The Lessons of the Revolt in Georgia

consists in the Communist learning to approach the non-Party man as an equal. He must not domineer, but carefully heed the voice of the non-Party people. He must not only teach the non-Party people, but also learn from them. And we have something to learn from the non-Party people. The question of the relations between Party and non-Party people is a major question of our Party practice. Lenin defined those relations by the term: mutual confidence. But the non-Party peasant cannot display confidence when he is not treated as an equal. In such cases, instead of confidence, distrust is created, and often the result is that a blank wall rises between the Party and the non-Party people, the Party is divorced from the masses and the bond between the workers and peasants is converted into estrangement.
THE LESSONS OF THE REVOLT IN GEORGIA
A vivid illustration of such a turn of affairs is the recent revolt in Georgia.67 Our newspapers write that the events in Georgia were stage-managed. That is true, for, in general, the revolt in Georgia was an artificial, not a popular revolt. Nevertheless, in some places, thanks to the bad link between the Communist Party and the masses, the Mensheviks succeeded in drawing a section of the peasant masses into the revolt. It is characteristic that they are the localities that are the most saturated with communist forces. There are relatively far more Communists in those localities than in the rest. And yet it was there that our people missed, overlooked, failed to notice the fact that there was unrest among the peasants, that something was brewing among them, that there was discontent among them, that it had been growing day by day, and the Party knew nothing about it. In the places that were most saturated with Communists, the latter proved to be most divorced from the sentiments, thoughts and aspirations of the non-Party peasantry. That is the crux of the problem.
How could this incongruous thing have happened? It happened because the Communists did not know how to approach the peasants in the Leninist way; instead of an atmosphere of confidence they created an atmosphere of mutual distrust and thus divorced the Party from the non-Party peasants. An interesting point is that one of the most active responsible workers in Georgia attributes this incongruity to the weakness of the local Soviets and to the Party being divorced from the non-Party people. “Undoubtedly,” he says, “the prime reason why we failed to see that a revolt was brewing is to be found in the weakness of the local Soviets.” Lenin said that the Soviets are the surest barometer, the surest indicator of the mood of the peasantry. Now, it was just this barometer that the Communist Party in some of the uyezds of Georgia lacked.
Comrades, the events in Georgia must be regarded as symptomatic. What happened in Georgia may be repeated all over Russia if we do not radically change our very approach to the peasantry, if we do not create an atmosphere of complete confidence between the Party and the non-Party people, if we do not heed the voice of the non-Party people, and, lastly, if we do not revitalise the Soviets in order to provide an outlet for the political activity of the toiling masses of the peasantry.