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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.

And Trotzky, in power, has been as red as he is in this book.  The
minister of foreign affairs practised in Petrograd what he preached in
Switzerland, where he wrote most of the chapters of his book.  And he
practised also what all the other great International Socialist leaders
talked and wrote.

That's what makes him so hard to understand, him and his party and the
Bolshevik policy.  We are accustomed to the sight of Socialists and
Radicals going into office and being "sobered by the responsibilities of
power