Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/355

 the working masses against the imperialistic cliques. We are ready to support this uprising with all the forces at our command. The official and semi-official French patriots, who a few months ago supported Romanoff against us, are now indignant at our negotiations with the Hohenzollerns. They very often summon against us the help of the spirits of their ancestors, the Jacobins, who conducted no negotiations with the "tyrants" but declared ruthless war against them.

This opposition, which aims at the glorifying of the petty bourgeois democracy of the i8th century at the expense of the proletarian democracy of the 20th century, is in every respect irrelevant.

Our Revolution was directly generated by the war. In France, on the contrary, at the close of the 18th century, the war was generated by the Revolution.

After the French masses, principally the peasantry, had achieved the greatest revolutionary conquests, the stress of feudal Europe forced them to defend these conquests by force of arms against the foreign enemy. The enthusiasm of the revolution passed immedately into the zeal of war, which only meant the conveyance of the revolution across its national borders.

Our people bled in the course of the last three years in the imperialistic murder campaign, and the revolution became first of all a means of freeing them from the horrors and sufferings of the war. The Jacobin Revolution of 1792 had a feudal Europe against it. The proletarian revolution of 1917 faces an imperialistic Europe, divided into two hostile camps. If to the "sanscullotte" the war was the direct continuation of the liberating revolution, then to the Russian soldier who has not yet left the trenches occupied by him for three years, the revolutionary war on an extensive scale would seem nothing else but a continuation of the preceding murder.

This by no means implies that we renounce the revolutionary war. On the contrary, we consider it the duty of the revolutionary classes to defend the cause of Socialism against the inner as well as the foreign class-enemies. Doubtless our revolutionary war can become popular provided there is an open revolutionary fight of the proletariat at least in one of the European countries. The powerful impulse which Europe has received from the Russian Revolution, must now come back from Europe, thus materializing the thought of an international revolution in the consciousness of the working class of Russia, and supplying the stimulus to rouse them for a