Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/347

 printed millions of copies of newspapers in the German and Austrian language, which were circulated by means of aeroplanes, etc. This propaganda asumed enormous proportions, and seriously affected the morale of the Central Powers' troops,—how seriously only time can tell. At one of the sessions of the peace congress General Hoffman protested against the propaganda of the Bolsheviki, to which Trotzky retorted that neither the conditions of the armistice nor the character of the peace negotiations limited freedom of speech or press! An intensive propaganda was also carried on among the Austro-German war prisoners in Russia, resolutions were adopted repudiating the policy of their governments, and pledges made to fight in the cause of revolutionary Russia.

Upon the resumption of negotiations, Germany and Austria insisted upon their proposals, which amounted to annexations of the most brutal sort. A great strike movement, verging almost on a revolution, broke loose in Austria during the middle of January. In one district alone 90,000 workers went on strike, and the total must have been near a million. It was a spontaneous mass movement of a revolutionary character,—the dynamic mass action out of which revolutions arise. But the reactionary administrations of the imperialistic unions and of the government Social Democratic Party acted against the strikes. When the news of the strikes reached Trotzky, he badgered the Teuton diplomats into an adjournment of the sessions for a week, hoping that time would deepen the scope of the strikes. The great strike movement broke loose against the Socialist Party leaders, who were taken by surprise, but who immediately placed themselves at its head and led it astray. The movement spread to Germany, where hundreds of thousands of workers were involved, but where the unions acted against the strike; as the Berlin Vorwaerts pleaded, "we don't want a revolution, we simply want the government to mediate its differences with the strikers."

The Scheidemann faction preached incessantly against a revolution, using the Russian situation to promote an imperialistic German peace. Moderate Socialism again betrayed the proletariat and the revolution, openly and shamelessly doing the vile counter-revolutionary work of their imperialistic governments. The unions refused to pay strike benefits and ordered the strikers back to work; the dominat moderate Socialism used its moral influence to terrorize the strikers and potential rebels into submission. he workers, betrayed and maligned by the very movement that should have directed them to victory, were beaten sullenly back.