... At every difficult moment during the war, the Party mobilised the Communists, and it was they who were the first to perish in the front ranks; they perished in thousands on the Yudenich and Kolchak fronts; the, finest 67 people of the working class perished, those who sacrificed themselves realising that they would die but save generations, save thousands upon thousands of workers and peasants. They branded with ignominy and hounded the self-seekers, those who during the war were concerned for their own skins, and mercilessly shot them. We are proud of this dictatorship, of this iron power of the workers who declared: we overthrew the capitalists and we shall lay down our lives at their slightest attempt to restore their power again. No one starved as much in these two years as the workers of Petrograd, Moscow and IvanovoVoznesensk. It has now been calculated that in these two years they received not more than 7 poods of bread a year, while the peasants of the grain gubernias ate not less than 17 poods. The workers made great sacrifices, suffered disease and the death rate among them increased, and they will prove that the workers rose in revolt against the capitalists not out of feelings of revenge, but out of their inflexible determination to create a new social order in which there would be no landlords and capitalists. It was for this that the sacrifices were made; only thanks to these unprecedented sacrifices which, moreover, were made consciously, voluntarily and were consolidated by the discipline of the Red Army, which did not resort to the old methods of discipline, only thanks to these greatest sacrifices did the vanguard workers maintain their dictatorship and win for themselves the right to the respect of the workers of the entire world. It should not be forgotten by those who particularly slander the Bolsheviks that the dictatorship meant the greatest sacrifices, the greatest starvation for the workers themselves, for those who exercised it. The Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Petrograd and Moscow workers suffered in those two years more than anyone else ever suffered in the struggle on the Red fronts....