Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/54

47 the Communist doctrine; it was the result of the war of defense of the Revolution.

It called also for new methods of management. The Russian workers, during the many months the Revolution has lasted, have learned a great deal about industrial affairs. Bourgeois correspondents, who are inveterate enemies of Socialism and who insinuate themselves into Soviet affairs under the pretense that they are converts to Socialism in order that they may, in the guise of impartial observers spend a few weeks collecting "pictures of life" in Soviet Russia afterwards to be hawked about—these people, naturally, have no conception of the work which has been performed by the inexperienced Russian proletariat under the most unfavorable conditions. Whoever appeals against these assertions to the speeches of the Soviet leaders and to articles in the Soviet Press, forgets the aim of those pessimistic descriptions printed in the Soviet Press. Soviet Russia is waging a life-and-death struggle. It can win only if it exerts all its strength, and employs every means of defense. The leaders and the Press must denounce every weakness of the organism in order to call forth fresh efforts. Even where failure is due to objective obstacles and difficulties it is helpful to tell the masses that all these hinderances can be overcome. While the bourgeoisie and Social Democratic Press of Germany endeavors to conceal every form of corruption practiced by the State authorities, the Soviet Press ruthlessly lays bare the weaknesses of its own State machinery. Soviet functionaries are recklessly attacked by it, and so also are the working masses at every failure, and this notwithstanding the fact that Ossinski, one of the greatest experts in economic policy in the Soviet Government was perfectly right when he pointed out a year ago that production depends in the first place on objective circumstances and is the result of a continuously working process. Wherever work is continually interrupted through want of fuel or raw materials, production, recorded per head and per hour, falls. It follows then that the masses