The Coalition
Government having decided to continue participation in the war with a new
offensive, Lenin again addresses the Congress of Soviets, this time on the
Bolshevik war policy and position on a separate peace. The Bolshevik policy, he
said, is premised on the imperialist character of the war. Russia’s allies,
Britain, France, and now the United States, have imperialist aims; therefore
Russia’s armies, in which the vast majority of the soldiers came from the peasantry,
are fighting not to defend the revolution against Germany, but to support the capitalist
ruling classes at home and abroad.
The Bolsheviks
were being accused in the bourgeois press of seeking a separate peace. The party’s
answer was peace through revolution – world revolution. (See the entry
for May 10 – April 27, and the text of the party resolution here.)
But Lenin did not try to explain the contingency of world revolution in this
speech. Instead he demanded, “No peace with the German capitalists,” and “No
alliance with the British and French” capitalists, at the same time reminding
the Congress of the Provisional Government’s complicity in imperialist policies
for the annexation of Armenia, Finland, and Ukraine.
Despite Lenin’s
urgings, the Congress of Soviets voted to support the new offensive. The separately
proposed Bolshevik resolution on the war was not even put to a vote.
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