408 THE CLASS STRUGGLE THE CHIEF TASK OF OUR DAY 409 order to provide repose and healing for his army, which has become sick with disintegration and demoralization.
We have signed a Peace of Tilsit. When Napoleon forced Prussia in 1807 to make such a peace, he destroyed all the German armies, occupied the capital and all the large cities, introduced his police system, obliged the vanquished to provide an auxiliary army for the conduct of new wars of conquest conducted by the victor, dismembered Germany, and concluded with certain German states alliances against other German states. Yet, in spite of this severe peace, the German people succeeded in maintaining themselves, in gathering their forces, and in attaining for themselves the rights of freedom and independence. To all those who are able and willing to think the example of the Peace of Tilsit which was only one of the many oppressive and humiliating treaties forced upon the Germans at that time shows clearly how childishly naive is the thought that under all circumstances a most cruel peace is the depth of degradation.
while war is the path of heroism and salvation. Warlike eras have frequently shown that peace may often discharge the function of a breathing spell for the gathering of forces for new battles. The Peace of Tilsit was the greatest humiliation of Germany and, at the same time, the point of departure for a great national awakening. Historical circumstances at that time provided no other way out than through the bourgeois state; for, a century or more ago, history was created by a small band of noblemen and the cliques of bourgeois intellectuals, while the great masses of workers and peasants lay slumbering and unobserving. History at that time, therefore, moved with frightful slowness.
And therefore, if Russia now can pass, as she indisputably is passing, from a Peace of Tilsit to a period of national uplift, to a great war of national defence, the result of this transition will not be the bourgeois state, but the international socialist revolution. We have therefore become, since Oct. 25, 1917, defenders. we are for the defence of the fatherland, but the fatherland that we are defending is the socialist fatherland, we are defending our socialism, which is a section of the universal army of socialism. Hatred of the Germans; down with the Germans, such was the cry and remains the cry of the ordinary (i. e. bourgeois) patriotism. And we say: Hatred to the imperialistic robbers, hatred to capitalism, death to capitalism, and, together with this. We must learn from the Germans! Remain faithful to the fraternal union with the German workers. They have been late in coming to our assistance. We shall wait for their coming, we shall gain time; they will come to our assistance.
Yes, learn from the Germans! History moves in zigzags and in roundabout paths. It so happens that the German at present simultaneously personifies, together with savage imperialism, the beginnings of discipline, organization, harmonious cooperation, on the basis of the modern machine industry, and strict accountability and supervision.
And that is precisely what we lack. That is just what we must learn. That is exactly what our revolution must have in order to proceed from a victorious beginning, through a series of difficult trials, to a victorious conclusion. That is exactly what the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic needs in order to cease being poor and weak, and to become, once for all, rich and mighty.
Capitalism has now considerably raised culture in general, and particularly that of the masses. The war has shaken up the masses, has awakened them with unparalleled terrors and sufferings.
The war has accelerated the march of history so that it now flies with the speed of a locomotive. History is now made by the independent action of millions and tens of millions of people. Capitalism has reached the stage of socialism.