The peasant must do a bit of starving so as to relieve the factories and towns from complete starvation. On the level of the state in general this is an entirely understandable thing. But we are not counting on the exhausted, destitute peasant understanding it. And we know you can't manage without compulsion.

- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, speech to the tenth party congress, March 8, 1921

A Peasant's Right to Life?
Today, the Ethiopian peasant and the pastoralist is as powerless as at any other time in Ethiopian history.

What would you do if you were faced with the prospect of your children starving to death? Imagine traveling to a nearby town and observing the urban population going about its business in a normal manner. Would you not be justified in forcibly obtaining the food you need?

The French revolution of 1789 was ignited in part by peasant unrest due to successive bad harvests and general famine conditions in certain parts of the country.

The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 was also fueled by famine. But beginning around 1980 the Ethiopian revolution took a new anti-peasant course. 1991 did nothing to reverse the anti-peasant bias. The reason is that in the Ethiopian revolution, as in all revolutions led by Bolshevik parties, the 'basic danger to the revolution is the clash between the respective interests of the peasants and the workers..'. And of course, the revolution is on the side of the future, i.e. the worker.

For example, when several thousand Gojjami peasants walked all the way to Addis Abeba in 1997 to protest the EPRDF land redistribution, the EPRDF rounded them up in the middle of the night and got rid of them.

The Ethiopian leadership is infatuated with the Bolshevik revolution, and both Mengistu and Meles derive their rural policies from Lenin's and later Stalin's war against the Russian peasantry in the 1920s and 1930s.

The fundamental problem is that you can't build a true socialist state when 85 percent of the population is composed of peasants. This was the case in the Russia of 1917, and it is the case in Ethiopia of 2003.

What does a Bolshevik socialist like Meles do with these peasants who are stuck in the "idiocy of rural life" as Marx put it? Three things:

• Squeeze as much surplus as you can out of them and use that to build factories and increase the size of the working class. (This is ADLI in brief)

• Make absolutely sure the peasant does not have any chance to own land. As Lenin said, "Peasants are revolutionary when they want land, and counter-revolutionary once they have obtained land."

• Stop bourgeois ideas and bourgeois politics from reaching rural areas. Otherwise, the danger of Bonapartism will loom large. One only has to review the famous article by Marx "The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon" to see how the peasants can set a country back by decades if they are allowed to vote freely.

What happens when the harvest is bad?

The prime minister tells the peasant in essence: "Unless foreigners feel sorry for you, you will die. My job is to notify the foreigners. After that, your life is not my responsibility. This government has other priorities than wasting its resources on you."

This from the leader of the government who has made strategic policy decisions that directly bear on the situation the peasant is in.

To understand the Melesian response to famine, one has to understand Lenin. One has to understand that the peasants are not proletarians. They are not the Marxist-Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat" They are leftovers from the feudal society. They are actually an obstacle in the transition to socialism.

This is why peasants get such horrible treatment from this government.

Let us assume there is a severe economic crisis that threatens the urban population with famine, including the families of the villa-and-landcruiser revolutionaries. Without doubt an emergency will be declared, money will be diverted from other projects and no revolutionary democrat will miss even a single meal.

But the peasant and pastoralist? Hey, life is tough. Peasants died by the millions in the Soviet Union, in China, and even now they are dying in North Korea. Socialism is fatal to peasants. Revolutionary democracy is not a tea party. In fact it is hell for the peasant.

The most important thing for Ethiopia's leaders, Mengistu from 1977-1991 and Meles from 1991-2003, is the path set by Lenin.

NOTE: The great revolutionary democrat of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi consults the works of Lenin when he needs guidance. During the war with Eritrea, he cited Lenin's insistence on ending the war with Germany with Germany still occupying Russian territory (1917) as an example of why Ethiopia should accept the Technical Modalities (1999).

Eyob Haile. July 18, 2003

The 1892 famine in the Volga region of Russia:

Vladimir Ilyich stood out against the rest of the intelligentsia. His heart had been hardened. Virtually alone among the revolutionaries of Samara and indeed the whole empire, he argued that the famine was the product of capitalist industrialization. His emotional detachment astonished even members of his family. His sister Anna Ilinichna went around the town to help the sick, giving them medicine and advice. Vladimir Ilyich refused to join her.

Nothing could shake Vladimir Ilyich's belief that mass impoverishment was inevitable. The peasantry had always paid a dreadful price for industrial growth - and so it would be in late 19th century Russia. Humane countermeasures were not merely ineffectual; they would do harm by slowing down the development of capitalism, and therefore the eventual further progress to socialism. Thus the famine, according to Vladimir, 'played the role of a progressive factor.'

His hard-heartedness was exceptional. He lived in the very region, the Volga provinces, where the famine raged. Peasants were dragging themselves into towns pleading for food and for work. Corpses were found lying in the streets.

Yet Vladimir Ilyich, once he had formed his intellectual analysis, would not be deflected by sentiment. His family derived income from a Samara provincial estate and yet still he insisted that Krushvits, who managed the estate for them, should pay up exactly what had been agreed. This meant that the peasants would have to pay Krushvits in full, regardless of circumstance.

Lenin - A Biography by Robert Service, 2000, pages 87-88.