Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/374



The Soviet Government of Russia must now not only build anew, but it must also close up the old accounts and, up to a certain and rather high degree, pay the old debts: first, those of the war which has lasted three and a half years. This war furnished the touchstone of the economic strength of the warring countries. The fate of Russia, a poor and backward country, was, in a war of long duration, a foregone conclusion. In the mighty collisions of war apparatus, the decision lay, in the last analysis, in the capacity of a country to adapt its industries to the needs of the war, to transform the same in the shortest possible time and to replace, in ever growing volume, engines of destruction that were used up with such rapidity in the course of this general butchery. Every country, or almost every country, even the most backward, could at the beginning of the war be in possession of the mightiest engines of destruction—or could import them. That was the case with all backward countries; even so in Russia. But war eats up quickly its dead capital and requires its constant renewal. The war capacity of each and every country drawn into this world massacre, could in truth be measured by its capacity to create anew and during the war, cannons, projectiles and other war material.

Had the war solved the problem of the relative relation of forces in a very short time, then it would have been possible, theoretically at least, for Russia to maintain behind the trenches the position that might have meant victory. But the war dragged on too long. And that was not due to accident. The fact that international diplomacy had for the last 50 years worked in the direction of creating a European so-called "balance of power," that is to say a condition wherein the opposing forces were to be about evenly balanced, that fact alone,—considered in the light of the power and wealth possessed by the modern bourgeois nations—would give the war a long-drawn-out character. And that, on the other hand, meant the exhaustion