Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution
that our wives and children will not be destitute."
"After that," added the delegates, "is it not wrong to think in France that the Russians are planning a separate peace, which would dishonour the Revolution and deliver them up to the Central Empires?"
That was the keynote of much that we heard constantly expressed later on, even among the Zimmerwaldians, or the Extremists, or, at least, among such extremists as were not secret agents of Germany.
Certainly, among the travelling companions whom we met several days afterwards in the train between Stockholm and Petrograd, there were many revolutionaries who longed ardently for a separate peace "in order to be able," as Clémenceau says, "to give themselves up entirely to the joys of civil war." But however keen their pacifism, however impatient they were to conclude at any price a general peace, they were forced to admit that if the Russian Revolution concluded a separate peace, the Russian Revolution was lost.
Except on this point, however, it would
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