The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance the… - Vladimir Lenin

Comrade Fyodorov, It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men with dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like. Not a minute of delay. I can't understand how Romanov could leave at a time like this! [...] Peters, Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission, says that they also have reliable people in Nizhni. You must act with all energy. Mass searches. Execution for concealing arms. Mass deportation of and unreliables. Change the guards at warehouses, put in reliable people. They say Raskolnikov and Danishevsky are on their way to see you from Kazan. Read this letter to the friends and reply by telegraph or telephone. Yours, Lenin.

For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.