Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/357



What is a peace program? From the viewpoint of the ruling classes or of the parties subservient to them, it is the totality of the demands, the ultimate realization of which must be ensured by the power of militarism. Hence, for the realization of Milyukov's "peace-program" Constantinople must be conquered by force of arms. Vandervelde's "peace-program" requires the expulsion of the Germans from Belgium as an antecedent condition. Bethmann-Holweg's plans were founded on the geographical war-map. From this standpoint the peace clauses reflect but the advantages achieved by force of arms. In other words, the peace program is the war program.

Such is the case prior to the intervention of the third power, the Socialist International. For the revolutionary proletariat, the peace program does not mean the demands which national militarism must fulfill, but those demands which the international proletariat intends to enforce by dint of its revolutionary fight against militarism in all countries. The more the international revolutionary movement expands, the less will the peace questions depend on the purely military position of the antagonists, and the more will the danger disappear lest the conditions of peace be understood by the masses as war-aims.

This is rendered most clear to us by the question of the fate of small nations and weak states.

The war began with a devastating invasion of Belgium and Luxemburg by the German armies. In the echo created by the violation of the small country, besides the false and egotistic anger of the ruling classes of the enemy, there reverberated also the genuine indignation of the common masses whose sympathy was attracted by the fate of the small country, crushed only because it happened to lie between two warring giants. At that first stage of the war the fate of Belgium attracted attention and sympathy, owing