Report on the Work in the Countryside

This is Lenin’s important work about the Bolshevik Party’s new policy towards the middle peasants. It was written on March 23,1919, published in Pravda issue No.70 on April 1,1919. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 36 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

After the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, a comprehensive land reform was carried out, private ownership of land was abolished, and the number of middle peasants had increased day by day. By the beginning of 1919, the middle peasants had accounted for 60% of the Russia’s agricultural population, and the Russian rural economy was gradually dominated by the middle peasants. Due to the changes in the rural area and the balance of class power, in the face of the armed interference of the imperialist countries and the armed rebellion of the white guards in Russia, the Soviet implemented the “wartime communism policy” with the surplus grain collection system as its core.

In the early days of the Soviet, the policy of the R.C.P.(B) to form an alliance with the poor peasants in the rural areas against the urban and rural bourgeoisie, and to neutralize the middle peasants was now outdated. New policies must be formulated in order to win over the middle peasants. Therefore, one of the important issues of the Eighth Congress of the R.C.P.(B) held in Moscow between March 18-23, 1919, was to determine the correct attitude of the proletariat towards the middle peasants and set up a rural work commission at the first conference of the Congress.

Lenin made the report on behalf of this commission at the conference. In the report, Lenin summed up the tasks, stages and achievements of the Russian proletarian revolution. He pointed out that the primary and basic tasks of the proletarian revolution have been completed: The first stage was the seizure of power in the cities by all peasants and the establishment of the Soviet form of government.

The second stage was to single out the proletarian and semi-proletarian elements in the rural districts and to ally them to the urban proletariat in order to wage the struggle against the bourgeoisie in the countryside, against profiteering, huckstering, ruination. Lenin said: the organizations we originally created for this purpose, i.e., the “Poor Peasants’ Committees”, had become so consolidated that we found it possible to replace them by properly elected Soviets, i.e., to re-organize the village Soviets so as to make them the organs of the power of the proletariat in the rural districts.

These two stages were basically completed. Now a more complicated and urgent task, namely, the attitude towards the middle peasants, has come to the fore. Through the comparative analysis of class forces during the Russian revolution, Lenin discussed the class status and characteristics of the middle peasants and the party’s policy towards the middle peasants: (1) The middle peasants were a class that vacillates between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The middle peasant was partly a property-owner and partly a working man. He did not exploit other working people. For decades, the middle peasant defended to maintain its status with the greatest difficulty, he suffered the exploitation of the landowners and the capitalists, he bore everything. Therefore, the policy formulated during the period of preparation for the revolution and the early days of the Soviet was to keep the peasants neutral in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and to prevent the peasants from actively helping the bourgeoisie, which had proven correct theoretically and in practice.

(2) The policy of compromise with the middle peasants in the Party Programme was necessary and correct. Lenin stressed that the issue of the middle peasants was of great practical significance. For Lenin, the victory of the civil war, to resolve the question of food crisis, the consolidation of the alliance of workers and peasants and the Soviet power, and the construction of socialism in a small-scale peasant country all would depend on the correct attitude towards the middle peasants. The middle peasants were not enemies of the Soviet power. The Soviets should never call to launch a class struggle against the middle peasants on any question and never carry out such struggle. The Bolsheviks who worked in the countryside were required to correctly implement the policies towards the middle peasants in the Party Programme during the socialist transformation and economic construction. They should strictly distinguish the middle peasants from the rich peasants and the bourgeoisie, completely deprive the bourgeoisie, form an alliance with the middle peasants who did not exploit others, compromise to the middle peasants and live in peace with them.

(3) For the transition to a large-scale machinized socialist agriculture, we must humble student of the peasants instead of their teacher. We must learn from the peasants about methods of transition to a better system, and not to dare to give orders. Long-term persuasion and education should be carried out in the way that the peasants understand rather than in the tone of textbooks. In particular, it is wrong to impose the policies on the middle peasants by force. What we must now do is to help them and improve their living and production conditions. Socialist farms and communes should be built to gain the trust of the peasants. Practical work and concrete examples should be used to prove that communism is the best thing. Lenin argued that as long as the workers’ grain collection teams and the local food agencies working in countryside, towns and villages faithfully implement the Party’s policies, do a good job in each step, and maintain good relations with millions of middle peasants, they would surely gain their trust and successfully complete all tasks. At that time, socialism would be absolutely invincible.

In this report, Lenin has shown the importance of middle peasants and the ideological principles and methods of rural work. He has enriched the theory of socialist economic construction during the transitional period. These theories made important practical effects on winning over middle peasants, consolidating the Soviet power and overcoming the difficulties during the civil war.