This statement was denounced as a lie
by Karl Radek in _Pravda_. Some day, doubtless, the truth will be known;
for the present it is enough to note the fact that as early as November the
Bolsheviki were negotiating through such a discredited agent of the Central
Powers as Dr. Alexander Helfandt, otherwise "Parvus," the well-known
Marxist! Such facts as this, added to those previously noticed, tended
inevitably to strengthen the conviction that Lenine and Trotsky were the
pliant and conscious tools of Germany all the time, and that the protests
of Trotzky at Brest-Litovsk were simply stage-play.
But for all that, unless and until official, documentary evidence is
forthcoming which proves them to have been in such relations with the
German Government and military authorities, they ought not to be condemned
upon the chain of suspicious circumstances, strong as that chain apparently
is. The fact is that they had to make peace, and make it quickly. Kerensky,
had he been permitted to hold on, would equally have had to make a separate
peace, and make it quickly. Only one thing could have delayed that for
long--namely, the arrival of an adequate force of Allied troops on the
Russian front to stiffen the morale and to take the burden of fighting off
from the Russians.
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