How To Achieve Peace (Fourth ‘Letter from Afar’)¶
Core Argument¶
Digest: How To Achieve Peace (Fourth ‘Letter from Afar’)¶
Written from Zurich on 12 (25) March 1917, this letter constitutes Lenin's polemical intervention against the widespread illusion that the newly installed Provisional Government could be pressured into securing a democratic peace. The immediate occasion is Maxim Gorky's public appeal to the government to conclude an early peace — an appeal Lenin treats as symptomatic of a far deeper political sickness infecting the petty bourgeoisie and sections of the working class.
Lenin's core argument is that the class character of the Provisional Government makes any appeal for a democratic peace not merely futile but actively harmful. The government of Guchkov and Milyukov is a landlord-capitalist government, bound by the material interests of finance capital and by the secret treaties concluded under Tsar Nicholas II. Drawing on his own theoretical work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin defines imperialism as monopoly capitalism at the stage where the world has been completely divided among the great powers. The war is a clash between the Anglo-French and German groups of multimillionaires for redivision of the globe. Russia fights with Anglo-French money to rob Armenia, Turkey and Galicia. To urge such a government to conclude an honourable peace, Lenin writes, is "like preaching virtue to brothel keepers."
The polemic is directed at two targets simultaneously. First, Gorky himself, whom Lenin recalls warning on Capri for his political mistakes — Gorky's disarming self-defence ("I am a bad Marxist") is recalled with evident frustration. Second, and more importantly, the letter attacks the entire political line then dominant in Petrograd, including among leading Bolsheviks, which held that the Party should exercise pressure on the Provisional Government rather than break with it entirely. Lenin insists that talking peace to bourgeois governments is "deception of the people."
The positive programme is starkly opposed: political power must pass to the Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies. Such a Soviet government would repudiate all tsarist and bourgeois treaties, publish them publicly, call for an immediate armistice, and demand the liberation of all colonies and oppressed nations. It would refuse to recognise the war debts contracted by the bourgeois governments. Only on this basis — a revolutionary break with the capitalist state — can a genuinely democratic peace be achieved. The letter ends by posing the question directly to the German worker: can the war continue if Russia transfers power to the Soviets?