Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

130V. I. LENINwar with China, which is threatening, and which is quitepossible, Japan will not supply any more ammunition!).Tsarism knows how its secret negotiations with Englandconcerning Constantinople have been and are progressing;it knows the strength of the British forces in Salonika,Mesopotamia, etc. Tsarism knows all this. It has all thecards in its hands and is making exact calculations—insofaras exact calculations are possible in such matters wherethat very doubtful and elusive element, the “fortune ofwar”, plays so great a part.As for the Milyukovs and Guchkovs, the less they knowthe more they talk. And the Plekhanovs, the Chkhenkelis,the Potresovs know nothing at all of tsarism’s secret pacts;they are forgetting even what they knew before, do notstudy what can be learned from the foreign press, do notexamine the course of tsarism’s foreign policy before thewar, do not trace its course during the war, andare consequently playing the part of socialist SimpleSimons.If tsarism has become convinced that even with allthe aid of liberal society, with all the zeal of the warindustries committees, with all the help the Plekhanovs,Gvozdyovs, Potresovs, Bulkins, Chirkins, Chkheidzes(“Save the country”, don’t laugh!), Kropotkins, and thewhole of that menial crowd are giving to the noble causeof producing more shells—that even with all this help andwith the present state of military strength (or militaryimpotence) of all the allies it can possibly drag and hasdragged into the war, it cannot achieve more, it cannot hitGermany harder, or that it can do so only at excessive cost(for example, the loss of ten million more Russian soldiers,the recruiting, training and equipment of whom wouldcost so many more billions of rubles and so many moreyears of war), then tsarism cannot but seek a separate peacewith Germany.If “we” go after too much booty in Europe, “we” runthe risk of utterly exhausting “our” military resources, ofgaining almost nothing in Europe and of losing the opportunityof getting “our share” in Asia. This is how tsarismargues, and it argues correctly from the standpoint ofimperialist interests. It argues more correctly than the