backward industry, agriculture, should be put on a new track, should be rebuilt and transformed from an occupation carried on on lines of routine and tradition, as it has been for centuries, into an industry based upon the results of experimental and applied science. The war has awakened this consciousness immeasurably more than any of us can estimate. But, while doing this, it has also destroyed the possibility of continuing production on the old lines.
Those who think that after this war we can attain to a restoration of pre-war conditions, that we can restore the systems and methods of farming which prevailed hitherto, are mistaken, and every day shows them their mistake more and more clearly. The war has created such appalling ruin that small private farms have now neither working cattle, stock, nor implements. We cannot go on any longer with this criminal dissipation of labour. The toiling poorest peasantry, which made most sacrifices for the Revolution, suffered most in the war, did not take the land away from the landlords in order to give it to new vultures. Life itself is bringing that toiling peasantry face to face with the question of passing to communal tillage as the only way of restoring the civilisation ruined and broken by the war, as the only way to escape from that darkness, ignorance and oppression to which Capitalism hitherto condemned the whole mass of the rural population. It was that darkness and oppression which allowed the Capitalist to throttle Humanity during four years of war: and from it, all the workers of all countries, with revolutionary energy and determination, are making up their minds at all costs to be free.
Such, comrades, are the conditions which had to develop on a world-wide scale in order that this most difficult, and at the same time most important and fundamental reform in the work of Socialist reconstruction should become a question of practical politics—and that is what it is in Russia to-day. The formation of committees of the poor, the present congress of land sections of Soviets, of those committees of the poor, and of agri-
11
