Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/208

 appetite on the altar of revolutionary democracy. It would be difficult to imagine any undertaking more fruitless, and—in spite of all the tragic humiliation of it—more ridiculous than this! When M. Tereschenko, in the manner of the provincial newspaper editorial of the democratic variety, endeavors to explain to the hardened ring leaders of the international plunderbund that the Russian Revolution is really a "powerful intellectual movement, expressive of the will of the Russian people in its struggle for equality …" etc., etc.,—when he furthermore "does not doubt" that "a close union between Russia and her Allies (the hardened ring-leaders of the international plunderbund) will assure in the fullest measure an agreement on all the questions involved in the principles proclaimed by the Russian Revolution,"—it is difficult to free one's self from a feeling of disgust at this medley of impotence, hypocrisy and stupidity.

The bourgeoisie secured for itself, in this document of Tereschenko's, it appears, all the decisive words: "unfaltering fidelity to the general cause of the Allies," "inviolability of the agreement not to make a separate peace," and a postponement of the revision of the aims of the war until "a favorable opportunity;" which amounts to asking the Russian soldier, until this "favorable opportunity" arrives, to shed his blood for those same imperialistic aims of the war which it seems so undesirable to publish, so undesirable to revise. And Tseretelli's whole political horizon is revealed in the complacent smugness with which he recommended to the attention of the All-Russian Congress this diplomatic document in which "there is clear and open speech, in the language of a revolutionary government, concerning the strivings of the Russian Revolution." One thing cannot be denied: the cowardly and impotent appeals addressed to Lloyd George and Wilson are couched in the same terms as the appeals of the Soviet Executive Committee addressed to Albert Thomas, the Scheidemanns and the Hendersons. In both there is all along the line an identity of purpose, and—who knows?—perhaps even an identity of authorship.