Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

CAN THE BOLSHEVIKS RETAIN STATE POWER?111by the organisation of the entire population in Soviets.Those capitalists who are exceptionally stubborn andrecalcitrant will, of course, have to be punished by the confiscationof their whole property and by imprisonment. Onthe other hand, however, the victory of the proletariatwill bring about an increase in the number of cases of thekind that I read about in today’s Izvestia for example:“On September 26, two engineers came to the Central Council ofFactory Committees to report that a group of engineers had decidedto form a union of socialist engineers. The Union believes that thepresent time is actually the beginning of the social revolution andplaces itself at the disposal of the working people, desiring, in defenceof the workers’ interests, to work in complete unity with the workers’organisations. The representatives of the Central Council of FactoryCommittees answered that the Council will gladly set up in its organisationan Engineers’ Section which will embody in its programmethe main theses of the First Conference of Factory Committees onworkers’ control over production. A joint meeting of delegates of theCentral Council of Factory Committees and of the initiative groupof socialist engineers will be held within the next few days.” (Izvestia,September 27, 1917.)* **The proletariat, we are told, will not be able to set thestate apparatus in motion.Since the 1905 revolution, Russia has been governed by130,000 landowners, who have perpetrated endless violenceagainst 150,000,000 people, heaped unconstrained abuseupon them, and condemned the vast majority to inhumantoil and semi-starvation.Yet we are told that the 240,000 members of the BolshevikParty will not be able to govern Russia, govern her inthe interests of the poor and against the rich. These 240,000are already backed by no less than a million votes of theadult population, for this is precisely the proportion betweenthe number of Party members and the number of votescast for the Party that has been established by the experienceof Europe and the experience of Russia as shown, for example,by the elections to the Petrograd City Council lastAugust. We therefore already have a “state apparatus” ofone million people devoted to the socialist state for the sakeof high ideals and not for the sake of a fat sum receivedon the 20th of every month.