Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/198

 brutalized and demoralized the Great-Russian people, transforming it into a tormentor of other races.

The new government, having confirmed those shameful and piratical agreements, refuses to suggest to all the belligerents an immediate armistice, in spite of the wishes of the large majority of the Russian people voiced by the Council of Workers and Soldiers. It has evaded the issue by confining itself to solemn, sonorous, platitudinous phrases and declarations, all of them perfectly empty but of the kind which bourgeois diplomats have always used to deceive the gullible and naive masses of oppressed nations.

And, therefore, the new government does not deserve the slightest confidence in the domain of international politics.

Moreover, it would be a waste of time to expect the government to make known the peace hunger of the peoples of Russia, or to renounce all annexations; for this would simply deceive the people, awaken in them hopes which cannot be fulfilled, retard their intellectual enlightenment, and gradually reconcile them with the idea of a continuation of the war. Socially, the present war is not characterized by any noble aims; it only reflects the class character of the government waging it, the alliance between the class represented by that government and the imperialistic financiers of Russia, England and France, and the actual policy of their class.