The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

by Adam Tooze

Whereas more orthodox Marxists dismissed Sinn Fein as suicidal putschists who lacked substantial working-class backing, for Lenin they were a vital pointer to the revolutionary future: ‘To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices . . . to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution . . .’ Anyone, who expected a ‘“pure” social revolution’, made only by the working class, would ‘never live to see it . . . We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of Liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement . . .’34 Lenin demanded an immediate revolutionary peace. But, as anyone familiar with his writings would soon realize, this slogan was easily misunderstood. Lenin wanted urgently to halt the all-consuming, imperialist World War that was threatening to extinguish any hope of historical progress. But he wanted this peace only because he hoped that it would unleash an even more encompassing international class war – the ‘proletariat’s great war of Liberation’. A revolutionary peace concluded by an all-Soviet Russian regime would cause an uprising of the German proletariat. That liberals and Mensheviks shrank from such a course, fearing that it would unleash civil war in Russia, was precisely what marked it for Lenin as the correct revolutionary line. He wa...