Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/85

 promised victory. [Upon the declaration of war, Jules Guesde, Albert Thomas and other French Socialists entered the ministry as representatives of their party, and supported the government in all its acts.]

"At the same time that these warnings by the official representatives of Socialism in the democratic countries are being addressed to the Russian proletariat, the government officialdom of England and France are carrying on an equally systematic campaign against the Russian Revolution, against the democratic demands which have already been set up and realized by the proletariat, and primarily against the demand for a republic and the real and complete elimination of the power of the Romanoffs.

"The entire bourgeois press of England and France has been given free rein by the governments to calumniate the Council of Workers' and Soldiers' Delegates and the revolutionary army. They are trying by agitation to direct the provisional government toward a counter-revolutionary coup d'etat, to set aside the rule of the man in the street, and thus place the destiny of the Russian Revolution in the hands of the English embassy. They go so far as to threaten financial boycott, and set up the claim that the French creditors, who invested their money with, and participated in the plunder of, the Romanoffs, have a right to interfere in this hour of destiny, in which the Russian people is to decide its future.

"The government Socialists of France and of England have neither enough courage nor enough revolutionary consciousness to fight this reactionary activity; in fact, they lend moral support by their demonstrations to this activity, and do not even shrink from the insinuation that the Russian Social Democracy, after the manner of the Romanoff clique, is considering a separate peace with Germany against the French Republic. Thus, while the Russian proletariat is straining every nerve to destroy the reactionary powers which it has overthrown and save the country from the danger of counter-revolution, its appeal for international solidarity to wage the common fight for the salvation of all nations from the bloody butchery, is purposely misinterpreted and falsified to the workers and soldiers of England and France. The western masses, hampered by martial law, are made antagonistic to the Russians by this insidious agitation. Comrades B. Brizon, A. Blanc and Raffin-Dugens have protested in the French parliament against this despicable distortion of the truth.

"Never has the revolutionary uprising of a people been so betrayed by the very elements from which it was justified in ex-