The first Congress of the Peoples of the East, held Sept. 1–7, 1920, in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan, occurred nearly three years after the October 1917 revolution in Russia, in which the Bolshevik Party had led in the establishment of a revolutionary workers and peasants government. Some 2,000 delegates from more than two dozen peoples of Asia met in joint conference with leaders of workers' parties in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States to hammer out a common policy in the fight against imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation. Copyright © 1993 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

For many years, for many decades we have been silent. You did not hear our voice. No one told you of us, of how we live, how we suffer under the rule of those who are your masters too.

Your masters, the European and American factory owners, merchants, generals, and officials, broke into the peace of our villages and towns, plundered us for centuries, took from us what our work in the past had created, and sent all this off to Europe to embellish their lives, their homes, with the labor of our hands and of our ancient culture. They turned us into slaves.

Where previously we had to pay tribute to our own rich men, to the landlords, slave owners, sultans, emirs, khans, and maharajas, now the whip of the European slave owners was also laid across our backs. We were forced to labor on the plantations of the European capitalists. Sweat poured from our brows so that they might obtain rice, tea, sugar, tobacco, and rubber at a cheap rate. Our children were born and died in bondage. If it suited the interests of your bosses and ours, they parted child from mother, wife from husband, and drove them from one country to another.

To you they said that they were bringing European knowledge and science to our countries. But what they brought in fact was opium and vodka, so that when sorrow welled up in the heart of the Asian and African slaves, they would more easily forget their intolerable life and would not dare to lift their chained hands against their enslaver.

Your bosses, the European capitalists, supported our own enslavers, making them their guard dogs to watch over us. But when the whip of the local ruler was not enough, they sent in white soldiers, they sent in cannon. They destroyed the independence of our countries, subjecting us to their laws and their governors and making slaves of us in the full sense of the word. The aim of their colonial rule, they told us, was to train us for future independence. But they fought with every means against the spread of knowledge among us toilers of the East. Prisons and barracks for us they had in number, but they did not build schools where the children of Asia might learn what the white men had discovered that was great and good. They looked on us as an inferior race; they forbade us to sit in the same railway carriage that white men traveled in; they forbade us to live in the same neighborhood as white people or to eat at the same table with them.

You did not see our wounds; you did not hear our songs of sorrow; you believed your own oppressors when they said we were not people but cattle. You, who are servants to the capitalists, saw us as your own servants. In America you protested when Chinese and Japanese peasants, evicted by your capitalists from their villages, came to your country in search of a crust of bread. You did not approach us in a fraternal way in order to teach us how to fight along with you for the common cause of emancipation. Instead, you denounced us for our ignorance, you shut us out of your lives, you excluded us from your unions....¹

Only a common victory of the workers of Europe and America and the toiling masses of Asia and Africa will bring liberation to all who have until now toiled for the happiness of the wealthy few. If you were to free yourselves alone, leaving us in slavery and bondage, you yourselves would fall the next day into the same bondage. For in order to keep us in chains and in prison, you would have to form packs of prison bloodhounds to guard us in the East and in the South. You would have to raise armies to keep us under an iron heel. You would have to give power over us to your generals and governors. And once they had tasted the sweetness of the idle life lived at the expense of our labor and learned how to hold generations of colored toilers in bondage, they would soon turn their bayonets against you--and the wealth accumulated in Asia and Africa would be used to thrust you back into your previous slavery.

If you were to forget us now, you would pay dearly for that mistake; you would have cause to remember our chains when you felt chains on your own hands. You cannot free yourselves unless you help us in our struggle for liberation. The wealth of our countries is, in the hands of the capitalists, a means of enslaving you. So long as the British capitalist can freely exploit Indian, Egyptian, and Turkish peasants, so long as he can rob them, so long as he can force them to serve in the British army, he will always have wealth enough and executioners enough to subdue the British workers. Without our revolt there can be no victory for the British workers over the British capitalists, for the world proletariat over world capital.

And just as you cannot wrest power from the hands of the capitalists without unity with us, so you are not in a position to maintain power without this unity. The capitalist countries of Europe do not produce enough grain and raw materials to provide food, clothing, and footwear for their workers. Our countries, the countries of the East and of Africa, are rich in grain and raw materials. Without these supplies, the workers of Europe would die of starvation after their victory. They will be able to obtain these supplies by uniting with the toilers of Africa and Asia, by helping the toiling masses of Africa and Asia and thus inspiring them with confidence and love.

Such unity between ourselves and you will bring invincible strength. We will be able to feed and clothe each other; we will be able to help each other with armies of warriors fired with the single idea of common liberation.

1. For the pre-1914 Socialist International's stand on immigrant workers from Asia, see Riddell, Lenin's Struggle for a Revolutionary International, pp. 15-20, 41.  
 
 
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