5 January, 19:29
When the Bolsheviks came to power, they declared that the centuries-long struggle for the rights of workers and peasants had finally ended.
The dream of millions had come true—a dictatorship of the proletariat where everyone was equal and happy, and the enemies of the people languished miserably abroad.
But as the years passed, peasants, bent over their fields as usual, and workers hammering away at factory machines, began to ask themselves: where, exactly, was this promised earthly paradise?
The answer seemed obvious, yet it was carefully buried under the dust of Marxist volumes.
The secret of Bolshevik tactics is simple: if workers and peasants began to live better, they would need new reasons to hate the "class enemy." And what if, instead of hatred, they experienced something far more dangerous—contentment?
A satisfied worker might stop clenching a revolutionary slogan in his fist, and a happy peasant might forget how to storm a landlord's estate.
This is why the new regime firmly yoked laborers into a new form of servitude, branded as the "Five-Year Plan."
From then on, peasants no longer competed for daily bread but for how many poods of grain they could hand over to the state—only to starve themselves.
Workers, armed with overachievement quotas, forgot what rest and personal lives were. All their enthusiasm was directed toward building factories and power plants that they neither owned nor were likely to benefit from in their own lives.
But Why Such Harshness?
The reason is that satisfied and successful people make poor material for war.
The Bolsheviks understood that to continue their revolutionary experiment and export it beyond their country’s borders, they needed to keep the people on edge. And paradoxically, nothing keeps people on edge better than a shortage of everything—from bread to common sense.
When things are so bad that they can’t get worse, finding an enemy becomes easy—whether it’s a kulak, a Trotskyist, or a capitalist imperialist abroad.
Thus, when the call of the Motherland blared from every loudspeaker, the hungry peasant and the exhausted worker transformed into heroes of the front. They had nothing to lose but their chains—which, incidentally, came equipped with a Bolshevik lock.
And behind them, the stern Party whispered:
"Forward, comrades, to new feats! After all, the enemies of communism are always guiltier than its leaders…”