V. I.

Lenin

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”)?

---
Notes: