Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/454



The entire capitalist press of your countries is howling with a hoarse voice, like a dog loosened from his chains, for the "intervention" of your governments in the internal affairs of Russia; they cry: "Now or never!" But at the very moment that these hirelings of your exploiters are throwing off all disguise and speaking openly of an attack on the workers and peasants of Russia, they are still shamefully lying and deceiving you outrageously, for while uttering their threats of "intervention," they are already conducting military operations against the Russia of the workers and peasants.

You who are shedding your blood on the Mame and on the Aisne in the interests of Capital, in the Balkans, in Syria, in Mesopotamia, you are now also to lie in the snows of northern Finland and in the mountains of the Ural. In the interests of Capital, you are to be the hangman of the Russian Revolution. In order to disguise this crusade against the Russian Workers' Revolution, your capitalists also explain that the expedition it not to be undertaken against the Russian Revolution, but against German Imperialism, to which we are said to have sold ourselves. We were forced, however, to divide Russia, because your governments, which knew very well that Russia could fight no longer, would not enter into peace negotiations, at which their strength would have saved Russia and assured us an acceptable peace. Now Russia, exhausted by 3 1-2 years of war, has betrayed your cause; rather have your governments thrown Russia under the feet of German Imperialism. They think only of squeezing out the interest on the old loans advanced by French capital to Czarism. The Allies warned us, that the Germans would occupy the Siberian and Murman Railways; these two -direct lines, they said, which connect us with the outer world, must not come under German control. But in the end it was not the Germans who actually took possession of the railroads, which was impossible for them, at their distance from the railroad, but the Allies themselves. They are thus pursuing three objects: 1) the occupation of as much Russian territory as possible, in order, by holding its resources, to secure the payment of the interest on the loans made by French and English capital; 2) the suppression of the Workers' Revolution; 3) the erection of a new eastern front, in order to divert the Germans from the western front to fight on Russian soil.