To the Editors of ‘Nashe Slovo’

Wellred

Core Argument

In his correspondence with the editors of Nashe Slovo, Lenin confronted the central strategic questions posed by the imperialist war for the international socialist movement. The occasion was a proposal for joint action against social-patriotism ahead of the London Conference of Entente Socialists. Lenin agreed to the proposal and submitted a draft declaration affirming that the war was imperialist on all sides, including Britain and France in their alliance with tsarism. The declaration demanded a break with national blocs and class truces, refusal of war credits, withdrawal from bourgeois governments, and fraternisation in the trenches. When the editors declined Lenin’s declaration in favour of their own, the Bern Conference of RSDLP groups adopted Lenin’s resolutions instead, defining the war as imperialist, rejecting the ‘defence of the fatherland’ slogan, and calling for its conversion into civil war. The resolutions condemned opportunism as the cause of the Second International’s collapse, demanded a Third International, and argued that the defeat of the tsarist monarchy was the lesser evil.

Lenin’s principal criticism of Trotsky in this period concerned the latter’s illusions that unity could be reached with conciliators. Lenin insisted that during a reactionary war, a revolutionary class must desire the defeat of its own government. Trotsky rejected this as a concession to social-patriotism, but Lenin countered that revolutionary action against one’s own government in wartime necessarily means facilitating its defeat. The slogan “neither victory nor defeat” was merely a paraphrase of “defence of the fatherland,” renouncing class struggle and subordinating the proletariat to the bourgeois task of safeguarding imperialist governments. Only by desiring and contributing to the defeat of one’s own government could the proletariat pursue independent revolutionary policy.

On the question of peace, Lenin argued that a peace slogan without definite terms is meaningless. Socialists must advance the right to self-determination for all nations and colonies, which requires revolutions in advanced countries. The only consistent anti-imperialist position is a proletarian one, removing mistrust between workers of oppressor and oppressed nations and uniting them for socialist revolution—the only achievable regime of complete national equality. Socialists of the great robber powers who fail to uphold the right to secession for colonies and oppressed nations are in fact imperialists. The choice is between socialism and submission to imperialist laws; there is no middle course.