ABSTRACT
The Russian Revolution grew directly out of the war, and the latter became the touchstone for all parties and forces of the Revolution. The intellectual leaders had against the war. Many of them, while the Tsar was still on his throne, considered themselves as belonging to the left wing of the International, and were Zimmer-waldians. In Sept. 1915 an international conference of anti-war Socialists was held at Zimmerwald in Switzerland at which both Lenin and Trotsky played an important part. Democratic conference repudiated all Socialists who supported the war, and looked to the formation of a new International to replace the Second International, the 'international of social patriots'. To pursue a revolutionary Socialist policy would have meant in the circumstances a break with their own and Entente bourgeoisie, but, as we have said, the political impotence of the middle-class intellectuals and semi-intellectuals led them to seek protection with bourgeois Liberalism.
