Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/361



Now the question is, can the proletariat under the present circumsances set up an independent peace program, i. e., solutions of the problems which caused the war of today or which have in the course of this war been brought to light. It has been intimated that the proletariat do not now command sufficient forces to bring about the realization of such a program. Utopian is the hope that the proletariat could carry out its own peace program as to the issue of the present war. What alternative is there save the struggle for the cessation of the war and for a peace without annexations, i. e., a return to the status quo ante bellum, to the state of affairs prior to the war? This we are told is by far the more realistic program. In what sense, however, may the term realistic be applied to the fight for the close of the war by means of a peace without annexation? Under what circumstances, we ask, can the end of the war be brought about? Theoretically, three typical possibilities may here be considered. (1) A decisive victory of one of the parties. (2) A general exhaustion of the opponents without decisive sway of one over the other. (3) The interference of the revolutionary proletariat, which interrupts by force the development of military events.

It is quite obvious that in the first case, if the war is ended by a decisive victory of one side it would be naive to dream of a peace free of annexations. If the Scheidemanns and Landsbergs, the staunch supporters of the work of their militarism, insist in parliament upon an "annexationless" peace, it is only with the firmest conviction that such protests can hinder no "useful" annexation. On the other hand, one of our former Czarist commanders-in-chief, General Alexieff, who dubbed the annexationless peace as "an Utopian phrase," thought quite correctly that the offensive is the chief thing, and that in case of successful war operations everything else would come of itself. In order to wrest annexations from the