If the war had decided the problem of the balance of power in a very
short time, Russia might conceivably have turned out to be on that side
of the trenches which victory favored. But the war dragged along for a
long time, and it was not an accident that it did so. The fact alone
that the international politics were for the last fifty years reduced to
the construction of the so-called European "balance of power," that is,
to a state in which the hostile powers approximately balance one
another, this fact alone was bound--when the power and wealth of the
present bourgeois nations is considered--to make it a war of an
extremely protracted character. That meant first of all the exhaustion
of the weaker and economically less developed countries.
The most powerful country in a military sense proved to be Germany,
because of the strength of the industries and because of their modern
and rational construction as against the archaic construction of the
German State. France, with its undeveloped state of capitalism, proved
to be far behind Germany, and even such a powerful colonial power as
Great Britain, owing to the conservative and routine character of the
English industries, proved to be weaker than Germany. When history put
before the Russian Revolution the question of the peace negotiations, we
had no doubt that in these negotiations, and so long as the decisive
power of the revolutionary proletariat of the world had not interfered,
we should be compelled to stand the bill of three and a half years of
war.
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