Date: 1917
Source: ru:PSS/v32

“The Workers’ Gazette” is deeply concerned about the political implications of the offensive. One of its staff members even accuses another of ultimately reducing his evasive rhetoric to a simple admission: that the Russian revolutionary army is, in objective terms, now shedding blood not in the name of a peace without annexations, but in the service of the expansionist ambitions of the Allied bourgeoisie (“The Workers’ Gazette,” No. 93, p. 2, feuilleton, column 1).

It is precisely this “objective” meaning of the offensive that cannot fail to trouble the working masses—many of whom still follow the Mensheviks in part. And this concern is reflected on the pages of “The Workers’ Gazette.” Rather than risk an open rupture with the workers, the newspaper attempts to somehow link the “offensive” to the revolutionary proletarian struggle for peace. The predicament of this cunning editorial board lies in the fact that no connection can be established here except a negative one.

It is hard to imagine a sight more pitiable, more hopelessly muddled, than this venerable editorial staff—frightened by the very spirits it had itself conjured up, together with the Socialist Revolutionaries.

On the one hand, “The Workers’ Gazette” reports that “in the West today, the significance of the Russian offensive is being understood in a thoroughly distorted way. The bourgeois newspapers of England and France see in it a repudiation of the Council’s ‘utopian’ plans. Chauvinistic resolutions are passed under the banner of welcoming Kerensky and the advancing revolutionary army. And as the drums of war beat ever louder in response to the Russian offensive, persecution against those like-minded comrades of Russian democracy who share the latter’s platform of peace is intensifying.”

What a valuable admission! Especially when it comes from the pages of a ministerial newspaper that, only yesterday, had dismissed our predictions of these inevitable consequences of the offensive as the product of Bolshevik malice. It turns out that the matter is not our “malice,” but rather that the policy adopted by the leaders of the Council has its own internal logic—and that this logic leads to the strengthening, both within Russia and beyond its borders, of anti-revolutionary forces.

It is precisely this unwelcome fact that “The Workers’ Gazette” would like to somehow gloss over. The remedies proposed by the editorial board are remarkably simple: “There is an urgent need for a joint statement from the Central Executive Committee of the Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, together with the Council of Peasants’ Deputies, clearly and categorically affirming that the aims of the war remain the same for Russian democracy as they always have been,” and so on, and so forth. See how resolutely the Mensheviks are fighting the imperialist war: they are ready to issue yet another urgent, categorical declaration. How many such “urgent,” “categorical,” “passionate” declarations have already been made! And how many more times will these very categorical statements have to be repeated, at the fastest possible pace, in order to soften, even just a little, the actions of the very government that the ministerial “Workers’ Gazette” wholeheartedly supports?

No, gentlemen, you will not weaken the very facts you yourselves report through the most “categorical” words, declarations, and notes. To these facts, one can oppose only deeds—deeds that would truly signify a break with the policy of continuing the imperialist war. The Lvov–Tereshchenko–Shingarev–Kerensky–Tsereteli government is incapable of doing so. All it can do is, through its cowardly, wretched policies toward Finland and Ukraine, confirm its utter inability to carry out even the most “categorical” declarations about “no annexations” and about the “right” to self-determination. Under these conditions, all those promised declarations will amount to nothing more than a symbolic gesture, intended to deafen the masses. Deafening the masses with resonant declarations—not with “the proletarian struggle for peace”—that is the program of “The Workers’ Gazette,” and that is its true response to the rise of anti-revolutionary forces in the wake of the offensive.

“Pravda,” No. 95, July 13 (June 30), 1917

Printed according to the text of the newspaper “Pravda.”