which the State has once already had to pay. Now the schools for soviet work must also serve this end, and we already have in the Soviet Republic a central school of soviet work in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, which is a permanent school. Soon, doubtless, similar schools of soviet work will be established in the capitals of all the provinces.
Passing now to consider the party schools, we find that they have undergone a radical change in character during the period of actual transition to communism. At first they were the schools of a definite party, supported by the proletariat, and in this stage they had a purely political character. Now they have become places where instruction is given in the communist transformation of society, and they are therefore State schools. At the same time they are military academies for the purposes of the civil war. It has only been thanks to these schools that the proletariat has been able to form an idea of the objective significance of the transformation which it is undergoing half unwittingly, almost instinctively — for as yet it only realises the narrower concrete aims, and is incompetent to grasp the nature of the revolutionary process as a whole. The party schools are not only able to provide the proletariat with a scientific explanation of the nature and goal of the revolution, but they can also teach the workers how to achieve the aims of the revolution by the shortest route and with the least expenditure of effort.