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

EXTRAORDINARY ALL-RUSSIA RAILWAYMEN’S CONGRESS495institutions. Between 1905 and 1917, the sparks of the firewhich the Bolsheviks are alleged to have fanned artificially,also penetrated into that country which is distinguished forits high culture, its efficient economy and its history, andwe find the socialist revolution beginning there as.well.This proves that we are not blinded by party struggles, thatwe had not acted according to plan, and that it was nothingbut mankind’s hopeless state since the war began thatbrought on the revolution, and made the socialist revoiutioninvincible.Comrades, let me point out in conclusion that the samething has happened at this railwaymen’s congress. We sawyour hard fight against your top-drawer railway organisations.You railwaymen have seen for yourselves that themass of working railway proletarians bore the brunt of theeffort to get the railways running. Things did not come tosuch a pass by pure chance: either they had been deliberatelyhampered by the bourgeoisie, bribed by the millionaires whothrew in hundreds of thousands of rubles and were preparedto go to any length to destroy Soviet power, or had beencaused by the bourgeoisie’s refusal to change the system,because it held that that was how God had ordained allthings—there have always been masters and servants, andthe rich have always abused the poor who worked for them.In effect the railway officials thought that such a state ofaffairs had been ordained by God, which meant there couldbe no other system, and that chaos would result from anyattempt to change it. But that did not happen. The unityof the working masses is paramount; they will establish theirown discipline of equals and, using the technical and culturalachievements, make the railways run like clockwork,and carry on the exchange of goods between town and countryto help the workers and peasants organise the economyon a Russia-wide scale and enable the working masses tomake use of the products of their labour without the capitalistsand landowners. When this is done scientific andtechnical knowledge will no longer help a handful of men toget rich and stuff their money-bags, but will help to improvethe operation of the railway system as a whole. This is ofespecial importance to us. You know how much corruption,swindling and speculation there is at each junction; you