The following is the translation of an article which I wrote in 
French at the request of our Parisian friends for the Almanach du 
Parti Ouvrier pour 1892. I owe it to the French—as well as the 
German—socialists to publish it in German. To the French, 
because it must be known in Germany how openly it is possible to 
discuss with them the circumstances in which German socialists 
would undoubtedly take part in a war, even against France, and 
how free these Frenchmen are from the chauvinism and vengeful- 
ness which all the bourgeois parties, from the monarchists to the 
radicals, display in all their glory. To the Germans, because they 
are entitled to hear from me at first hand what I have been telling 
the French about them. 

It goes without saying—but let me make it quite clear once 
again—that in this article I speak purely in my own name and not 
in the name of the German party. The only ones entitled to do 
this are the elected bodies, representatives and delegates of this 
party. And, in addition, the international position which I have 
attained after fifty years’ work prevents me from acting as the 
representative of any particular national socialist party as opposed 
to another, although it does not prevent me from recalling that I 
am a German and being proud of the position which our German 
workers were the first to win for themselves through struggle. 

I 

German socialism made its appearance well before 1848. At that 
time there were two independent tendencies. Firstly, a workers’ 
movement, a branch of French working-class communism, a 

movement which, as one of its phases, produced the utopian 
communism of Weitling. Secondly, a theoretical movement, 
emerging from the collapse of the Hegelian philosophy; this 
movement, from its origins, was dominated by the name of Marx. 
The Communist Manifesto of January 1848 marks the fusion of 
these two tendencies, a fusion made complete and irrevocable in 
the furnace of revolution, in which everyone, workers and 
philosophers alike, shared equally the personal cost.’ 

After the defeat of the European revolution in 1849, socialism 
was reduced in Germany to a secret existence. It was not until 
1862 that Lassalle, a fellow student of Marx, again raised the 
socialist banner. But it was no longer the bold socialism of the 
Manifesto; what Lassalle demanded in the interest of the working 
class was cooperative production assisted by state credit; a 
reproduction of the programme of the Parisian workers affiliated 
before 1848 to the National of Marrast,” of the programme 
proposed by the pure republicans, as the alternative to Louis Blanc’s 
Organisation of Labour.” Lassallean socialism was, as we can see, 
very moderate. Nevertheless, its appearance on the scene marks 
the starting point of the second phase of socialism in Germany; 
for Lassalle’s talent, spirit and indomitable energy succeeded in 
creating a workers’ movement to which everything that had 
roused the German proletariat‘ over the last ten years was 
attached by links positive or negative, amicable or hostile.?” 

Could, then, pure Lassalleanism on its own fulfil the socialist 
aspirations of the nation that had produced the Manifesto? It 
proved impossible. Therefore, thanks mainly to the efforts of 
Liebknecht and Bebel, a workers’ party was soon formed which 
loudly proclaimed the principles of 1848.” Then, in 1867, three 
years after the death of Lassalle, Marx’s Capital appeared. The 
decline of Lassalleanism as such dates from this day. Increasingly 
the theories of Capital became the common property of all the 
German socialists, Lassalleans and others. More than once entire 
groups of Lassalleans went over en masse, drums beating and 
banners flying, to Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s new party, called the 
Eisenach party. As this party continued to grow in strength, there 
was soon all-out hostility between the Lassalleans and their rivals; 

they fought with cudgels precisely at the moment when there was 
no longer any real difference between the combatants, when the 
principles, arguments, and even the methods of the struggle of 
one side were in all essentials identical with those of the other. 

At this point the presence in the Reichstag of deputies from the 
two socialist factions imposed on them the necessity of joint action. 
When confronted with bourgeois deputies,* the ridiculous nature 
of this traditional hostility was obvious. The situation became 
intolerable. Then in 1875 the two factions merged.”” Since then 
the brother-enemies have continued to form a family united in 
harmony. If there was the slightest chance of a split, Bismarck 
himself undertook to eliminate it when, in 1878, he placed 
German socialism beyond the pale of the law with his notorious 
exceptional law.** The hammer blows of shared persecution 
completed the work of forging Lassalleans and Eisenachers into a 
homogeneous mass. Today, whilst the socialist party publishes an 
official edition of Lassalle’s works,”” it is removing from its 
programme, with the aid of the former Lassalleans, the last 
remaining traces of Lassalleanism as such.” 

