V.I. Lenin: Letter on the eve of the October Revolution

The following letter, written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on 24th October (6 November) 1917, on the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution, was addressed to the Central Committee members of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks):

Comrades,

I am writing these lines on the evening of the 24th. The situation is critical in the extreme. In fact it is now absolutely clear that to delay the uprising would be fatal. With all my might I urge comrades to realise that everything now hangs by a thread; that we are confronted by problems which are not to be solved by conferences or congresses (even congresses of Soviets), but exclusively by peoples, by the masses, by the struggle of the armed people.