V. I. Lenin

Speeches At The Evening Sitting Of The Central Committee
Of The R.S.D.L.P.(B.)

February 18, 1918 [1]

Minutes

I

Comrade Lenin. This is a basic question. Uritsky's proposal is
amazing. The Central Committee voted against a revolutionary
war, but we have neither war nor peace, and are being drawn into
a revolutionary war. War is no joke. We are losing railway cars,
and our transport is breaking down. We cannot wait any longer
because the situation has fully crystallised. The people will
not understand this: since there is a war on, there should have
been no demobilisation; the Germans will now take everything. This thing has gone so far that continued sitting on
the fence will inevitably ruin the revolution. Loffe wrote from
Brest that there was no sign of a revolution in Germany; if that
is so the Germans will find their advance very rewarding. We
cannot afford to wait, which would mean consigning the Russian
revolution to the scrap-heap. If the Germans said that they
wanted to overthrow Bolshevik power, we would naturally have to
fight; no more procrastination is permissible. It is now no
longer a matter of the past but of the present. If we apply to
the Germans, all we have is a piece of paper. You can't call
that a policy. The only thing we can do is offer the Germans a
resumption of the talks. There is no half-way house in this. If
it is to be revolutionary war it must be declared, and the
demobilisation stopped, but we can't go on in this manner. While
we engage in paperwork, they take warehouses and railway cars,
leaving us to perish. The issue now is that while playing with
war we have been surrendering the revolution to the Germans.

History will say that you have surrendered the revolution. We
could have concluded a peace which held no threat to the
revolution. We have nothing, we have not even got the time to
blow up anything as we retreat. We have done our best to help
the revolution in Finland, but now we can do no more. This is
not the time for an exchange of notes, and this temporising must
stop. It is too late to put out feelers, because it is quite
clear now that the Germans can launch an offensive. We cannot
argue against the advocates of a revolutionary war, but we can
and must argue against the temporisers. An offer of peace must
be made to the Germans.

Comrade Lenin. Bukharin failed to notice how he went over to the position of a revolutionary war. The peasants do not
want war and will not fight. Can we now tell the peasants to
fight a revolutionary war? But if that is what we want we should
not have demobilised the army. It is a utopia to want a
permanent peasant war. A revolutionary war must not be a mere
phrase. If we are not ready, we must conclude peace. Since we
have demobilised the army it is ridiculous to talk of a
permanent war. There is no comparison at all with a civil
war. The muzhik will not have a revolutionary war, and will overthrow anyone who openly calls for one. The revolution
in Germany has not yet started, and we know that over here, too,
our revolution did not win out all at once. It has been said
here that they would take Lifland and Estland; but we can give
them up for the sake of the revolution. If they should want us
to withdraw our troops from Finland, well and good-let them take
revolutionary Finland. The revolution will not be lost if we
give up Finland, Lifland and Estland. The prospects with which
Comrade Joffe tried to scare us yesterday do not at all spell
ruin to the revolution.

I propose a declaration that we are willing to conclude the
peace the Germans offered us yesterday; should they add to this
non-interference in the affairs of the Ukraine, Finland, Lifland
and Estland, we should unquestionably accept all that as
well. Our soldiers are in a poor state; the Germans want grain,
they will take it and go back, making it impossible for Soviet
power to continue in existence. To say that the demobilisation
has been stopped is to be overthrown.

---
Notes:
[1]
The evening sitting of the Central Committee on February 18,
1918, was held in a highly tense atmosphere. It was called in
view of the fact that the Germans had launched an offensive that
day and had taken Dvinsk in their headlong advance. The Left
Communists once again opposed Lenin's proposals, but Trotsky
proposed that inquiries should be sent to Berlin and Vienna
about the German Government's demands, without informing it of
the consent to conclude a peace. Sverdlov, Stalin and Zinoviev
favoured the dispatch of a telegram to the German Government
informing it of readiness to resume the talks. It was at this
sitting that Lenin first succeeded, after a bitter struggle, to
secure a majority in favour of concluding a peace: his proposal
for an immediate message to the German Government offering to
conclude peace was adopted by 7 votes to 6.

The general position of Trotsky's is often misnamed "Neither
Peace nor War". Readers should keep in mind that Trotsky's
proposals were all within the parameters of Lenin's position:
figuring out a way to back out of the war while holding the
Bolshevik faction in the Soviet together, preventing the front
from collapsing by continued German offensives and preventing
the triumph of the counter-revolution. Trotsky knew there had to
peace, but he was conserned that of the effect on the German
Revolution if the terms of the "peace" were not explained in
such a way as to assure the German working class of the Soviet's
continued support for the overthrow of the Kaiser and the end of
the war.

Trotsky's consistant position on this question and his eventual
abstention on the final terms of the Treaty actually allowed for
Lenin's position to triumph and end the war on with the German
army, dealing a blow to the imperialist war, the Left-Communists
and solidifying the Bolshevik support among the demoralized and
haggard rements of the Russian Army.