The masters of that combination, who would concentrate in their
hands the fruits of the victory, that is, Great Britain and America,
would have displayed toward our country the same methods which were
displayed by Germany during the peace negotiations. It would be absurd
and childish to appraise the politics of the imperialistic countries
from the point of view of any considerations other than those
considerations of naked interests and material power. Consequently, if
we, as a nation are at present weakened before the imperialism of the
world, we are weakened, not because of extricating ourselves from the
fiery ring of the war, having already previously extricated ourselves
from the shackles of international military obligations: no! we are
weakened by that very policy of the Czarists and the bourgeois classes,
which we, as a revolutionary party, have always fought against before
this war and during this war.
You remember, comrades, under what conditions our delegation went to
Brest-Litovsk last time, right after one of the sessions of the Third
All-Russian Congress of the Soviets. At that session, we reported on the
state of the negotiations, and the demands of our opponents. These
demands, as you remember, were really no more than masked, or, rather,
half-masked annexationist aspirations at the expense of Lithuania,
Courland, a part of Livonia, the Isles of Moon Sound, as well as a
half-masked demand for a punitive war indemnity which we then estimated
would amount to six, eight or even ten milliards of rubles.
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