Need I recount in detail the vicissitudes, the struggles, the 
setbacks and the triumphs which have accompanied the career of 
the German party? Represented by two deputies” and one 
hundred thousand votes from 1866, when universal suffrage 
opened up to it the doors of the Reichstag, today it has 35 
deputies and a million-and-a-half voters, a figure which none of 
the other parties reached in the elections of 1890.7’ Eleven years 
passed as an outlaw and in a state of siege have resulted in a 
quadrupling of its strength, to make it the strongest party in 
Germany. In 1867 the bourgeois deputies© were able to regard 
their socialist colleagues as strange creatures that had arrived from 
another planet; today, whether they like it or not, they have to 
regard them as the avant-garde of the power to come. The 
socialist party which overthrew Bismarck, the party which after 
eleven years of struggle has broken the Anti-Socialist Law; the 
socialist party, which like a rising tide overflows all the dikes, 
invading towns and countryside, even in the most reactionary 
Vendées*—this party today has reached the point where it is 

possible to determine the date when it will come to power almost 
by mathematical calculation. 
The number of Socialist votes was: 

Lar BF coccuripotasacsintaes 101,927 In 1884... eee 549,990 
AT LSTA cise dvgesncveots S51,670 In 1889 vc td 763,128 
WEST 7 ones cnnrsavedanss 493,447 = In 1890 ween 1,427,298 

Since the last elections the government has done its best to push 
the mass of people towards socialism; it has prosecuted associa- 
tions and strikes; it has upheld, even in the present scarcity, 
import tariffs which make the bread and meat of the poor more 
expensive in order to benefit the big landowners. So at the 
elections in 1895 we can count on two and a half million votes at 
least, which will increase by 1900 to three and a half to four 
million out of ten million registered voters,’ a figure which will 
appear curiously “fin de siécle” to our bourgeois. 

Facing this compact and steadily growing mass of socialists there 
are only the divided bourgeois parties. In 1890 the conservatives 
(two factions combined) received 1,377,417 votes; the national 
liberals 1,177,807; the progressists (radicals) 1,159,915; the 
Catholics‘ 1,342,113.7°8 There we have a situation in which one 
solid party able to muster two and a half million votes will be 
strong enough to force any government to capitulate. 

But the votes of the electors are far from constituting the main 
strength of German socialism. In our country you do not become 
a voter until the age of twenty-five, but at twenty you are a soldier. 
Moreover, since it is precisely the younger generation which 
provides the party with most of its recruits, it follows that the 
German army is becoming more and more infected with socialism. 
Today we have one soldier in five, in a few years’ time we shall 
have one in three, by 1900 the army, hitherto the most 
outstandingly Prussian element in Germany, will have a socialist 
majority. That is coming about as if by fate. The Berlin 
government can see it happening just as clearly as we can, but it is 
powerless. The army is slipping away from it. 

How many times have the bourgeois called on us to renounce 
the use of revolutionary means for ever, to remain within the law, 
now that the exceptional law has been dropped and one law has 

been re-established for all, including the socialists? Unfortunately 
we are not in a position to oblige messieurs les bourgeois. Be that as 
it may, for the time being it is not we who are being destroyed by 
legality.”” It is working so well for us that we would be mad to 
spurn it as long as the situation lasts. It remains to be seen 
whether it will be the bourgeois and their government who will be 
the first to turn their back on the law in order to crush us by 
violence. That is what we shall be waiting for. You shoot first, 
messieurs les bourgeois! *'° 

No doubt they will be the first ones to fire. One fine day the 
German bourgeois and their government, tired of standing with 
their arms folded, witnessing the ever increasing advances of 
socialism, will resort to illegality and violence. To what avail? With 
force it is possible to crush a small sect, at least in a restricted 
space but there is no force in the world which can wipe out a 
party of two million men* spread out over the entire surface-area 
of a large empire. Counter-revolutionary violence” will be able to 
slow down the victory of socialism by a few years; but only in 
order to make it all the more complete when it comes. 

If 

All the above was said with the reservation that Germany will be 
able to pursue its economic and political development in peace. A 
war would change all that. And war is liable to break out at any 
moment. 

