Thou art wretched, thou art abundant,
Thou art mighty, thou art impotent
– Mother Rus!

Human history is now passing through one of the greatest, most difficult turns, of immeasurable – one may say, without the slightest exaggeration, of world-liberating – significance. From war to peace; from war between predators, sending millions of exploited and toiling people to the slaughter in order to establish a new order of dividing the booty seized by the strongest of the robbers, to war of the oppressed against the oppressors for liberation from the yoke of capital; from the abyss of suffering, torment, hunger, and savagery to the bright future of communist society, universal well-being and lasting peace; – it is not surprising that at the steepest points of so steep a turn, when all around the old is cracking and crashing down with a fearful din, while the new is being born alongside in indescribable agony, some people’s heads begin to spin, some are seized with despair, and some seek salvation from the sometimes too bitter reality under the shelter of a fine, captivating phrase.

Russia has had to observe with particular clarity, and to experience with particular sharpness and pain, the steepest of the steep breaks in history, turning from imperialism to communist revolution. In a few days we demolished one of the oldest, most powerful, barbarous and brutal monarchies. In a few months we passed through a number of stages of compromise with the bourgeoisie, of outliving petty-bourgeois illusions, on which other countries spent decades. In a few weeks, having overthrown the bourgeoisie, we defeated its open resistance in civil war. We passed in a victorious triumphal march of Bolshevism from one end of the vast country to the other. We raised to freedom and to independent life the lowest strata of the working masses, those oppressed by tsarism and the bourgeoisie. We introduced and consolidated the Soviet Republic, a new type of state, immeasurably superior and more democratic than the best of the bourgeois-parliamentary republics. We established the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the poor peasantry, and launched a broadly conceived system of socialist transformations. We awakened faith in their own strength and kindled the fire of enthusiasm in many millions of workers of all countries. Everywhere we sounded the call of international workers’ revolution. We hurled a challenge at the imperialist predators of all countries.

And in a few days we were thrown to the ground by an imperialist predator who fell upon the unarmed. He forced us to sign an incredibly harsh and humiliating peace – a tribute for having dared to tear ourselves away, even for the briefest time, from the iron clutches of the imperialist war. The predator is pressing, choking and tearing Russia to pieces with all the greater fury the more menacingly the spectre of workers’ revolution rises before him in his own country.

We were compelled to sign a “Tilsit” peace. There must be no self-deception. We must have the courage to look the unadorned, bitter truth straight in the face. We must measure to the full, to the very bottom, the entire abyss of defeat, dismemberment, enslavement, and humiliation into which we have now been thrust. The more clearly we understand this, the firmer, more hardened, and steel-like will become our will for liberation, our striving to rise again from enslavement to independence, our unyielding determination to achieve, at all costs, that Rus cease to be wretched and impotent, that she become, in the full sense of the word, mighty and abundant.

She can become such, for we still have enough expanse and natural wealth left to supply each and everyone with means of subsistence that, if not abundant, are at least sufficient. We have the material both in natural riches and in the reserve of human forces, and in the magnificent sweep which the great revolution gave to popular creative effort – to build a truly mighty and abundant Rus.

Rus will become such if she casts aside all despondency and all empty phrases, if, gritting her teeth, she gathers all her forces, strains every nerve, flexes every muscle, if she understands that salvation is possible only along the path of the international socialist revolution upon which we have embarked. To march forward along this path, without losing heart from defeats, to gather stone by stone the solid foundation of socialist society, to work untiringly to create discipline and self-discipline, to strengthen everywhere and in all respects organization, order, businesslike efficiency, the harmonious cooperation of the whole people’s forces, universal accounting and control over the production and distribution of products – such is the path to the creation of military might and socialist might.

