Published:
Pravda No. 49, May 18 (5), 1917.
Published according to the text in Pravda.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
Progress Publishers,
1964,
Moscow,
Volume 24,
page 349.
Translated: Isaacs Bernard
Transcription\Markup:
B. Baggins and D. Walters
Public Domain:
Lenin Internet Archive
1999
(2005).
You may freely copy, distribute,
display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
Archive” as your source.
The “conciliation” machine is working at full speed. The Narodniks and Mensheviks are toiling in the sweat of their brow, making up a new list of ministers. We are on the eve of a “new” cabinet....
Alas! It will not be very new. The government of the capitalists will have a few petty-bourgeois ministers tacked on to it in the shape of Narodniks and Mensheviks who have allowed themselves to be lured to the support of the imperialist war.
We shall have more phrase-mongering, more fireworks, more lavish promises and bombast about “peace without annexations”—but no desire whatever to even enumerate frankly, precisely and truthfully the actual annexations effected, say, by three countries: Germany, Russia, and Britain.
How long, gentlemen of the old and the new cabinets, can one deceive oneself with the utopia that the peasants will support the capitalists (the well-to-do peasants are not the whole of the peasantry), with the utopia of an “offensive” at the front (in the name of “peace without annexations”)?
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