Everyone knows what war means today. It would be Russia and 
France on one side; Germany, Austria and perhaps Italy on the 
other. Socialists in all these countries, conscripted whether they 
like it or not, will be forced to do battle against one another: what 
will the German socialist party do in such a case?‘ 

The German empire is a monarchy with semi-feudal institutions, 
but dominated ultimately by the economic interests of the 
bourgeoisie. Thanks to Bismarck this empire has committed some 
grave blunders. Its domestic policy, a policy of harassment and 
meanness based on the police, unworthy of the government of a 
great nation, has earned it the scorn of all the bourgeois liberal 

countries; its foreign policy has excited the distrust, if not the 
hatred, of all its neighbours. With the violent annexation of 
Alsace-Lorraine the German government rendered any reconcilia- 
tion with France impossible for a long time to come; without 
gaining any real advantage itself it has made Russia the arbiter of 
Europe. This is so evident that the day after Sedan?"’ the General 
Council of the International was able to predict the situation in 
Europe as it is today. In its address of September 9, 1870 it said: 
“Do the Teuton patriots really believe that liberty and peace will 
be guaranteed to Germany by forcing France into the arms of 
Russia? If the fortune of her arms, the arrogance of success, and 
dynastic intrigue lead Germany to a dismemberment of France, 
there will then only remain two courses open to her. She must at 
al] risks become the avowed tool of Russian aggrandisement, or, 
after some short respite, make again ready for another ‘defensive’ 
war, not one of those new-fangled ‘localised’ wars but a war of 
races, a war with the combined Slavonian and Roman races.” ? 

There is no doubt: in relation to this German empire, the 
French republic as it is now represents revolution, the bourgeois 
revolution, to be sure, but still revolution. But the instant this 
republic places itself under the orders of the Russian tsar it is a 
different matter entirely. Russian tsarism is the enemy of all the 
Western nations, even of the bourgeois of these nations. By 
invading Germany, the tsarist hordes would be bringing slavery 
instead of liberty, destruction instead of development, degradation 
instead of progress. Arm in arm with Russia, France cannot bring 
a single liberating idea to Germany; the French general who spoke 
to the Germans about the republic would make Europe and 
America laugh. It would mean the abdication of France’s 
revolutionary role’; it would mean permitting Bismarck’s empire 
to pose as the representative of Western progress against the 
barbarism of the East. 

But behind official Germany there is the German socialist party, 
the party to which belongs the future, the imminent future of the 
country. The moment this party comes to power it will neither be 
able to exercise it nor to retain it without making good the 
injustices committed by its predecessors towards the other 
nationalities. It will have to prepare for the restoration of Poland, 

so shamefully betrayed today by the French bourgeoisie; it will 
have to appeal to northern Schleswig and to Alsace-Lorraine*” 
freely to decide their own political future. All these questions will 
thus be resolved effortlessly, and in the near future, if Germany is 
left to itself. Between a socialist France and a socialist Germany 
there can be no Alsace-Lorraine question; the case will be settled 
in the twinkling of an eye. It is a matter, then, of waiting another 
ten years or so. The French, English and German proletariat is 
still awaiting deliverance; could not the patriots of Alsace-Lorraine 
wait? Is there any reason to devastate a continent and to subjugate 
it, ultimately, to the tsarist knout? Is the game worth the candle? 

In the event of war first Germany, then France would be the 
main battleground; these two countries in particular will pay the 
cost in devastation. And there is more. This war will be 
distinguished from the outset by a series of betrayals between allies 
unequalled in the annals of diplomatic betrayal to date; France or 
Germany, or both, will be the main victims. It is therefore almost 
certain that neither of these countries will provoke an open 
conflict in view of the risks they would be running. But Russia, 
protected by its geographical position and by its economic situation 
against the more disastrous consequences of a series of defeats— 
official Russia alone could find it in its interests to unleash such a 
terrible war; it is Russia who will be pressing for war. In any case, 
given the present political situation, the odds are ten to one that at 
the first sound of cannon on the Vistula the French armies will 
march on the Rhine. 

Then Germany will be fighting for its very existence. If 
victorious it will find nothing to annex. 

