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

492V. I. LENINaway the land from the landowners, established workers’control in industry, and put the banks in the hands of socialistworkers’ organisations, giving the people accessto the immense wealth accumulated and stockpiled by thecapitalists to manage and use for the greater welfare andcultural growth of all the working people and not for theiroppression. That is the task facing the Soviet Republic.And this is why we have so much sympathy among the people,the working classes abroad, in spite of the militarycensorship of the tsars, and the harassment of socialistnewspapers by the Kerenskys abroad. The bourgeois newspapersover there tell lies about this country in a mostshameful fashion; our newspapers are suppressed: not asingle issue of Pravda has been allowed to go through. A fewdays ago a friend of mine returned from Switzerland, fromthat part of the country where I recently spent so manymiserable days, and he said that people in free Switzerlandwere not aware of the fact that the free republics of freeEurope were not letting through any issues of our paper,that they read only the wholesale lies circulated by thebourgeois newspapers, which do nothing but rail at theBolsheviks. Yet the workers in all countries have understoodthat Soviet power in Russia is truly a working people’sgovernment. You will not find a single worker in Europetoday—either in Britain, France, Germany or any othercountry—who does not applaud news of the Russian revolution,because they all regard it with hope and see it as atorch that will light the flame all over Europe.The Russian revolution was such a simple affair onlybecause Russia had been under the most savage oppressionof tsarism and because no other country had been torn andtortured by the war as she had been.The Russian people were the first to raise the torch of thesocialist revolution, but they are aware that they are notalone in their struggle and that they will accomplish theirtask with the help of the most loyal comrades and friends.We don’t know how long it will take for the socialist revolutionto break out in the other countries—it may take along time. You know how revolutions generally take placein other countries. Everyone here has been through 1917,and you all know that three months before the revolution