At the conference of the Communist party as well as at the Fourth Conference of the Soviet, the peace partisans triumphed. They were joined by many of those who in January considered it impossible to sign the Brest-Litovsk treaty. "Then," said they, "our signature would have been looked upon by the English and French workingmen as a shameful capitulation, without an attempt to fight. Even the base insinuations of the Anglo-French chauvinists to the secret compact between the Soviet Government and the Germans, might in case that treaty had been signed find credence in certain circles of European laborers. But after we had refused to sign the treaty, after a new German invasion, after our attempt to resist it, and after our military weakness had become painfully obvious to the whole world, after all this, no one dare to reproach us for surrendering without a fight." The Brest-Litovsk treaty, in its second enlarged edition, was signed and ratified. In the meantime, the executioners were doing their work in Finland and the Ukraine, menacing more and more the most vital centers of Great Russia. Thus the question of Russia's very existence as an independent country is henceforth inseparably connected with the question of the European revolution. CONCLUSION When our party took over the government, we knew in advance what difficulties we had to contend with. Economically the country had been exhausted by the war to the very utmost. The revolution had destroyed the old administrative machinery and could not yet create anything to take its place. Millions of workers had been wrested from their normal nooks in the national economy of things, declassified, and physically shattered by the three years' war. The colossal war industries, carried on on an inadequately prepared national foundation, had drained all the lifeblood of the people; and their demobilization was attended with extreme difficulties. The phenomena of economic and political anarchy spread throughout the country. The Russian peasantry had for centuries been held together by barbarian national discipline from below and iron-Czarist rule from above. Economic development had undermined the former, the revolution destroyed the latter. Psychologically, the revolution meant the awakening of a sense of human personality among the peasantry. The anarchic manifestations of this awakening are but the inevitable results of the preceding oppression. A new order of things, an order based on the workers' own control of industry, can come only through gradual and internal elimination of the anarchic manifestations of the revolution.