Vladimir Lenin
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Bolshevik leader; Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of Soviet Russia, 1917-1924 · Russia
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“It was a war of the American people against the English who despoiled America of its resources and held in colonial subjection, just as their "civilized" descendants are draining the life-blood of hundreds of millions of human beings in India, Egypt and all corners and ends of the world to keep them in subjection.”
English: English edition of 1918 as digitised by Project Gutenberg (eBook #35232); translator and publisher are not named in the text. Original-language text not found.
Open letter addressed to American workers during the Russian Civil War and the Allied intervention. Lenin is describing the American War of Independence and contrasting it with British rule elsewhere.
Lenin, 'A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia', Moscow, 20 August 1918, English edition, Project Gutenberg eBook #35232 Source
“We shook hands with the French Monarchists although we knew that each one of us would rather have seen the other hang. But temporarily our interests were identical.”
English: English edition of 1918 as digitised by Project Gutenberg (eBook #35232); translator and publisher are not named in the text. Original-language text not found.
Lenin recounts an arrangement with a French monarchist, de Lubersac, to destroy railway lines to slow the German advance after Brest-Litovsk. He presents it as an example of an agreement a class-conscious worker must be ready to make.
Lenin, 'A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia', Moscow, 20 August 1918, English edition, Project Gutenberg eBook #35232 Source
“The Workmen's and Peasant's Soviets are a new type of state, a new highest form of Democracy, a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, a mode of conducting the business of the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For the first time democracy is placed at the service of the masses, of the workers, and ceases to be a democracy for the rich, as it is, in the last analysis, in all capitalist, yes, in all democratic republics.”
English: English edition of 1918 as digitised by Project Gutenberg (eBook #35232); translator and publisher are not named in the text. Original-language text not found.
Lenin defines Soviet power to an American audience, describing the new state as a dictatorship of the proletariat and existing democratic republics as democracies for the rich.
Lenin, 'A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia', Moscow, 20 August 1918, English edition, Project Gutenberg eBook #35232 Source