VIII
PEACE—AND OUR TASK.
(Lenin)
This article was written early in April, after the Soviet acceptance of the Brest-Litovsk peace at the All-Russian Soviet Congress in Moscow, March 18, 1918.
The history of mankind is at present passing through one of its greatest and most difficult crises; a crisis that, without exaggeration, may be said to possess a world-wide liberating significance. From war to peace, from a war between beasts of prey who have sent to the slaughter millions of the toiling and exploited, with the object of securing a redivision of spoils already acquired among the strongest of the robbers, to a war of the oppressed against the oppressors for freedom from capitalist tyranny; from the abyss of suffering, pain and hunger to the resplendent communistic society of the future, to general well-being and permanent peace,—it is no wonder that at the most acute points of such a tremendous transformation, when the old is going to pieces with frightful noise and crash, and the new is being born in indescribable pain, that some should be seized with despair, and that others should seek relief from reality, which is at times too bitter, in the magic of fair, enchanting phrases.
Yet it was necessary to feel vividly what was occurring, to live through, in the most excruciating and painful manner, this sharpest of all sharp turns in history, turning us out of Imperialism into the Communistic Revolution. In a few days we destroyed one of the oldest, most powerful, most savage and barbarous monarchies. In a few months we passed through a series of agreements with the bourgeoisie, of realizing the emptiness of petit bourgeois illusions, for which other countries have required decades. In a few weeks, after having overthrown the bourgeoisie, we defeated its opposition in a civil war. In a victorious, triumphal progress of Bolshevism, we have passed from one end of our great country to the other. We have raised to liberty and to independent life the lowest sections of the toiling masses that have been oppressed by Czarism and by the bourgeoisie. We have introduced and strengthened the Soviet Republic, a new type of government, immeasurably higher and more
