by Arthur Ransome

“ If the army were not to be swept into the revolution, if it were allowed to remain apart from politics, it would be a passive weapon in the hands of the Government, who would thus be able to suppress the Soviets, and so the true expression of the people's will, whenever it should think fit. If the Government had been able to retain possession of the army, then Miliukov might have had his way, and the bourgeoisie would have secured the profits of the revolt of the masses. ”

“ Revolution divides men by character far more sharply than they are divided by war. Those whom the Gods love take the youth of their hearts and throw themselves gladly on that side, even if, clearsighted, they perceive that the fires of revolution will burn up perhaps the very things that, for themselves, they hold most dear. ”

“ At least half of our worst mistakes have been due to the underestimation of some person or force outside England, and disturbing to little men who will not realize that chaos has come again and that giants are walking in this world. They look across Europe and see huge things, monstrous figures, and, to save themselves, and from respect for other little lazy minds, they leap for the easiest tawdry explanation, and say, "Ah, yes, bogies made in Germany with candles inside turnip heads !" ”

“ They believed that the autocracy would carry out its plan and, therefore, did their best to prevent the revolution. Thus, when the days of the revolution of March, 1917, began, we had the spectacle of the autocracy wrestling with the bourgeoisie, both far removed from the actual people, both gambling with the lives of the people, but with entirely different objects. ”

“ Those working-men sent from the Allied countries, less with the idea of studying the revolution than of telling it to do what the Allies wanted, have also been men especially chosen and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open mind they should have had. Socialists especially who had long dreamed of revolution found it particularly difficult to recognize in this cloudy tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened. ”

“ The autocracy was trying to create a revolution which should fail. The bourgeoisie was trying to prevent the autocracy from creating a revolution at all. Looking back over a year, it is almost laughable to think that it was the autocracy that arrested the whole labor group of the Central War Industries Committee, because that group of patriotic Socialists had shown themselves capable of preventing trouble with the workmen. ”

“ And if each one of us, then, all the more each nation, by what it owes to those first daring days of its existence, when all the world looked askance upon its presumptuous birth, America was young once, and there were men in America who would have brought in foreign aid to re-establish their dominion over a revolted nation. ”

“ If there is any period one would desire to be born in,
is it not the age of revolution ; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared ; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope ; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? ”

“ The shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack from the Urals and the fisherman from the Yenisei can sit together in the All-Russian Assembly, and know that the laws, whose principles they approve, are not steel bands, too loose for one and throttling another, but are instruments which each Soviet can fashion out in its own way for the special needs of its own community. ”

“ The Soviets, in which the moderates who desired to keep the government as a sort of executive organ, mistrusting their own abilities, were in a majority, exerted all their influence on the government in the direction of peace. The government made its representations to the Allies, but, at any rate at first, gambled in the future, and pretended that things were not so bad, and that Russia could still take an active part in the war. ”

“ The French Revolution gave a measure of freedom to every nation in Europe, although it failed most notably in France and ended in a Dictator and a defeated Dictator at that, and, for the brave clearsighted France, foreseen by Diderot and Rousseau, substituted a France in which thought died and everyone was prone to grub money with a view to enslaving everybody else. The failure of the French Revolution did not lessen the ardor which the ideas which sprung from it poured into the minds that came to their maturity after 1795. ”

“ This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect from members of the class that is being ousted from its place of domination whole-hearted assistance in its own undoing. Those democrats in other countries and in Russia who do not understand what is happening under their eyes, exclaim at the unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. ”

“ The Soviet Government was faced with a choice: to collapse in a Cjuite unequal struggle, or to sign a peace agreement of which they disapproved. Many thought that the revolution would be best served by their deaths, and were ready to die. Lenin doubted the efficacy of such a rhetorical gesture, and believed that the secession of Russia from the war would ensure the continuation of the struggle by the imperialistic groups until such time as other countries reached the same exhaustion as had been reached by Russia, when, in his opinion, revolution would be inevitable. ”

“ The demobilization of the Russian army meant little, because it had long ceased to be anything but a danger to the peaceful population in its rear. The Soviet had only the very smallest real force, and that, as yet, unorganized, with enthusiasm but without confidence, utterly unpractised in warfare, consisting chiefly of workmen, who, as was natural, were the first to understand what it was they had to defend. ”

“ The Constituent Assembly meant for these people an end to political debate, an end even to political life, an end anyhow to revolution. In every country it is only a small minority that really concerns itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big uncon- scious mass of voting material, which does not concern itself with active politics, and asks nothing from its government except to be let alone. ”

