Produced by Al Haines. [Illustration: Cover] [Illustration: Leon Trotzky] THE BOLSHEVIKI AND WORLD PEACE BY LEON TROTZKY INTRODUCTION BY LINCOLN STEFFENS BONI AND LIVERIGHT NEW YORK 1918 Copyright 1918 Boni & Liveright Inc. CONTENTS Introduction by Lincoln Steffens Author’s Preface CHAPTER I. The Balkan Question II. Austria-Hungary III. The War against Czarism IV. The War against the West V. The War of Defense VI. What Have Socialists to do with Capitalist Wars? VII. The Collapse of the International VIII. Socialist Opportunism IX. The Decline of the Revolutionary Spirit X. Working Class Imperialism XI. The Revolutionary Epoch INTRODUCTION The voice that speaks in this book is the voice of Leon Trotzky, the Bolshevik Minister of Foreign Affairs for Revolutionary Russia. It is expressing ideas and views which lighted him on the course of his policy toward the War, Peace and the Revolution. It throws light, therefore, on that policy; it helps to an understanding of it, if one wishes to understand. But that isn’t all. The spirit that flames and casts shadows upon these pages is not only Trotzky’s. It is the spirit also of the Bolsheviki; of the red left of the left wing of the revolutionary movement of New Russia. It flashed from Petrograd to Vladivostok, in the first week of the revolt; it burned all along the Russian Front before Trotzky appeared on the scene. It will smoulder long after he is gone. It is a hot Fact which has to be picked up and examined, this spirit. Whether we like it or don’t, it is there; in Russia; it is elsewhere; it is everywhere to-day. It is the spirit of war; class war, but war. It is in this book. Nor is that all. The mind in this book--the point of view from which it starts, the views to which it points--Trotzky’s mind is the international mind. We have heard before of this new intelligence; we have read books, heard speeches, witnessed acts demonstrative of thoughts and feelings which are not national, but international; not patriotic, but loyal only to the lower-class-conscious war aims of the workers of the world. The class warrior is as familiar a figure to us as the red spirit is of the red left of revolution. But the voice which utters here the spirit and the mind, not only of the Russian, but of the world revolution is the voice of one having authority.