At this conference, according to the government, arrangements were made to circulate among the masses a Manifesto which declared that “from the viewpoint of the working class and of the laboring masses of all the nations of Russia, the defeat of the monarchy of the Czar and of its armies would be of extremely little consequence.”  The Manifesto urged the imperative necessity of carrying on on all sides the propaganda of the social revolution among the army and at the theater of the war, and that weapons should be directed not against their brothers, the hired slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary bourgeois governments.  The Manifesto went on, according to the government, to favor the organization of a similar propaganda in all languages, among all the armies, with the aim of creating republics in Russia, Poland, Germany, Austria, and all other European countries, these to be federated into a republican United Stares of Europe.

The declaration that the defeat of the Russian armies would be “of extremely little consequence” to the workers became the key-note of the anti-war agitation of the Bolsheviki.  Lenine and Zinoviev, still in exile, adopted the view that the defeat of Russia was actually desirable from the point of view of the Russian working class.  “We are Russians, and for that very reason we want Czarism to be defeated,” was the cry.[3] In his paper, the Social Democrat, published in Switzerland, Lenine advocated Russian defeat, to be brought about through treachery and revolt in the army, as the best means of furthering revolutionary progress.  The majority of the Bolshevik faction made common cause with the extreme left-wing Socialists of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, who shared their views and became known as “Porazhentsi”—­that is, advocates of defeat.  Naturally, the charge was made that they were pro-German, and it was even charged that they were in the pay of Germany.  Possibly some of them were, but it by no means follows that because they desired Russia’s defeat they were therefore consciously pro-German.  They were not pro-German, but anti-Czarists.  They believed quite honestly, most of them, that Russia’s defeat was the surest and quickest way of bringing about the Revolution in Russia which would overthrow Czarism.  In many respects their position was quite like that of those Irish rebels who desired to see England defeated, even though it meant Germany’s triumph, not because of any love for Germany, but because they hated England and believed that her defeat would be Ireland’s opportunity.  However short-sighted and stupid such a policy may be judged to be, it is quite comprehensible and should not be misrepresented.  It is a remarkable fact that the Bolsheviki, while claiming to be the most radical and extreme internationalists, were in practice the most narrow nationalists.  They were exactly as narrow in their nationalism as the Sinn-Feiners of Ireland.  They were not blind to the terrible