In one respect the Russian government has not lagged behind its European brethren: just as they have, it has succeeded in perpetrating a deception of "its" people on a colossal scale. A vast, monstrous apparatus of lies and intrigues has been set in motion in Russia as well, to infect the masses with chauvinism, to create the impression that the tsarist government is waging a "just" war, disinterestedly defending "Slavic brothers" and so forth.

The class of landowners and the upper echelons of the trading and industrial bourgeoisie have warmly supported the bellicose policies of the tsarist government. They justifiably expect for themselves enormous material advantages and privileges from the partition of the Turkish and Austrian inheritances. A whole series of their conferences already savors in advance those profits that would flow into their pockets upon the victory of the tsar's army. Moreover, reactionaries understand very well that if anything can still postpone the fall of the Romanov monarchy and forestall a new revolution in Russia, it is only a war victorious for the tsar in foreign affairs.

The broad strata of the urban "middle" bourgeoisie, bourgeois intellectuals, persons of the free professions and so forth – at least at the beginning of the war – have also been infected with chauvinism. The party of Russian liberal bourgeoisie – the Kadets – has wholly and unconditionally supported the tsarist government. In the sphere of foreign policy the Kadets have long been a government party. Pan-Slavism, by means of which tsarist diplomacy has more than once perpetrated its colossal political swindles, has become the official ideology of the Kadets. Russian liberalism has degenerated into nationalist-liberalism. It competes in "patriotism" with the Black Hundred, always willingly votes for militarism, navalism and the like. In the camp of Russian liberalism one observes approximately the same phenomenon as in Germany in the 1870s, when "free-thinking" liberalism decomposed and gave birth to the national-liberal party. Russian liberal bourgeoisie has definitively embarked upon the path of counter-revolution. The standpoint of the RSDLP on this question has been wholly confirmed by life. That view of our opportunists has been shattered by life – the view that Russian liberalism is still a motive force of revolution in Russia.

Among the peasantry the ruling clique has, with the aid of bourgeois press, clergy and so forth, also succeeded in arousing chauvinist sentiment. But as soldiers return from the field of slaughter, the mood in the village will undoubtedly change – and not in favor of tsarist monarchy. Bourgeois-democratic parties in contact with the peasantry have not withstood the chauvinist wave. The Trudovik party refused in the State Duma to vote for military credits. But through its leader Kerensky it issued a "patriotic" declaration, which proved extraordinarily useful to the monarchy. All the legal press of the "Populists" generally followed the liberals. Even the left wing of bourgeois democracy – the so-called Socialist-Revolutionary party, affiliated with the International Socialist Bureau – has swum with this same current. The representative of this party at the ISB, Mr. Rubanovich, stands forth as an open social-chauvinist. Half the delegates of this party at the London conference of socialists in "harmony" voted for a chauvinist resolution (while the other half abstained). In the illegal press of the Socialist-Revolutionaries (the newspaper "News"{222} and so forth) chauvinists predominate. Revolutionaries "from the bourgeois milieu," that is, bourgeois revolutionaries not connected with the working class, have suffered a most severe collapse in this war. The sad fate of Kropotkin, Burtsev, and Rubanovich is extraordinarily significant.