For help the bourgeoisie turned to their former enemies—the Germans. Again and again they told us that next week we would see the German armies marching into Moscow.
The Bolsheviks had then no Red Armies to oppose the Germans, no batteries of guns. But they had batteries of linotypes and printing-presses, which sprayed the German ranks with the deadly shrapnel of propaganda. In the Torch and the People's Peace, in all languages, flamed the appeal to the German soldiers to use their guns—not to destroy the workingmen's republic in Russia, but to set up a workingmen's republic in Germany.
In the Soviet offices John Reed and I made up an illustrated sheet. Picture No. 1 showed the German Embassy in Petrograd, a big banner on its front. Underneath this picture these sentences:
See the great banner. It is the word of a famous German. Was it Bismarck? Was it Hindenburg? No. It is the call of the immortal Karl Marx to international brotherhood—"Proletarians of all lands, unite!"
This is not merely a pretty decoration of the German Embassy. In all seriousness the Russians have raised this banner, and to you Germans they hurl back the same words that your Karl Marx gave to the whole world seventy years ago.
At last a real proletarian republic has been founded. But this republic cannot be secure until the workers of all lands conquer the power of government.
The Russian peasants, workers and soldiers will soon send a socialist as ambassador to Berlin. When will Germany send an internationalist Socialist to this building of the German embassy in Petrograd?
