Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/32

 28 If we will take the literature of the Allied countries we will see that all that has been written about the Brest Litovsk Peace by the leaders of the trade union movement of France, England, Belgium, etc. without mentioning the United States—Gompers is still writing such things, which proves absolutely his impaired mental capacity—we will see that they considered the Brest Litovsk Peace mainly as an injury to the interest of their "fatherland."

The reasons for Brest Litoysk Peace are well known. However, I cannot deny myself the pleasure of mentioning an interesting moment from the struggle and quarrel within the Russian Communist Party on the question of the Brest Litovsk Peace. You know that the Party at that time almost split: For peace at any price was Ilyitch (Lenin) and in the C. E. C. there were about half and half. And here, Radek relates at one of the fiercest discussions, Ilyitch (Lenin) said: "The peasants have already voted for peace." Radek asked, with a stare, "When?" "They voted with their feet"—answered Ilyitch—"because they are running away from the front and against this vote nothing can be done."

This, in a general way, was the reason for the Brest Litovsk Peace. And this reason was not noticeable even to all of us, so much the less of course, to the working masses of Europe. We have to say that the Brest Litovsk Peace, and the period of great difficulty in which the revolution was after the Brest Litovsk Peace, was used during a long period as a strong weapon in the hands of our opponents, the reformists, against Communism. But, on the other hand, the fact of peace in itself brought in something entirely new into the world's labor movement for the rank and file worker, be he a member of a trade union, or be he in Australia or Alaska, and even not knowing anything at all of what was going on in Russia; the fact in itself that the press of the whole world was against us, was cursing us, because we were confiscating banks, factories, etc., all that created a stimulation in him, a somewhat uncertain sympathy for us.

In this way we can say in a somewhat paradoxical way, that the first agitator for Bolshevism was the bourgeois press itself—for we had no Communist press in the different countries; and the more the bourgeois press was cursing us, the more sympathy it created for us, And all that, taken together, influenced the creation of that uncertain movement which, although very slowly, was growing as a left wing in the international labor movement, which at the proper moment joined with the revolutionary trade union movement and created world wide organization known by the names of Comintern (The Communist International) and Profintern (the Red International of Labor Unions). We should consider these moments, as I have already said, in order to understand the further development of the international labor movement.