Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/407

 capital (for capital is not a quantity of money but a definite social relationship) but also a step backward by our Socialist Soviet state which has from the very beginning proclaimed and carried on a policy of reducing high salaries to the standard of wages of the average worker.

Of course the servants of the bourgeoisie, particularly of the petty kind, like the Mensheviki and the Right Social-Revolutionists, will chuckle at our admission that we are taking a backward step. But we should pay no attention to their glee. We must study the peculiarities of the highly difficult and new road to Socialism without concealing our mistakes and weaknesses, but trying to overcome deficiencies in time. To conceal from the masses the fact that to attract bourgeois specialists by extremely high salaries is a defection from the principles of the Commune, would mean that we had lowered ourselves to the level of bourgeois politicians and were deceiving the masses. To explain openly how and why we have taken a backward step and then to discuss publicly the means we have to overcome our deficiencies—this means educating the masses and learning from experience, learning together with them how to build up Socialism. There has been hardly a single victorious military campaign in history in which the victor has not chanced to make individual mistakes, to suffer partial defeats, to temporarily retreat somewhere. And the "campaign" against Capitalism which we have undertaken is a million times more difficult than the most difficult military campaign, and it would be foolish and disgraceful to become dejected because of a particular and partial retreat.

Let us take up the question from the practical side. Let us assume that the Russian Soviet Republic must have a thousand first class scientists and specialists in various departments of science, technique and practical experience to direct the work of the people in order to accomplish most quickly the economic rehabilitation of the country. Let us assume that these great "stars" must be paid twenty-five thousand rubles each. Let us assume that this sum (25,000 rubles) must be doubled (assuming premiums granted for particularly successful and rapid accomplishment of the most important tasks of organization and technique) or even made four times as large (assuming that we must get several hundred better paid foreign specialists). Well, then, can this expenditure of 100,000,000 rubles a year for reorganizing the work of the people according to the last word of science and technique be considered excessive or unbearable for the Soviet Republic? Of course