by the Vietnamese Communist • To A territorial concessions, by the Bolsheviks. It was characterised as robbery and an imperialist diktat by the Russian government. It was furiously attacked by the 'left' in the Bolsheviks, notably Bukharin, who de manded a continuation of revolutionary war' against Germany and argued it was betraying the German workers.
But Lenin and Trotsky insisted that allowing the Bolshevik government to collapse would be betraying the German workers. After a fierce faction fight, the peace deal was sanctioned by the Bolsheviks. But the Soviet government never made any concession on their revolutionary objectives.
On the contrary, they used the peace negotiations to carry out revolutionary propaganda, and Trotsky even distributed revolutionary leaflets to German troops at the negotiation site. nomic crisis. A new third way is thus dead in the water.
This debate has great relevance, for example, to the discussion about what kind of measures should be implemented if the PT (Workers Party) should come to power in the 1994 elections in Brazil. Indeed this discussion concentrates the whole debate about the way forward against imperialism today. tionalisations in 1918, far too 'early' in the opinion of Lenin, under the impact of working class mobilisations and seizures of bosses' property. The dynamic of the class struggle demanded it. For Lenin, it was