The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government

Lenin wrote this pamphlet in the least romantic weeks of his life.

It was the early spring of 1918. The insurrection was five months old, the old order broken, the landlords and capitalists expropriated in the main - and the young Soviet republic was staring at ruin. In March it had signed the peace of Brest-Litovsk, surrendering Poland, the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine to buy a breathing space from the German army. Industry had all but stopped, transport was collapsing, famine was closing on the cities, and the working class in whose name the state ruled was scattering back to the villages or dying at the front. Into that emergency Lenin threw not a call to arms but a lecture on bookkeeping, discipline and output.

It is an honest and in places a bracing document, and its strengths are those of a man who refuses to flatter his own side. Lenin will not pretend the seizure of power was the difficult part; he insists the difficult part is only now beginning. He faces the backwardness of Russia without euphemism, and he faces his own retreats the same way. The decision to pay the old bourgeois specialists - engineers, managers, agronomists - far more than a worker earned he refuses to disguise as anything but what it was: not only "a retreat from the principles of the Paris Commune" but "a step backward on the part of our socialist Soviet state power".

That candour is the pamphlet at its best, and so is the democratic hope still audible under the grim arithmetic: the vision of "producers' and consumers' communes, which conscientiously keep account" of their own economy, and the argument that socialism, by abolishing the enslavement of the masses, opens the way for the first time to real self-government.

Delivered as a report to the Central Executive Committee and published in Pravda and Izvestia on 28 April 1918.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.