The editors of Izvestia, a paper controlled by the Narodnik and Menshevik bloc, are beating all records of muddledom. Pravda, we are told, has a foggy, misleading idea of annexations. Begging your pardon, citizen-ministers and ministerial editors, but facts are facts, and the fact is that our Party was the only one to give a definition of annexation in official and carefully worded resolutions.
Annexation means keeping an alien people by force within the bounds of a given state.
It is careless, most careless, on the part of the Narodnik and Menshevik leaders of the Soviet's Executive Committee to put such muddle-headed people in charge of a newspaper. Let us apply to their definition the argument they used against us. Palpable nonsense, nonsense from the practical as well as the theoretical point of view, since no soldier anywhere would think twice about dismissing any editors who argued in this way. The Duchy of Brandenburg and the Principality of Muscovy have nothing to do with it. To think that one can escape this by wishes, demands, or conferences is the illusion of a petty bourgeois.