The greatest significance of Lenin’s words lies in their recognition of the seriousness of the non-military forms of resistance, sabotage, and the like, and of the “low cultural level” of the “socialistic proletariat.” Reading the foregoing statements carefully and remembering Lenin’s other utterances, both before and after, we are compelled to wonder whether he is intellectually dishonest, an unscrupulous trickster playing upon the credulity of his followers, or merely a loose thinker adrift and helpless on the swift tides of events. “For the success of Socialism ... not less than _a few months_” we read from the pen of the man who, in June of the previous year, while on his way from Switzerland, had written “Socialism cannot now prevail in Russia”; the same man who in May, 1918, was to tell his comrades “it is hardly to be expected that the even more developed coming generation will accomplish a complete transition to Socialism”; who later told Raymond Robins: “The Russian Revolution will probably fail. We have not developed far enough in the capitalist stage, we are too primitive to realize the Socialist state.”[30] [30] _Vide_ testimony of Robins before U. S. Senate Committee. And yet--“the success of Socialism ... not less than a few months!” By the latter part of February, 1918, it was quite clear that the Soviet control of industry was “killing the goose that laid the golden eggs”; that it was ruining the industrial life of the nation. The official press began to discuss in the most serious manner the alarming decline in production and the staggering financial losses incurred in the operation of what formerly had been profitable enterprises. At the Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, in March, 1918, the seriousness of the situation caused great alarm and a desperate appeal was made to the workers to increase production, refrain from sabotage, and practise self-discipline. The congress urged “a merciless struggle against chaos and disorganization.” Lenin himself pointed out that confiscation of factories by the workers was ruining Russia. The very policy they had urged upon the workers, the seizure of the factories, was now seen as a menace. On April 28, 1918, Lenin said: “If we are to expropriate at this pace, we shall be certain to suffer a defeat. The organization of production under proletarian control is notoriously very much behind the expropriation of big masses of capital.”[31] He had already come to realize that the task of transforming capitalist society to a Socialist society was not the easy matter he had believed shortly before. In September he had looked upon the task of realizing Socialism as a child might have done. It would require a Freudian expert to explain the silly childishness of this paragraph from _The State and Revolution_, published in September, 1917: