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To-day is the first sitting of the Committee on territorial questions, where I am to preside, and deal with our territorial affairs. "The only interesting point about the new constellation seems to be that the relations between Petersburg and Kieff are considerably worse than before, and the Kieff Committee is no longer recognised at all by the Bolsheviks as independent. "February 1, 1918.
The situation is due at bottom to two facts: that almost the whole industrial energies of the population have had to be devoted to war, and that the peasants do not appreciate the importance of the war or the fact of the blockade. It is futile to blame the Bolsheviks for an unpleasant and difficult situation which it has been impossible for them to avoid.
When they read in the English papers of January, 1919, how the Czech, Italian, French, and Allied forces had inflicted defeat upon the Bolsheviks at Perm, it caused a grim smile to pass over the faces of the Russian officers who did the job. Not a single Czech, Italian, French, or Allied soldier fired a shot after Admiral Koltchak assumed supreme command. There is one notable exception.
Wrangel's war material, his guns and machine-guns and ammunition, were given mostly to the Georgians, who promptly lost it to the Bolsheviks or sold it to Kemal. The Greeks certainly complain that the Kemalist army, after being almost devoid of artillery, suddenly became possessed of it in a mysterious way, and shelled them with French shells.
The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that thirty dollars of good American chink one day in the Soviet part of Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of the Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at the famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke millionaire.
It plays a larger part in the schemes of the leading Bolsheviks than is realized by the Labour Party in this country. Its method is not, for the present, to preach Communism, since the Persians and Hindoos are considered scarcely ripe for the doctrines of Marx. It is nationalist movements that are supported by money and agitators from Moscow.
In Russia at this moment, the sacrifice of the individual is largely inevitable, because of the severity of the economic and military struggle. But I did not feel, in the Bolsheviks, any consciousness of the magnitude of this misfortune, or any realization of the importance of the individual as against the State.
As soon as the community contains only wage-earners, the State will cease to have any functions. And so, through a period of dictatorship, we shall finally arrive at a condition very similar to that aimed at by Anarchist Communism. Three questions arise in regard to this method of reaching Utopia. First, would the ultimate state foreshadowed by the Bolsheviks be desirable in itself?
There would have been better ground for assisting Finns, Letts, Esthonians, and Ukrainians against Bolshevik imperialism; but it was to Koltchak, Denikin, and their north Russian friends, rather than to the little peoples that help was sent, and a powerful motive in the discrimination was the pledge of the Russian conservatives to resume responsibility for Russia's debts to her Allies, particularly France, which the Bolsheviks had repudiated.
The next important element among the revolters were the escaped prisoners of the old régime, who, being released by the Bolsheviks, had taken to the forest to avoid recapture probably the wildest and most savage set of men in the world.
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