‘Parallel Action’

Abstract

While Lenin was boasting about the Bolsheviks never having ‘invited imperialists’ they were in fact already contemplating an invitation to the Germans to help them solve their military problems. Paquet records that Radek was talking about German action against Murmansk as early as 24 July,¹ and on 28 July Chicherin instructed Joffe in Berlin that the hostility between the Germans and General Alekseyev’s Volunteer Army should be exploited.² It was perhaps in preparation for the appeal about to be made to the Germans that an ‘address to the toiling masses of the Allied countries’ was composed on 31 July and issued on 1 August in the name of the Council of People’s Commissars. The peoples of France, Britain and the other countries opposing Germany were told that if they could not defeat Germany when a large Russian army was in the field, they would hardly manage to do it now. German imperialism could be defeated only when the imperialism of all countries was defeated by the united attack of the world preletariat — and the road thereto lay not through continuing the war but through ending it. And, incidentally, the Allied propaganda about a German threat to the Murman Railway was false, ‘because the Germans are too far away from it’.³