To the East as well as to the West it will only find provinces 
speaking foreign tongues; it has enough of those already. Beaten, 
crushed between the French hammer and the Russian anvil it will 
have to cede Old Prussia and the Polish provinces to Russia, 
Schleswig to Denmark, and the entire left bank of the Rhine to 
France. Even if France refused to accept, its ally would impose this 
conquest on it; what Russia needs more than anything else is a cause of 
permanent enmity between France and Germany.’ Reconcile these two 
great countries and that is the end of Russian supremacy in 
Europe. Dismembered in this way, Germany would be unable to 
play its part in Europe’s civilising mission”; reduced to the role 

imposed on it by Napoleon after Tilsit it could not live except by- 
preparing for a new war of national rehabilitation. But in the 
meanwhile it would be the humble tool of the Tsar,* who would 
not fail to make use of it—against France. 

What will become of the German socialist party in such 
circumstances? It goes without saying that neither the Tsar nor the 
French bourgeois republicans nor the German government itself 
would let pass such a good opportunity to crush the sole party 
which, for them, constitutes the enemy. We have seen how Thiers 
and Bismarck extended their hands to each other over the ruins 
of the Paris Commune?””; we would then see the Tsar, Constans, 
Caprivi (or their successors) embracing one another over the 
corpse of German socialism. 

But the German socialist party, thanks to the efforts and the 
unceasing sacrifices of more than thirty years, has attained a 
position that none of the other socialist parties in Europe occupies: 
a position which guarantees it political power in a short while. 
Socialist Germany occupies in the international working-class 
movement the most advanced, the most honourable and the most 
responsible outpost; it is its duty to defend this outpost against all.° 

Now, if the victory of the Russians over Germany means the 
crushing of socialism in this country, what will be the duty of the 
German socialists with regard to this eventuality? Should they 
passively endure the events that are threatening them with 
extinction, abandon the post they have conquered and for which 
they are answerable to the world proletariat without putting up a 
fight? 

Obviously not. In the interest of the European revolution they 
are obliged to defend all the positions that have been won, not to 
capitulate to the enemy from without any more than to the enemy 
within; and they cannot accomplish that except by fighting Russia 
and its allies, whoever they may be, to the bitter end. If the 
French republic placed itself at the service of His Majesty the 
Tsar, Autocrat of all the Russias, the German socialists would fight 
it with regret, but they would fight it all the same. The French 
republic may represent vis-a-vis the German empire the bourgeois 
revolution. But vis-a-vis the republic of the Constanses, the Rouviers 
and even the Clemenceaus, especially vis-a-vis the republic that is 

working for the Russian Tsar, German socialism represents the 
proletarian revolution. 

A war in which Russians and Frenchmen invaded Germany 
would be, for Germany, a war to the death, in which, in order to 
ensure its national existence, it would have to resort to the most 
revolutionary means. The present government, certainly, would 
not unleash revolution, unless it were forced to. But there is a 
strong party which would force it to, or if necessary replace it: the 
socialist party. 

We have not forgotten the marvellous example which France 
gave us in 1793.74 The centenary of ’93 is approaching. If the 
Tsar’s thirst for conquest and the chauvinist impatience of the 
French bourgeoisie stop the victorious but peaceful march of the 
German socialists, the latter are ready, you may be sure, to prove 
that the German proletarians of today are not unworthy of the 
French sans-culottes of a hundred years ago, and that 1893 will 
equal 1793. And then the soldiers of Constans, on setting foot on 
German soil, will be greeted with the song?: 

What, would foreign hordes 
Lay down the law in our homes? 

Let us sum up. Peace ensures the victory of the German 
socialist party in some ten years’ time; war offers it either victory 
in two or three years, or complete ruin, at least for the next 
fifteen to twenty years. In this position the German socialists 
would have to be mad to prefer the all-or-nothing of war to the 
certain victory which peace offers them. There is more. No 
socialist, of whatever country, can desire victory by war, either by 
the present German government or by the French bourgeois 
republic; even less by the Tsar, which would. be tantamount to the 
subjugation of Europe. That is why socialists everywhere demand 
that peace be maintained. But if war is to break out nonetheless, 
one thing is certain. This war, in which fifteen to twenty million 
armed men would slaughter one another and devastate Europe as 
it has never been devastated before—this war would either lead to 
the immediate triumph of socialism, or it would lead to such an 
upheaval in the old order of things, it would leave behind it 
everywhere such a heap of ruins, that the old capitalist society 
would become more impossible than ever, and the social revolu- 
tion, set back by ten or fifteen years, would only be all the more 
radical and more rapidly implemented. 

x * 

That, then, was the article from the French workers’ calendar. It 
was written in the late summer, when the heads of the French 
bourgeoisie were still flushed with the champagne-induced inebria- 
tion of Kronstadt,”" and the great manoeuvres on the battle area 
of 1814 between the Seine and the Marne had brought patriotic 
enthusiasm to a head. At that time France—the France that 
expresses itself in the big press and the parliamentary majority — 
was indeed ripe for more or less unlimited stupidity in the service 
of Russia, and the eventuality of war moved into the foreground 
as a possibility. And in order, should it become a reality, to 
prevent any last minute misunderstanding between the French 
and German socialists, I considered it necessary to make it clear to 
the former what in my opinion the necessary attitude of the latter 
should be with regard to such a war. 

