Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/476

 So far as Italy is concerned, the revolutionary sentiment of the proletariat of that country is evident to us. When Gompers, the social patriot who has turned himself over to the bourgeoisie, visited the cities of Italy and preached patriotism to the workers he was hissed out everywhere. During the war the Italian Socialist Party has taken a big step toward the Left. In France at the beginning of the war the number of patriots among the workers was only too great, for it was declared that the soil of France and Paris was menaced. But there, too, the attitude of the proletariat is changing. When a letter was read to the last convention telling what mischief the Entente was up to in Russia there were shouts of "Long live the Russian Socialist Republic" and "Long live the Soviets!" Yesterday we got word that at a meeting held in Paris 2,000 metal workers greeted the Soviet Republic.

And in England it is true that the so-called Independent Labor Party has not openly entered into an alliance with the Bolsheviki, but its sympathies for us are constantly on the increase. The Socialist Labor Parties of Scotland have even come out openly for the Bolsheviki.

This fact looms up before us entirely on its own initiative: Bolshevism has become a world theory and the tactics of the international proletariat. And the workingmen of all countries, who formerly read only the lying and calumnious articles and news reports of the bourgeois press, are now beginning to take stock of what is happening in Russia. And when last Wednesday a demonstration took place in Berlin, and the workers—in order to show their ill-will toward the Kaiser—wanted to march in front of his palace, they then went to the Russian Embassy in order thus to announce their solidarity with the facts of the Russian Proletarian Government.

So, Europe has got this far in the fifth year of the war. Therefore, we also declare that we never were so near to the world-wide revolution as we are today. Our allies are millions and millions of proletarians in all the countries of the world. But for all that, I repeat that our situation never before was so precarious as it is at present, because in Europe, as well as in America, Bolshevism is being reckoned with as a world power and a world danger.

Immediately following the conclusion of the peace of violence [Brest-Litovsk] we began the positive work of building up the Socialist republic. As soon as we gave an opportunity to the peasants actually to get along without the land owners, and a chance to the industrial workers to arrange their own life without the capitalists, as soon as the people understood that it could manage the State itself, without slavery and exploitation, then it became clear to everyone, and also manifested itself in practice, that no power and no counter-revolution in the world would be able to overthrow the Soviet power, i. e., the government of the workers and peasants. It required many months for us to come to this conviction in Russia.

In the cities the revolution began to consolidate itself already in November, 1917, but in the country it did not do so until the Summer of 1918. In the Ukraine, on the Don, and in various other places, the peasants have had occasion to feel the power of the Constituents and the Czecho-Slovaks in their own affairs. This required many, many