even if it proclaimed itself a parliament, and the sovereign parliament of the revolution, it could determine nothing for the supreme decision does not depend on it, but on the working class districts of Petrograd and Moscow.
All the objective conditions of success are present. We have on our side the exceptional advantages of a situation where our victory in the insurrection is the only thing which can put an end to the faltering inaction which maddens the people and which is a real torture to them; again our victory in the insurrection is the only thing which will make the contrivance of a separate peace against the revolution break down, by means of an open proposal for peace which shall be more complete, more just, and in favour of the revolution.
Finally our party alone after gaining victory in the insurrection, will be able to save Petrograd. For if our offer of peace is rejected, and if we fail even to procure an armistice we shall become desperate "defensists," we shall put ourselves at the head of the military parties, we shall become the most military party of all, we shall conduct the war in a really revolutionary manner. We shall carry off all the bread and the boots of the capitalists. We shall leave them nothing but crumbs, we shall give them nothing but clogs. All the bread and boots will be needed for the front.
And then we shall be within reach of defending Petrograd victoriously. Russia has still immense material and moral resources for a truly revolutionary war. Further there are ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that the Germans will grant us at least an armistice. And, to obtain an armistice now is to vanquish the whole world.
Firmly convinced that the insurrection of the workers of Petrograd and Moscow is absolutely necessary to save the revolution and to defend Russia from the greed of the imperialists of the two Ententes who are ready to conclude a separate peace in order to divide her land, we must first of all, at the Conference adapt our tactics to the conditions of the rising insurrection and then prove that we accept not in words alone the dictum of Marx on the necessity of considering insurrection as an art.
We must, at the Conference, immediately proceed to the strengthening of the Bolshevik fraction, and for this, we must not seek quantity nor fear to leave the falterers in the camp of the
