406 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE CHIEF TASK OF OUR DAY 407 has communicated to our national productive forces to create a really rich and powerful Russia.
Russia may become such if we cast aside all discouragement and all oratory, if we strain every nerve and tighten every muscle, if we understand that sal on is possible only by the path of international socialist revolution, on which we have entered. To advance on this road, undaunted by defeat, to build up, stone by stone, the firm foundation of the socialist society, to work with untiring hand at the creation of discipline and self discipline, at strengthening, at all times and in all places, the organization, the orderliness, the efficiency, the harmonious cooperation of the forces of the entire nation, a central supervision and control of the production and distribution of products such is the path to power, whether it be power in the military sense or power in the socialist sense.
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 democratic than the best of the bourgeois parliamentary republics. We organized a dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poorest peasants, and inaugurated a widely planned system of socialistic reconstruction. In millions and millions of workers in all countries we have awakened the faith in their powers and kindled the fires of their enthusiasm. We have sent out in all directions the call of the international workers revolution. We have thrown down the gauntlet to the imperialistic robbers of all countries.
And in a few days an imperialist robber, falling upon us unarmed, has cast us to the ground. He has forced us to sign an incredibly oppressive and humiliating peace our punishment for having dared, if only for one short moment, to free ourselves from the iron bonds of the imperialistic war. The robber strangles and chokes and dismembers Russia with all the greater fury, the more threateningly he perceives rising before him in his own country the spectre of the impending workers revolution.
We were forced to sign a Peace of Tilsit. There is no reason for deceiving ourselves as to that. We must have the courage to look right into the face of this bitter, unembellished truth. We must sound to the depths, completely, the whole abyss of defeat and humiliation into which we have now been cast. The better we understand this, the harder and firmer will become our will to free ourselves, to rise again from slavery to independence, our unbending resolve, at whatever costs, to raise Russia from her present poverty and weakness, to make her rich and powerful in the true sense of the word.
And this she may become, for we still have left enough territory and natural resources, to provide each and every one of us, if not with a superabundance, yet with a sufficient supply of the means of subsistence. We have enough, in natural riches and in labor power, as well as in the stimulus, which our great revolution It is unbecoming for a socialist, when he has suffered a defeat, to protest his victory loudly or to droop into despair. It is not true that we have no other alternative than that between an inglorious (from the point of view of the shlakhtzy) death, which is what this terrible peace amounts to, and a heroic death in a hopeless war. It is not true that we have betrayed our ideals and our friends by signing this Peace of Tilsit. We have betrayed nothing and no one, we have neither sanctioned nor concealed a single falsehood; to no single friend and companion in misfortune have we refused all the aid in our power. commander in chief, who withdraws the remains of his army, defeated, and afflicted with a panic flight, into the interior of the country, who defends this withdrawal, in a case of extremity, with an intolerable and humiliating peace, is not perpetrating treason with regard to those sections of the army which he can no longer assist and which have been cut off by the enemy. Such a commander is doing his duty when he chooses the only way that is open for saving what can still be saved, consenting to no gambles, embellishing no sad truths in the eyes of the people. giving up territory, in order to gain time, utilizing every breathing spell, no matter how short, in order to collect his forces, in