It is unworthy of a genuine socialist, when a grave defeat has been inflicted upon him, either to bluster or to fall into despair. It is not true that we have no way out and that we are left only to choose between an “inglorious” death (from the viewpoint of a szlachcic), such as the harshest peace is, and a “valiant” death in a hopeless battle. It is not true that we have betrayed our ideals or our friends by signing the “Tilsit” peace. We have betrayed nothing and no one; we have not sanctified or covered up a single lie; we have never refused to help any friend and comrade in misfortune with everything we could, with everything at our disposal. A general who withdraws the remnants of a defeated army, or an army stricken with panic flight, deep into the country, who covers this retreat, in case of extreme necessity, with the harshest and most humiliating peace, does not commit treason against those units of the army which he is unable to help and which are cut off by the enemy. Such a general does his duty, choosing the only path to saving what can still be saved, not consenting to adventures, not embellishing the bitter truth before the people, “surrendering space in order to gain time,” taking advantage of every, even the briefest, respite in order to gather forces, to let breathe or tend to an army that has become sick with disintegration and demoralization.

We have signed a “Tilsit” peace. When Napoleon I forced Prussia, in 1807, to accept the Peace of Tilsit, the conqueror defeated all the German armies, occupied the capital and all the major cities, introduced his own police, forced the vanquished to provide auxiliary corps for the conqueror’s new predatory wars, dismembered Germany, concluding alliances with some German states against other German states. And yet, even after such a peace, the German people held out, managed to gather strength, managed to rise and win for themselves the right to freedom and independence.

For anyone who wants to think and is able to think, the example of the Peace of Tilsit (which was only one of many harsh and humiliating treaties forced upon the Germans in that epoch) clearly shows how childishly naive is the idea that under all circumstances a most severe peace is an abyss of ruin, while war is the path of valor and salvation. Epochs of wars teach us that peace has often played the role in history of a respite and a gathering of forces for new battles. The Peace of Tilsit was Germany’s greatest humiliation and at the same time a turning point towards a greatest national upsurge. At that time the historical situation offered no other outlet for that upsurge than an outlet towards a bourgeois state. At that time, over a hundred years ago, history was made by a handful of nobles and a sprinkling of bourgeois intellectuals, while the masses of workers and peasants were drowsy and slumbering. At that time, history could, for this reason, only crawl along with terrifying slowness.

Now capitalism has raised culture in general, and the culture of the masses in particular, far, far higher. The war has shaken up the masses, awakened them by unheard-of horrors and suffering. The war has given a jolt to history, and it is now flying with the speed of a locomotive. History is now being made independently by millions and tens of millions of people. Capitalism has now grown ripe for socialism.

And therefore, if Russia is now moving – and she is indisputably moving – from the “Tilsit” peace towards a national upsurge, towards a great patriotic war, the outlet for this upsurge is not an outlet towards a bourgeois state, but an outlet towards the international socialist revolution. We have been defencists since October 25, 1917. We are for the “defence of the fatherland,” but the patriotic war towards which we are moving is a war for a socialist fatherland, for socialism as the fatherland, for the Soviet Republic as a detachment of the world army of socialism.

“Hate the German, strike the German” – such was and remains the slogan of the ordinary, i.e., bourgeois, patriotism. But we say: “Hate the imperialist predators, hate capitalism, death to capitalism,” and at the same time: “Learn from the German! Remain faithful to the fraternal alliance with the German workers. They are late in coming to our aid. We shall gain time, we shall wait for them; they will come to our aid.”

Yes, learn from the German! History proceeds in zigzags and roundabout ways. It has turned out that it is precisely the German who now embodies, alongside brutal imperialism, the principle of discipline, organization, harmonious cooperation on the basis of the latest machine industry, of the strictest accounting and control.

And this is precisely what we lack. This is precisely what we must learn. This is precisely what our great revolution lacks in order to proceed from its victorious beginning, through a series of severe trials, to a victorious conclusion. This is precisely what the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic needs in order to cease being wretched and impotent, in order to become irrevocably mighty and abundant.

March 11, 1918.

Izvestia VTsIK No. 46, March 12, 1918. Signed: V. Lenin