Logos Library | ON THE EVE

Title: ON THE EVE

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Vladimir Lenin On the Eve The "conciliation" machine is working at full speed. The Narodniks and Mensheviks are toiling in the sweat of their brow, making up a new list of ministers. We are on the eve of a "new' cabinet.... Alas! It will not be very new. The government of the capitalists will have a few petty-bourgeois ministers tacked on to it in the shape of Narodniks and Mensheviks who have allowed themselves to be lured to the support of the imperialist war. We shall have more phrase-mongering, more fireworks, more lavish promises and bombast about "peace without annexations"-but no desire whatever to even enumerate frankly, precisely and truthfully the actual annexations effected, say, by three countries: Germany, Russia, and Britain. How long, gentlemen of the old and the new cabinets, can one deceive oneself with the utopia that the peasants will support the capitalists (the well-to-do peasants are not the whole of the peasantry), with the utopia of an "offensive" at the front (in the name of "peace without annexations")? Written: ~ 5 May, 1917 First Published: Pravda No. 49, May 5 (18), 1917 Transcription/Markup: Brian Basgen and David Walters Online Version: Lenin Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1999 ...