Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/250

 on no charges at all, or on charges that are manifestly framed-up.

The defense is offered that it is not the Bolsheviki who are being prosecuted, but only certain definite persons and on definite accusations. But these declarations are deliberately and manifestly untrue, for how can printing offices be wrecked for the transgressions of individual persons, even if these persons have been found guilty and duly sentenced in court? Unless, indeed, the government should legally have found guilty the whole Bolshevist party, its views and its tendencies. But the government of free Russia could not, and never did, do anything of the sort.

The clearest exposure of the fictitious character of the accusations directed against the Bolsheviki is in the fact that the newspapers of the landholders and the capitalists have been rabidly denouncing the Bolsheviki for their agitation against the war, against the landholders and against the capitalists, and demanding the arrest and prosecution of the Bolsheviki—before even a single accusation had been lodged against even one Bolshevik.

The people want peace. But the "revolutionary" government of Russia continued to wage a war of conquest, on the basis of the same secret treaties which the late Czar Nicholas II concluded with the English and French capitalists, in the interests of the subjection of foreign races by the Russian capitalists. The government of free Russia has been very prolific in its excuses, but it has not offered a righteous peace to all the nations.

We have no bread. Hunger again approaches. Everybody knows that the capitalists and the wealthy are cheating ruthlessly on the prices of war materials, are making unheard-of profits out of high prices, but nothing at all has been done toward a serious study of the production of commodities and their distribution by the workers. The capitalists are becoming more and more impudent, even throwing the workers out of the factories into the streets, and that at a time when there is a famine of manufactured articles among the people.

The great majority of the peasants have declared loudly and plainly in a long series of congresses, that they consider the feudal ownership of land to be unjust—mere usurpation. But a government styling itself revolutionary and democratic continues for