But then a powerful check was imposed on the Russian 
war-monger. First came the news of harvest failure at home, with 
every reason to expect a famine. Then came the failure of the 
Paris loan,”! signifying the final collapse of Russian state credit. 
The four hundred million marks were, it was said, oversubscribed 
many times; but when the Paris bankers sought to palm off the 
bonds onto the public, all their attempts failed; the esteemed 
subscribers had to dispose of their good securities in order to 
cover these bad ones—and to such an extent that the other large 
European stock exchanges were also forced down by these mass 
sales; the new “Russians” sank several per cent below their issue 
price—in short, there was such a crisis that the Russian 
government had to take back a hundred and sixty millions worth 
of bonds and only received cover for two hundred and forty 
instead of four hundred million. At this the proclamation of a 
further Russian attempt to get credit—this time for all of eight 
hundred million marks—which had been gaily crowed out to the 
world, fell through miserably. And at the same time it also became 
plain that French capital has no “patriotism” at all, but it does 
' have—however much it may beat the drum in the press—a 
salutory fear of war. 

Since then the failure of the harvest has indeed developed into a 
famine, and such a famine as we in Western Europe have not seen 
on this scale for a long time, such as rarely occurs even in India, 
the typical country for such calamities, indeed such as barely ever 
reached this height in the holy Russia of earlier times, when there 
were still no railways. How does this come about? How can it be 
explained? 

Very simply. The Russian famine is not the result of a mere 
failure of the harvest, it is a part of the tremendous social 
revolution which Russia has been undergoing since the Crimean 
War; it is simply the transformation of the chronic sufferings 
linked with this revolution into acute sufferings brought about by 
this bad harvest. 

Old Russia went irrevocably to its grave the day when Tsar 
Nicholas, despairing of himself and of old Russia, took poison.?”” 
On its ruins the Russia of the bourgeoisie is being built. 

The beginnings of a bourgeoisie were already present at that 
time. Partly bankers and import merchants—mostly Germans and 
German Russians or their descendants—partly Russians who had 
risen through domestic trading, but particularly schnapps pedlars 
and army suppliers who had grown rich at the expense of the 
state and people, and also a few manufacturers. From now on this 
bourgeoisie, particularly the industrial bourgeoisie, was literally 
cultivated by means of massive goverment aid, by subsidies, 
premiums, and protective tariffs that were gradually raised to the 
utmost.?! The immeasurable Russian Empire was supposed to 
become a production area sufficient unto itself, which could 
dispense with imports from abroad entirely or almost entirely. 
And it is to ensure not only that the domestic market should 
continually grow, but also that the products of warmer climes 
should be produced inside the country itself, that there is this 
steady striving for conquests in the Balkan peninsula and in Asia, 
with Constantinople and British India respectively as the ultimate 
goals. This is the secret, the economic basis of the drive for 
expansion that is so rife among the Russian bourgeoisie, the 
branch that leads south-west being called Pan-Slavism.? 

However, the serfdom of the peasants was absolutely inconsis- 
tent with such industrial plans. It fell in 1861. But how! The 
Prussian abolition of servitude and statute labour carried out slowly 
between 1810 and 1851 °° was taken as a model; but everything was 
to be settled in a few years. Consequently, in order to break the 
resistance of the big landowners and “serf”-owners, concessions had 
to be made to them which were quite different from those granted by 
the Prussian state and its corrupt officials to the gracious landlords of 
their day. And as for corruptibility, the Prussian bureaucrat was 
nothing but a babe-in-arms compared with the Russian tschinownik.* 
Thus it was that in the partition of the land the nobility received the 

lion’s share, and asa rule the land made fertile by the labour of many 
generations of peasants, while the peasants received only the 
minimum necessary for subsistence, and even this was generally 
allotted to them in poor wasteland. Common forest and common 
grazing went to the landlord; if the peasant wished to use 
them—and without them he could not exist—he had to pay the 
landlord for it. 

