Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/375

 of such countries as were weaker and, in an economic sense, less developed.

The strongest, in a military sense, proved to be Germany, due to the power of its industries and due also to the modem, rational character of these industries side by side with a time-worn, anachronistic political system. It was shown that France, largely because of its petty bourgeois economy, had fallen behind Germany; and even so powerful a colonial empire as England, because of the more conservative and routine-governed character of its industries, proved to be the weaker in comparison with Germany. When history placed the Russian Revolution face to face with the question of negotiating peace, we were not in doubt that we would have to settle the bill for the three and. a half years of war—unless the power of the international revolutionary proletariat should decisively upset all calculations. We did not doubt that in German Imperialism we had to deal with an opponent thoroughly saturated with the consciousness of his colossal power, a power which, in the course of this war, has come so plainly to the fore.

All those arguments of bourgeois cliques, to the effect that we would have been much stronger had we conducted the negotiations in conjunction with our allies, do not meet the point. To be enabled to conduct negotiations together with our allies for an indefinite time we should, above all things, have been able to continue the war in conjunction with them; but, as our country was weakened and exhausted, it was the continuation, not the termination of the war, that would have still further weakened and exhausted it. And thus we would have been forced to quit, sooner or later, under conditions still more unfavorable to us. … If, therefore, we stand to-day, a weakened country, face to face with a world Imperialism, we surely have not been weakened because we have torn ourselves out of the fiery ring of war and out of the embrace of international war obligations—no, we have been weakened by the policies of Czarism and of the bourgeois classes, those policies which we have fought as a revolutionary party—before the war and during the war.

Do you remember, comrades, under what circumstances our delegation went direct from a session of the Third All-Russian Soviet Congress to Brest-Litovsk? At that time we rendered to you a report as to the state of the negotiations and the demands of the enemy. These demands, as you will recollect, ran along the line of masked, or rather half-masked annexationist desires, an annexation of Lithuania, Courland, a part of Livonia, the islands of the Moon Sound, as well as a half-veiled contribution which, at that time, we