Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/112



The argument of "revolutionary defense" used by the moderates to justify participation in this imperialistic war is simply one more symptom, one of the most fundamental and striking symptoms, of the petty bourgeois tide which has been swamping almost everything. It is, indeed, the worst obstacle to the furtherance of the movement and to the success of the Russian Revolution. Whoever stops short at that point and does not dare to keep his independence, is lost to the Revolution. The masses, however, do not stop as leaders do, and they have different ways, different methods of freeing themselves.

Revolutionary defense is, on the one hand, the result of the deception practiced on the masses by the bourgeoisie, the result of the peasants' and workers' unthinking confidence; and, on the other, it is an expression of the interests and standpoint of the petite bourgeosie. The bourgeoisie deceives the people by playing upon the generous pride of the Revolution and pretending that, from a social and political point of view, the character of the war changed completely from the day when the Revolution substituted the bourgeois republic for the Czar's monarchy. And the people believed this, for a while, still being in a measure the victims of old prejudices which caused them to see in the other races of Russia mere chattel slaves of Great Russia. The perversion of the Great Russian race by the Czars, who taught it to consider other races as inferior and belonging "by right" to the Great Russians, could not be straightened out all at once.

We must make it clear to the masses that the social and political complexion of the war is not determined by the good will of certain individuals or certain groups, but by the class which conducts the war, by the class policy of which the war seems to be a product,