“ In the end it becomes difficult for even honest-minded sturdy folk in England to look those bogies squarely in their turnip faces and to see that they are not bogies at all, but the real article, giants, whose movements in the mist are of greater import for the future of the world than anything else that is happening in our day, I think it possible that the Revolution will fail. ”

“ I love the real England, but I hate, more than I hate anything on earth (except cowardice in looking at the truth) the intellectual sloth, the gross mental indolence that prevents the English from making an effort of imagination and realizing how shameful will be their position in history when the tale of this last year in the biography of democracy comes to be written. ”

“ At some time or other, every one of us has dreamed of laying his brick in such a work. And even if this thing that is being builded here with tears and blood is not the golden city that we ourselves have dreamed, it is still a thing to the sympathetic understanding of which each one of us is bound by whatever he owes to his own youth. ”

“ The bourgeois classes in the fighting countries and those of the laboring classes, who had been tamed by reading the newspapers to a happy acquiescence in bourgeois ideas, were a little troubled lest the disturbance in Russia should affect their war, they having forgotten that they were fighting for democracy, and that the enfranchisement of 180 million souls was in itself a greater victory than they had set out to gain, so that, from that moment, the main object of the war should have been to save that victory. ”

“ For they hoped that in stirring the working classes of the world to demand peace from their Governments they would be putting into their hands the sword that was necessary for the Social Revolution, in which cause they had, like many of their friends, spent the best years of their lives. ”

“ Thus the bourgeoisie were dissatisfied with the Government because it put difficulties in the way of a successful waging of the war that was to give Russia Constantinople. The aristocracy were dissatisfied with the Tsar on account of his inability to keep his family in order or to hide the fact that it was in disorder, the folk, the great bulk of the nation, were dissatisfied with the Government because they held the Government responsible for the increasingly difficult conditions of their lives. ”

“ All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble ; but you who hold not of today, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it ; and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels. ”

“ America is further from this bloody cockpit of Europe, for one thing. For another, even rich Americans, dependent for their full pockets on the continuance of the present capitalist system, can wholeheartedly admire the story of the bolshevik adventure, and even wish for its success, without fearingf any serious damage to the edifice in which they live, on which they feed, like parasites on cheese. ”

“ What is the scholar, what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends ? you shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. ”

“ While the bourgeoisie held this attitude it was natural that the Soviets, and, most of all, the left party in the Soviets, should use the Constituent Assembly as a means of showing up the duplicity of their bourgeois opponents. ”

“ The army, which at that time meant practically the whole of the younger peasantry, took the share in politics it had a right to take. From that moment the future of the Soviets was assured, and the Bourgeois Government was doomed to be a Government only by the good will of the Soviets who, within a few days of the beginning of the revolution, were the only real power in the country. ”

“ It would be less dignified but more honest to admit that revolution is a kind of speeding up of the politi- cal fiux, during which tendencies that in ordinary times would perhaps only become noticeable in the course of years, come to full fruition in a few weeks or days. Revolution turns the slow river of political development into a rapid in which the slightest action has an immediate effect and the canoe of Gov- ernment answers more violently to a paddle dipped for a moment than in ordinary times to the organized and prolonged effort of its whole crew. ”

“ Those servants of the autocracy who fomented disorder in Petrograd in March, 1917, believed that by creating and sup- pressing an artificial, premature revolt they could forestall and perhaps altogether prevent the more serious revolt which they had good reason to expect in the future. They were wrong, because revolution is not an act of political life but a state of political life. ”

“ English lads will die, and English lads have died, not one or two, but hundred of thousands, because their elders listen to men who think little things and tell them little things, which are so terribly easy to repeat. ”

“ They forget or have never realized that the object of the social
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revolution is to put an end to the existence of a bourgeois or exploiting- class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploita- tion is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from government is merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the more honorable position of equality with his fellow-workers. ”

“ Every work- man, every peasant in Russia has the right to vote in the elec- tion of deputies to his local Soviet, which is made up of a number of deputies corresponding to the number of electors. The local Soviets choose their delegates to an All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. ”

“ Just as the Soviet constitution ensures that the actual law-givers shall be in the closest touch with the people, just as it ensures that in deed instead of in amiable theory the people shall be their own law-givers, so also it provides for inter-communication in a contrary direction. ”

“ Nothing has been more remark- able or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who by their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest from the revolutionary movement. ”

“ Deputies are with- drawn and others substituted for them whenever this seems necessary to the local electorate. Thus the country is free from the danger of finding itself governed by the ghosts of its dead opinions, and, on the other hand, those ghosts find themselves expeditiously laid in their graves as soon as, becoming ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule. ”