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

470V. I. LENINers’ society. I attach very special importance to theseagreements, 163 they show that the workers are becomingaware of their strength.Comrades, in my report I have not dealt with the particularlypainful and difficult questions of peace and the foodsupply, because they are special items on the agenda andwill be discussed separately.My purpose in making this brief report was to show, asit appears to me and to the whole of the Council of People’sCommissars, the entire history of what we have experiencedduring the past two and a half months, how the relation ofclass forces took shape in this new period of the Russianrevolution, how a new state power was formed and whatsocial tasks confront it.Russia has started to achieve socialism in the right way—by the nationalisation of the banks and the transfer of allthe land entirely to the working people. We are well awareof the difficulties that lie ahead, but we are convinced, bycomparing our revolution with previous revolutions, thatwe shall achieve enormous successes and that we are on theroad that guarantees complete victory.And with us will go the masses of the more advancedcountries, countries which have been divided by a predatorywar, whose workers have passed through a longer period oftraining in democracy. When people depict the difficultiesof our task, when we are told that the victory of socialismis possible only on a world scale, we regard this merelyas an attempt, a particularly hopeless attempt, on the partof the bourgeoisie and of its voluntary and involuntarysupporters to distort the irrefutable truth. The final victoryof socialism in a single country is of course impossible. Ourcontingent of workers and peasants which is upholding Sovietpower is one of the contingents of the great world army,which at present has been split by the world war, but whichis striving for unity, and every piece of information, everyfragment of a report about our revolution, every name, theproletariat greets with loud and sympathetic cheers, becauseit knows that in Russia the common cause is being pursued,the cause of the proletariat’s uprising, the internationalsocialist revolution. A living example, tackling the jobsomewhere in one country is more effective than any procla-