212 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 213 and is demanded by the Socialists of every other national group of Russia, is and must be the aim of the Lettish, Polish, Lithuanian and Esthonian Socialists.
It is the fate of every great world empire, that it carries in its body the germs that will cause its own destruction. The population of the Baltic Provinces are neither the priest ridden folk of Alsace Lorraine, nor the ignorant, downtrodden Polish masses of Upper Silesia. Will the Hohenzollern be more successful in subduing a people that even the Tsar, with all his ruthlessness, could never succeed in taming, especially since the decree of economic development of Germany at the outset makes the application of old Russian methods impossible?
The revolutionary movement of Greater Germany will acquire in the Baltic proletariat a tried, trained, self sacrificing body of fighters that knows no compromise with bourgeoisie and government bureaucracy.
When the Socialist Letts, Esthonians, Lithuanians have become a part of the German Social Democracy there will be no suspension of the class struggle, no civil peace in Germany.
The State in Russia Old and New The Farce of Dual Authority By LEON TROTZKY The war conditions are twisting and obscuring the action of the internal forces of the revolution. But none the less the course of the revolution will be determined by these same internal forces, namely, the classes.
The revolution which had been gathering strength from 1912 on, was, at first, broken off by the war, and later, owing to the heroic intervention of an exasperated army, was quickened into an unprecedented aggressiveness. The power of resistance on the part of the old regime had been once for all undermined by the progress of the war. The political parties who might have taken up the function of mediators between the monarchy and the people, suddenly found themselves hanging in the air, owing to powerful blows from below, and were obliged at the last moment to accomplish the dangerous leap to the secure shores of the revolution. This imparted to the revolution the outward appearance, for a time, of complete national harmony. For the first time in its entire history the bourgeois liberalism felt itself bound up with the masses and it is this that must have given them the idea of utilizin gthe universal revolutionary spirit in the service of the war.
The conditions, the aims, the participants of the war did not change. Guchkov and Milyukov, the most outspoken of the imperialists on the political staff of the old régime, were now the managers of the destines of revolutionary Russia. Naturally the war, the fundamental character of which remained the same as it had been under Czarism against the same enemies, with the same allies, and the same international obligations now had to be transformed into a war for the revolution. For the capitalist classes, this task was equivalent to a mobilization of the revolution, and of the powers and passions it had stimulated, in the interests of Imperialism. The Milyukovs magnanimously consented to call the red rag a sacred emblem if only the working