But is this a merely transitional party dictatorship while the foreign wars continue and while the victory of the Communists is not yet assured? Not at all. In his speech before the Communist Internationale, as quoted in the Moscow Pravda, December 3, 1920, Zinoviev declared: "After the victory the role of the party does not decline but on the contrary increases." We have already quoted the resolution of that Congress referring to "the long and persistent civil war which impends." Again Lenin says in his "Theses," which were adopted by the Congress:
The conquest of political power by the proletariat does not bring about the cessation of class struggle against the bourgeoisie, but on the contrary, makes this struggle especially wide, sharp, and pitiless.
What before the victory of the proletariat appears theoretically as merely a difference of opinion on the question of "democracy," after the proletarian victory becomes inevitably a question to be decided by force of arms.
On January 30, 1921, Lenin said to the visiting delegation of Spanish Socialists:
We never speak about liberty. We practice the proletariat's dictatorship in the name of the minority because the peasant class has not yet become proletariat and are not with us. It will continue until they subject themselves. Presumably the dictatorship will last about forty years.
Similarly Lenin declared to Serrati, the Italian revolutionary leader, a few months earlier, that the