To ensure, however, that both landed nobility and peasants 
were ruined as quickly as possible, the nobility was given the 
capitalised redemption sum in state bonds from the government in 
a lump sum, while the peasants had to pay the redemption price 
in long-term instalments. As was only to be expected, the nobility 
for the most part squandered the money received immediately, 
while the peasant, facing what was, for someone in his position, 
enormous payments, was suddenly hurled out of a subsistence 
economy into a money economy. 

The Russian peasant, who previously had hardly had to make 
any money payments excepting relatively low taxes, is now 
supposed not only to live off the smaller and poorer plot allotted 
to him and, after the abolition of the free wood and free grazing 
on common land, feed his livestock through the winter and 
improve his plot—but also to pay increased taxes as well as the 
annual redemption instalment, and in cash too. He was thus 
placed in a position in which he could neither live nor die. On top 
of this there was the competition of the newly developed 
large-scale industry, which deprived him of the market for his 
domestic industry—domestic industry was the main source of 
money for countless Russian peasants—or, where this was not yet 
quite the case, delivered up this domestic industry to the mercy of 
the merchant, i. e. the middleman, the Saxon entrepreneur or the 
English sweaters, thus turning the peasants engaged in domestic 
industry into nothing less than the slaves of capital. In short, 
anyone curious to know how the Russian peasants have been 
abused over the last thirty years need only look up the chapter on 
the “Creation of the Home Market” (Chapter 24, Section 5) in the 
first volume of Marx’s Capital.* 

The ravages wrought among the peasants by the transition from 
a subsistence economy to a money economy—this chief means of 
producing the home market for industrial capital—are depicted in 
a classic manner by Boisguillebert and Vauban from the example 

of France under Louis XIV.* But what occurred then is child’s 
play compared with what is happening in Russia. Firstly the scale 
is three or four times larger, and secondly the revolutionisation of 
the conditions of production, in whose service this transition is 
being forced on the peasants, is infinitely more thorough-going. 
The French peasant was slowly dragged into the sphere of 
manufacture, the Russian peasant is being swept overnight into 
the tornado of large-scale industry. If manufacture felled peasants 
with the flint-lock, large-scale industry is carrying out the job with 
a repeating-rifle. 

This was the position when the failure of the harvest in 1891 
exposed at a stroke the entire upheaval and its consequences, 
which had been quietly taking place for years but had remained 
invisible to the European philistine. This position was such that 
the first bad harvest was bound to turn into a national crisis. And 
now there is a crisis that will not be mastered for years to come. In 
the face of a famine like this every government is powerless, but 
particularly the Russian, which expressly trains its officials in 
thieving. Since 1861 the old communist customs and institutions of 
the Russian peasants have partly been undermined by economic 
developments, partly destroyed systematically by the government. 
The old communist community has disintegrated, or is in the 
process of so doing, but at the very moment when the individual 
peasant is being placed on his own feet, the ground is removed 
from under them. Is it any wonder that last autumn winter.corn 
was sown in extremely few districts? And where it was sown the 
weather ruined most of it. Is it any wonder that the main 
instrument of the peasant, the beast of burden, first had nothing 
to eat itself and then, for this irrefutable reason, was eaten by the 
peasant himself? Is it any wonder that the peasant is leaving house 
and home and fleeing to the cities, vainly looking for work but 
unfailingly bringing typhoid with him? 

In a word: here we have before us not an isolated famine but an 
immense crisis prepared by a prolonged, quiet economic revolu- 
tion and merely rendered acute by the failure of the harvest. This 
acute crisis, however, is assuming in its turn a chronic form and 
threatens to stay for years. Economically it is accelerating the 
dissolution of the old communist peasant community, the enrich- 
ment of the village usurers (the kulaki) and their transfor- 
mation into big landowners, and the transfer of the landed 

property of the nobility and the peasants into the hands of the 
new bourgeoisie. 

For Europe it means peace for the time being. Russian war- 
mongering is paralysed for a good many years to come. Instead 
of millions of soldiers falling on the battlefields, millions of Rus- 
sian peasants are dying of starvation. But its effects as far as Russian 
despotism is concerned remain to be seen.