Written: 8 October, 1921
First Published: October 11, 1921 In the Beulletin VIII Vserossiishogo
elekirotechnicheskogo syezda (Bulletin of the 8th All-Russia Congress of Electrical Engineers) No. 3; Published according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 49-50
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup:
David Walters &
R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
I regret very much that I am unable to greet your Congress in person.
I have on more than one occasion expressed my opinion on the importance of the book A Plan for Electrification and still more so of electrification itself. Large-scale machine industry and its extension to agriculture is the only possible economic basis for socialism, the only possible basis for a successful struggle to deliver mankind from the yoke of capital, to save mankind from the slaughter and mutilation of tens of millions of people in order to decide whether the British or German, the Japanese or American, etc., vultures are to have the advantage in dividing up the world.
The Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet Republic has initiated the planned and systematic electrification of the country. However meagre and modest the beginning may be, however enormous the difficulties may be for the country which the landowners and capitalists have reduced to ruin in the course of four years of imperialist war and three years of civil war, and which the bourgeoisie of the whole world is watching, ready to pounce upon and convert into their colony, however slow, painfully slow, the progress in the electrification of our country may he, progress is nevertheless being made. With the assistance of your Congress, with the assistance of all the electrical engineers in Russia, and of a number of the best and progressive scientists in all parts of the world, by the heroic efforts of the vanguard of the workers and working peasants, we shall cope with this task, and our country will be electrified.
I greet the Eighth All-Russia Congress of Electrical Engineers and wish you every success.
V. Ulyanov (Lenin),
Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars
[1] This Congress, convened on Lenin’s initiative, was held in Moscow on October 1-9, 1921. It was attended by nearly 900 scientists, engineers and technicians as well as workers from various industrial enterprises.
Lenin was elected honorary chairman of the Congress, and his letter of greetings was read at the morning sitting on October9, 1921.