V. I.

Lenin

Public attention is fixed on the Balkans just now, and understandably
so. For the whole of Eastern Europe, the hour is perhaps striking when the
peoples themselves will have their free and decisive word to say. There is
no longer room for the game of the bourgeois “powers” and their diplomats
who are past masters of intrigue, scheming and selfishly tripping up one
another.

The Balkan peoples might say, as our serfs used to in the old days:
“Save us from lordly anger and lordly love, the worst of all misfortunes.” [1] For the Balkan peasants and workers, both hostile and
would-be friendly intervention by the European “powers” means only adding
all sorts of fetters and hindrances to free progress to the general
conditions of capitalist exploitation.

That is one reason why it is essential to fight against both
bureaucratic-governmental and liberal “diplomacy”. Rech , for
example, was false through and through when, a few days ago, it invited
“Russian society” (i.e., the bourgeoisie) to remember the statement of a
British ministerial organ which said that Europe would not permit
“misgovernment” in the Balkans! “Let our diplomats not sit back idly,”
shouted Rech .

Even the most “liberal” bourgeois Europe, we say in reply, can bring
the Balkans nothing but support for decay and stagnation, nothing but
bureaucratic obstacles to freedom. It is “Europe” that is hindering the
establishment of a federal republic in the Balkans.

The foremost workers in the Balkans, and all Balkan democrats, pin
their hopes solely on the development of the political consciousness,
democratic spirit and independent activity of the masses , and not
on the intrigues of bourgeois diplomats, whatever liberal phrases they
adorn themselves with!

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Notes:
[1]
Said by Liza, the maid, in Alexander Griboyedov’s comedy Wit Works Woe .