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. The first, 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. The second, 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 in order to build a society none of them had seen. The texts here are the Progress Publishers translations from the Collected Works — A Great Beginning from Volume 29 (Moscow, first printing 1965) and The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, in Julius Katzer's revised translation, from Volume 31 (1966).
Both are Lenin at his most generous and least dogmatic. A Great Beginning rests on a genuine insight, and a modest one: that overthrowing the old rulers was the easy part. The subbotniks 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, a victory over the habits left as a heritage to the worker and peasant by accursed capitalism." 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: classes are "large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production." The Tasks of the Youth Leagues is warmer still, and its central demand is not obedience but culture. The whole duty of the young, Lenin says, "might be summed up in a single word: learn" — and learn everything: "You can become a Communist only when you enrich your mind with a knowledge of all the treasures created by mankind." He is explicit that this is the opposite of rote: "We have no need of cramming." He is sober about the scale of the task, promising the delegates not utopia but that "no less than ten years will be required for the electrification of the country."
It would be a poor tribute to leave the weaknesses out. Both texts carry the seeds of what could go wrong once the enthusiasm of a few thousand volunteers was asked to become the organising principle of a whole economy. The hope that free, unpaid labour might scale up from a heroic minority to a system was never tested under conditions Lenin could control; his heirs would supply the missing enthusiasm with compulsion. And the youth speech contains the tradition's most quoted and most dangerous formula on morality. Against the churchmen and the idealists Lenin insists that "we do not believe in an eternal morality," that "our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle." In his mouth this was a weapon against hypocrisy; detached from his own scruple and handed to a state, it becomes a licence — for whatever the men who claim to speak for the class declare the class to need. Lenin did not draw that conclusion. Others would.
The tradition from which this introduction is written insists on the calibration. In June 1919 Lenin was not designing a labour code; he was reaching for hope in a wrecked country under siege, and the subbotniks were a real movement of real workers, not a decree. The whole point of A Great Beginning is that the new discipline "does not drop from the skies" and cannot be commanded into being — it has to be freely given or it is nothing. That is the exact opposite of what the enthusiasm would later be made to mean. These were the intuitions of a revolutionary who still believed the working class held its own state in its own hands. History was preparing to take that guarantee away.
Was the state that turned these texts into scripture faithful to them? It was not, and the distance is the reason to reprint them. The voluntary Saturday that Lenin prized precisely because it was voluntary became, within two decades, the compulsory subbotnik — a ritual obligation dressed in the language of free labour. The "enthusiasm" he had watched with wonder was industrialised into the Stakhanovite cult of output, into shock-work and socialist emulation as techniques for extracting more from the worker, into the tonnage worship of the Five-Year Plans; and where enthusiasm failed, the labour decrees of 1938–1940 made lateness and absence crimes. The free and conscious discipline of the producers had become the discipline of the producers by a bureaucracy standing over them. Lenin's definition of class, meanwhile, turned in the hand of anyone honest enough to apply it: a stratum defined by "the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production" and by its command over the means of production need not hold legal title to be a class — which is precisely how Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, anatomised the Soviet bureaucracy as a privileged caste. The catechism could not afford to let that definition point homeward, so it froze it into a formula about capitalism alone. And the youth? The Tasks of the Youth Leagues had demanded that the young "enrich" their minds with all of human culture and had warned that "Communism will become an empty word, a mere signboard, and a Communist a mere boaster, if all the knowledge he has acquired is not digested." What the Komsomol became was the cramming Lenin forbade — a machine of rote "Marxism-Leninism", a ladder for careerists, an instrument of mobilisation and control. The morality Lenin had subordinated wholly to the class struggle supplied the alibi for the purges, in which the interests of the class were whatever the General Secretary said they were.
None of this was written into the sentences, and it would be cheap to pretend it was. The germ of communism Lenin saw in a railway depot is not the ancestor of the compulsory subbotnik any more than his stopwatch fathered the Gulag. The degeneration had causes, and they were historical, not textual: the revolution was left isolated when the risings in the West failed; it inherited a ruined and backward land; and the civil war it barely survived consumed the very working class in whose name the state ruled, so that by 1921 the class had been scattered and the dictatorship governed in the name of a ghost. Into that emptiness climbed the bureaucracy Trotsky and, after him, Ernest Mandel described — a caste that usurped the revolution and kept its slogans. Honesty adds that the author lived long enough to fear the apparatus he had helped build: the Lenin of the last struggle, dictating against the bureaucracy from a sickbed, is already fighting the machine that would one day embalm him and hang his portrait over the production charts. The measure of the betrayal is not that Lenin hoped too much for voluntary labour in 1919 but that his hope was canonised as a duty and turned against the workers who were supposed to give it.
So why read them now? Because, set against the ossified cult, they keep alive the question the cult was built to bury: what is the difference between labour that builds communism and labour that is merely commanded in its name? Lenin's answer is unambiguous and still bracing — the difference is freedom, the free and conscious self-activity of the producers, or it is nothing. The subbotnik as free association and the subbotnik as compulsory ritual look alike on the calendar and are opposites in substance, and the whole distance between the revolution and its betrayal lies in that gap. The youth speech reaches even further past its origins. Its vision of a generation that inherits and masters "all the treasures created by mankind," rather than reciting a signboard, is a rebuke to every regime — Stalinist or otherwise — that would rather have its young obedient than educated. Lenin told the fifteen-year-olds in that hall that they, and not he, "will see a communist society, and will itself build this society." The state that came after made them build something else. Reading him now, against the grain of the cult that claimed him, is a way of returning the promise to the people it was made to.