A Great Beginning & The Tasks of the Youth Leagues

The two pieces gathered here were written in the hardest years of the Russian Revolution, and both look past the fighting to the thing Lenin thought would be harder still: the making of communists.

A Great Beginning was written in June 1919, at the blackest point of the civil war, with Kolchak driving from the east and Denikin from the south and the cities starving behind the front. Its occasion was small and unlikely - a handful of railwaymen on the Moscow-Kazan line who had begun staying behind on their Saturdays to work, unpaid, for the republic. Lenin seized on these "communist subbotniks" as a sign of something enormous: the first shoots of a new kind of labour, given freely rather than squeezed out by hunger or the whip. They matter, he writes, because they are "the actual beginning of communism" - not its proclamation but its germ, visible for once in the behaviour of ordinary workers. This is, he says, "a revolution that is more difficult, more tangible, more radical and more decisive than the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for it is a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism". The discipline he wants is not imposed but grown: "the free and conscious discipline of the working people themselves." The same pamphlet contains the definition of class that every Soviet schoolchild would later recite.

The Tasks of the Youth Leagues is the speech he gave on 2 October 1920 to the Third Congress of the Young Communist League, on what the young would have to learn to build a society none of them had seen. Its demand is that they master "all the treasures created by mankind" rather than recite a signboard - a standard that reaches well past its origins.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.