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

THIRD ALL-RUSSIA CONGRESS OF SOVIETS463instead of taking the firewood I had collected from me, headded some more.’”When I heard that, I said to myself: let the hundreds ofnewspapers, no matter what they call themselves—socialist,near-socialist, etc.—let hundreds of extremely loudvoices shout at us, “dictators”, “violators”, and similarwords. We know that another voice is now rising from amongthe people; they say to themselves: now we need not beafraid of the man with the gun because he protects the workingpeople and will be ruthless in suppressing the rule of theexploiters. (Applause.) This is what the people have felt,and that is why the propaganda that simple and uneducatedpeople are carrying on when they relate how the Red Guardsare turning their might against the exploiters—that propagandais invincible. It will spread among millions andtens of millions, and will firmly create what the FrenchCommune of the nineteenth century began to create, but wasable to continue for only a very short time because it waswrecked by the bourgeoisie—it will create a socialist RedArmy, something all socialists have always aimed at, i.e.,the general arming of the people. It will create new RedGuard cadres that will enable us to train the working peoplefor the armed struggle.It used to be said about Russia that she would be unableto fight because she would have no officers. But we must notforget what these very bourgeois officers said as they observedthe workers fighting against Kerensky and Kaledin.They said: “The Red Guards’ technical level is very low,but if these people had a little training they would have aninvincible army.” This is because, for the first time inthe history of the world struggle, elements have entered thearmy which are not the vehicles of bureaucratic knowledge,but are guided by the idea of the struggle to emancipatethe exploited. And when the work we have commencedis completed, the Russian Soviet Republic will be invincible.(Applause.)Comrades, the road which Soviet power has traversedinsofar as concerns the socialist army has also been traversedinsofar as concerns another instrument of the rulingclasses, an even more subtle, an even more complicatedinstrument—the bourgeois court, which claimed to maintain