Lenin carried the party majority, but the Left Communists were unreconciled and Trotsky continued to abstain. To console themselves for accepting Lenin’s odious peace, the delegates rallied around a resolution promising the ‘most energetic, mercilessly decisive and draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and discipline of the workers and peasants of Russia’, to prepare them for the ‘liberationist, patriotic socialist war’ that would drive out the German oppressors.
