Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/55

 A revolutionary government of the Soviets alone can act properly on the problem of the war. The Provisional Government, a government of capitalists, is continuing the war in the interests of capitalists. Just as German capitalists, with their crowned robber, Wilhelm, at the head, so the capitalists of all other countries carry on the war for the division of capitalist profits and for world domination. Hundreds of millions of men, almost all the world, are drawn into this criminal war. Hundreds of milliards of capital are invested in the "profitable" enterprises of death, hunger, destruction, bringing to the people atrocious suffering and scandalously-high profits to the capitalists. In order to break away from this terrible war and conclude a really democratic peace, and not a peace of force, there is only one way: the transfer of all government power into the hands of the Councils of Workers and Soldiers. The workers and the poorest peasants, not being interested in protecting the profits of capital and the plundering of weak nations, can actually accomplish that which the capitalists only promise, namely, to end the war by a lasting peace conserving liberty to all peoples without exception.

Our program of peace is as follows:

1.—The Council of Workers and Soldiers declares that as at revolutionary government, it does not recognize any treaty of Czarism or the bourgeoisie.

2.—It publishes immediately these treaties of exploitation and robbery.

3.—It proposes at once and publicly an armistice to all participants in the war.

4.—Peace terms are: liberation of all oppressed peoples and of all colonies.

5.—A declaration of distrust in all bourgeois governments; appeal to the working class to overthrow the governments.

6.—The war debts of the bourgeoisie to be paid exclusively by the capitalists.

By means of this policy, the majority of the workers and poorest peasants can be won for Socialism and for the revolutionary dictatorship of the Soviets.

We do not doubt for a minute that these peace terms would be unacceptable not only to a monarchical Germany, but also to a republican Germany, and equally unacceptable to the capitalist governments of England and France. And in that event we would be compelled to wage a revolutionary war against the German bourgeoisie, but not only against the German bourgeoisie, and we would