Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Note on The Necessity of Signing the Peace Treaty

Written: February 24, 1918
First Published: 1929 in Lenin Miscellany XI; published according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 27, 1972, page 57
Translated: Clemans Dutt, Edited by Robert Daglish
Transcription\HTML Markup:Robert Cymbala and David Walters
Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive March, 2002

Not to conclude peace at the present moment meansdeclaring an armed uprising or a revolutionary war againstGerman imperialism. This is either phrase-making or aprovocation by the Russian bourgeoisie, which is thirstingfor the arrival of the Germans. In reality we cannot fightat the present time, for the army is agaiihst the war andis unable to fight. The week of war against the Germans,infaceof whom our troops simply ran away, from February 18to 24, 1918, has fully proved this. We are prisoners of German imperialism. Not empty phrases about an immediatearmed uprising against the Germans, but the systematie,serious, steady work of preparing a revolutionary war, thecreation of diseipline and an army, the putting into orderof the railways and food affairs. That is the point of viewof the majority of the C.E.C., including Lenin (and themajority of the C.C., Bolsheviks), and of Spiridonova andMalkin (the minority of the C.C., Left Socialist-Revolutionaries).