3. The Soviet government must immediately propose to all the warring peoples (i.e., simultaneously to their governments and to the worker and peasant masses) to conclude immediately a general peace on democratic terms, and likewise to conclude an armistice without delay (for at least three months).

The main condition of a democratic peace is the renunciation of annexations (seizures) – not in the incorrect sense that all powers return what they have lost, but in the only correct sense, that every nationality, without a single exception, both in Europe and in the colonies, receives the freedom and the opportunity to decide for itself whether it forms a separate state or enters as a part into any other state.

In proposing peace terms, the Soviet government must immediately itself proceed to carry them out in practice, i.e., publish and annul the secret treaties by which we have been bound until now, which were concluded by the tsar and promised the Russian capitalists the plunder of Turkey, Austria, etc. Then we are obliged immediately to satisfy the demands of the Ukrainians and Finns, to secure for them, as for all the other nationalities in Russia, complete freedom, up to the freedom of secession, to apply the same to the whole of Armenia, to pledge to evacuate it and the Turkish lands occupied by us, etc.

Such peace terms will not be met with goodwill by the capitalists, but among all peoples they will meet with such enormous sympathy and will provoke such a great, world-historic outburst of enthusiasm and universal indignation at the prolongation of the predatory war that, most probably, we shall immediately obtain an armistice and consent to the opening of peace negotiations. For the workers’ revolution against the war is growing irresistibly everywhere, and it is not phrases about peace (with which all the imperialist governments, including our own Kerensky government, have long deceived the workers and peasants), but only a break with the capitalists and a proposal of peace that can move it forward.

If the least probable happens, i.e., if not a single belligerent state accepts even an armistice, then the war on our side will become truly forced, truly just and a defensive war. The mere consciousness of this by the proletariat and the poorest peasantry will make Russia many times stronger, also in military terms, especially after a complete break with the capitalists who are plundering the people, not to mention that then the war on our side will be not in words, but in deed, a war in alliance with the oppressed classes of all countries, a war in alliance with the oppressed peoples of the whole world.

In particular, the people must be warned against that assertion of the capitalists, to which the most intimidated and the philistines sometimes succumb, that the British and other capitalists, if we break our present predatory alliance with them, are capable of inflicting serious harm on the Russian revolution. This assertion is thoroughly false, for the “financial support of the allies,” enriching the bankers, “supports” the Russian workers and peasants only as a rope supports a hanged man. Russia has enough bread, coal, oil, and iron, and nothing but deliverance from the landlords and capitalists who are plundering the people is needed for the proper distribution of these products. As for the possible military threat to the Russian people from its present allies, the assumption that the French and Italians would be able to unite their troops with the Germans and move them against a Russia that has proposed a just peace is a manifestly absurd assumption; and England, America, Japan, even if they were to declare war on Russia (which would be extremely difficult for them, both because of the extreme unpopularity of such a war among the masses and because of the material divergence of interests among the capitalists of these countries over the division of Asia, and especially over the plunder of China), could not cause Russia one hundredth part of the harm and the calamities that the war with Germany, Austria and Turkey is causing.