Speech at the Reception for the Participants of the Festival of Tajik Art in the Kremlin, 22 April 1941

Source: Tom 18

Source: Tom 18

Comrades!

I thank you for your trust, sympathy, and good wishes. But people have one bad habit -- they praise the living, if they deserve it, of course, and the dead they consign to oblivion. As they used to say in the old days, idols, or as they say now, leaders, are praised and shown sympathy so long as they have not died, but when they die, they are sometimes forgotten. I would not say that this habit is a virtue, that it is in keeping with Bolshevik traditions.

You know that we Bolsheviks are accustomed to going against the current, and I, as a Bolshevik, want to speak today about a man who, although he has died, will live forever in history. I want to speak about the man who reared us, taught us, sometimes scolded us, sometimes praised us, who made us into human beings -- about Lenin.

It was he, Lenin, who taught us to work as Bolsheviks must work, knowing no fear and halting before no difficulties -- to work as Lenin did. We are his shadow, his fledglings and pupils. It would be false modesty on my part to say that we, the present leaders of the Party and government, have done nothing, have no achievements. We do have successes, but we owe all of this to Lenin.

Here we are enjoying the fruits of the friendship of peoples. I see that besides young people, there are also elders present here -- for example, myself. So we, the old-timers, remember -- the youth perhaps does not remember, and the youth perhaps does not even need to remember -- but we, the old Bolsheviks, remember how we used to call old, tsarist Russia a prison of peoples. Now we have the Soviet Union -- a broad field on which free, equal peoples work. Such are the results of the policy of the friendship of peoples.

But who devised this policy? Lenin.

It was he, Lenin, who counterposed to the old ideology, which consisted in the elevation of one race to the heavens while other peoples were demeaned and oppressed -- to this old ideology, which is dead and has no future -- he counterposed a new ideology: the ideology of the friendship of peoples, which holds that all peoples are equal.

This ideology has triumphed, and we enjoy its fruits. And the one who organized this policy was Lenin.

I shall put it in Eastern fashion: we are his shadow on Earth, and we shine with his reflected light.

I propose a toast to Lenin.

I wish to say a few words about the Tajiks. The Tajiks are a special people.

They are not Uzbeks, not Kazakhs, not Kyrgyz -- they are Tajiks, the most ancient people of Central Asia. "Tajik" means "bearer of the crown" -- so they were called by the Iranians, and the Tajiks have lived up to this name.

Of all the non-Russian Muslim peoples on the territory of the USSR, the Tajiks are the only non-Turkic, Iranian nationality. The Tajiks are a people whose intelligentsia gave rise to the great poet Firdausi, and it is not without reason that they, the Tajiks, trace their cultural traditions back to him. You must have felt during the festival that they, the Tajiks, have a finer artistic sensibility; their ancient culture and special artistic taste are manifest in music, in song, and in dance.

Sometimes our Russian comrades mix everyone up: a Tajik with an Uzbek, an Uzbek with a Turkmen, an Armenian with a Georgian. This, of course, is wrong. The Tajiks are a special people, with an ancient and great culture, and in our Soviet conditions a great future belongs to them. And the entire Soviet Union should help them in this. I would like their art to be surrounded by universal attention.

I raise a toast to the flourishing of Tajik art, of the Tajik people, and to our readiness, as Muscovites, to help them in everything that is necessary.

RGASPI F. 558 Op. 11 D. 1072. L. 195-196 rev.

Note: In one of the drafts of Volume 14, a highlighted passage of the text was proposed for removal.