Page:Lenin - The Soviets at Work (1919).pdf/50

48 served as a respite to gather strength for new battles. The Peace of Tilsit was the greatest humiliation of Germany and at the same time a turning point to the greatest national awakening. At that time the historical environment offered only one outlet for this awakening—a bourgeois state. At that time, over a hundred years ago, history was made by a handful of noblemen and small groups of bourgeois intellectuals, while the mass of workers and peasants were inactive and inert. Owing to this, history at that time could crawl only with awful slowness.

Now capitalism has considerably raised the level of culture in general and of the culture of the masses in particular. The war aroused the masses, awakened them by unheard of horrors and sufferings. The war has given impetus to history and now the world is speeding along with the speed of a locomotive. History is now being independently made by millions and tens of millions of people. Capitalism has now become ripe for Socialism.

Thus, if Russia now moves—and it cannot be denied that she does move from a "Tilsit" peace to national awakening and to a great war for the fatherland, the outlet of such an awakening leads not to the bourgeois state but to an international Socialist revolution. We are "resistants" since November 7, 1917. We are for the "defense of our fatherland, " but the war for the fatherland towards which we are moving is a war for a Socialist fatherland, for Socialism, as a part of the universal army of Socialism.