Preface

Source: Works, Vol. 11, January, 1928 to March, 1929
Publisher: Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954
Transcription/Markup: Salil Sen for MIA, 2008
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2008). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit "Marxists Internet Archive" as your source.

The Eleventh Volume of the Works of J. V. Stalin contains writings and speeches of the period January 1928 to March 1929.

In this period, on the basis of the successes achieved in the socialist industrialisation of the country, the Bolshevik Party worked intensively to prepare the way for the transition of the labouring masses of the peasantry from individual economy to collective-farm socialist economy. Consistently steering a course towards the collectivisation of agriculture, as decided at the Fifteenth Congress of the C.P.S.U.(B.), the Party worked to create all the necessary conditions for a mass influx of the peasants into the collective farms.

When the Party passed over to the offensive against the kulaks, the hostile Bukharin-Rykov group of Right capitulators threw off the mask and came out openly against the Party's policy.

In the letter "To the Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee," in the speeches on "The Right Danger in the C.P.S.U.(B.)," Industrialisation of the Country and the Right Deviation in the C.P.S.U.(B.) and "Bukharin's Group and the Right Deviation in Our Party," in the article "They Have Sunk to the Depths" and in other works, J. V. Stalin reveals the counter-revolutionary kulak nature of the Right deviation, exposes the subversive activities of the Right capitulators and of the Trotskyist underground anti-Soviet organisation, and points to the necessity of waging a relentless fight on two fronts, while concentrating fire on the Right deviation.

In the reports on The Work of the April Joint Plenum of the Central Committee and Central Control Commission and Results of the July Plenum of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.), in the talk "On the Grain Front," the speeches on "Industrialisation and the Grain Problem" and "On the Bond between the Workers and Peasants and on State Farms," the speech at the Eighth Congress of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League and the speech on "Grain Procurements and the Prospects for the Development of Agriculture," in the article "Lenin and the Question of the Alliance with the Middle Peasant" and in other works, J. V. Stalin defines the principal ways and means of solving the grain problem, building collective farms and state farms and strengthening the bond between town and country. In these works he demonstrates the necessity for a rapid rate of development of industry, as the basis for socialism and the defence of the country and sets the task of training new cadres from the ranks of the working class capable of mastering science and technology. J. V. Stalin stresses the vital necessity for the utmost development of criticism and self-criticism as the Bolshevik method of educating cadres, as the motive force of the development of Soviet society.

J . V. Stalin's work The National Question and Leninism published here for the first time, is devoted to further development of Marxist-Leninist theory and substantiation of the Bolshevik Party's policy on the national question. In this work J. V. Stalin advances the thesis of new, socialist nations, which have been formed first of all in the Soviet Union, brings out the fundamental difference between bourgeois nations and socialist nations, and stresses the solidarity and viability of the socialist nations.

This volume contains J. V. Stalin's well-known speech on Three Distinctive Features of the Red Army, which reveals the sources of the Red Army's strength and might and outlines the ways and means of further strengthening it.

Questions of the international revolutionary movement and the tasks of the fraternal Communist Parties are dealt with in the report on Results of the July Plenum of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.) and in the speeches on "The Programme of the Comintern" and The Right Danger in the German Communist Party.

J. V. Stalin stresses the international significance of the Great October Socialist Revolution and of socialist construction in the U.S.S.R. He explains that the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the Soviet state is an inevitable phase of the socialist revolution in all countries.

In this volume the following fourteen works of J. V. Stalin are published for the first time: "Grain Procurements and the Prospects for the Development of Agriculture"; "First Results of the Procurement Campaign and the Further Tasks of the Party"; "To the Members of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee"; "The Programme of the Comintern"; "Industrialisation and the Grain Problem"; "On the Bond between the Workers and Peasants and on State Farms"; "Letter to Comrade Kuibyshev"; "Reply to Comrade Sh."; "Reply to Kushtysev"; "They Have Sunk to the Depths"; "Bukharin's Group and the Right Deviation in Our Party"; "Reply to Bill-Belotserkovsky"; "Telegram to . . . Proskurov"; The National Question and Leninism.

Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the C.C., C.P.S.U.(B.)