148 THE CLASS STRUGGLE TRUTH ABOUT INTERVENTION IN RUSSIA 149 slavery. The Russian workers and peasants therefore could no longer admit the principle that they should pay tribute to foreign bankers for the doubtful honor of serving as their cannon fodder. So the repudiation of the debts of Czarism and the nationalization of atl the natural resources of the Russian Republic, to serve the interests of the people, was the first and most essential of the principles of the October Revolution. But no sooner was this done than the governments of England and France began to plot for the overthrow of the Russian Soviet Government. In November, 1917, the French Government paid a large sum of money to the Ukrainian Rada in order that it should raise a rebellion against the workers and peasants government. On the Don, General Kaledin received arms and ammunition from the Allied military missions, in order that his Cossacks should join in the attack. But the peasants of the Ukraine and laboring Cossacks refused to be the tool of the Paris and London Stock Exchanges, threw off the voke of the Rada and of General Kaledin and created their own revolutionary soviets in federal union with the Soviet Government of Great Russia. Then followed the tragicomedy of Kieff, when the Ukrainian Rada, which had been bought by Allied gold, finding itself threatened by its indignant revolutionary peasantry, sold itself to the German warlords and invited the armed forces of the Central Powers to protect its class interests.
Foiled in their attempts to use the Ukrainian Rada, the Allied governments began to spread rumors that the leaders of the Russian workers and peasants government were agents of Germany and had betrayed the working classes of England and France, because they had brought Russia out of the war. Against these slanders may be set the following facts. The necessity for Russia to obtain peace was dictated, firstly, by the impossibility of undertaking the work of social reconstruction at home, if a foreign war was draining the country of its material resources; and, secondly, by the desire of the workers and peasants of Russia to maintain a neutral position between the armed camps of Europe, and to show to the workers of other lands that they had no partiality to any of the warring governments. The best proof that the Soviet government was sincere in its desire to make peace not with the German government, but with the German people, was seen in the course of the Brest Litovsk negotiations. The Soviet government not only showed no desire to bring the negotiations to a speedy conclusion, but did, everything possible to cause them to drag on indefinitely, so as to expose to the German people the rapacity and cynicism of the German government. By these tactics they were largely responsible for the great strike in Germany during January, 1918.
This was the first real protest of the German people against the war, and the policy of their government, and it was brought about by the tactics of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. Contrast with this the tactics of the Allied governments, who, in spite of their loud assertions that by armed forces alone can Prussian militarism be crushed, have after four years battering away at the Western front at the cost of thousands of the noblest lives failed to call forth a single demonstration in Germany against the war. Trotzky succeeded in the Council Chambers of Brest Litovsk in creating that spirit of rebellion among the German people, which all the heavy guns and armored tanks of Field Marshal Haig had failed to create in the course of the whole campaign. But the strike in Germany failed and the German government was left free to crush the Russian Revolution. Why did the strike fail?
Because Hindenburg and the Prussian junkers were able to appeal to the more uneducated and less class conscious among the German people and to say to them: Don withdraw your support from us, because, if you do, the Allied governments will ruin Germany and reduce you to slavery.
They were able to point to the secret treaties, published by the Soviet government, which showed that the Allies had been fighting to annex Germany up to the left bank of the Rhine, and that their governments had not repudiated these treaties. They were able to point to the fact that, although the workers and peasants government of Russia had invited the Allies to take part in the Brest Litovsk negotiations, had waited in fact a fortnight for them to make up their minds, the Allied governments had refused. Thus the Prussian warlords were able to tell their people that the Allies would not hear of peace and that therefore a strike at this time would be treachery to their country. It was only when the Soviet government saw that the Russian Revolution had been deserted by the Allied democracies and betrayed by the German proletariat, that they were compelled reluctantly to sign the cruel Brest Litovsk peace. And the very fact that the Kaiser and his hirelings imposed such onerous conditions shows how much he feared the Russian workers and peasants revolution and how abominable is the slander that the Bolsheviks are the agents of the German government, since it was not the