tions, has placed under German control some of her richest provinces, and has imposed on her an indemnity of £300,000,000. The army, it is true, has been disbanded, but there has been no peace for Russia, rent as she is by class war. The land hunger of the peasants has been satisfied by a decree proclaiming the confiscation of all private estates and of all church and Crown land, but, as no legal machinery was set up for its partition, villages and individual peasants fought one another for its coveted possession, and the land went to whoever could seize and hold the most. The workmen, on the other hand, to whom the control of the factories was entrusted, did not know how to manage them, and as nobody cared to work, most of the factories have been closed and the workmen thrown on the streets. As there are, consequently, no manufactured goods in the country, the ruble has lost its purchasing power, and the peasant, who has stocks of grain, refuses to part with them. The promised food has not been forthcoming, and famine is claiming thousands of victims. Workmen and peasants alike have realized too late by bitter experience what Bolshevik rule means, and how it has spelled ruin both for themselves and their country. Liberty, the watchword of the February revolution, has long been a dead letter

it is the monopoly of a single class, of a minority which through its Red army terrorizes the majority of the nation. All who do not subscribe to the articles of the Bolshevik creed are disfranchised, all papers which do not support the Government are suppressed. Justice is unobtainable, or only to be bought, and corruption is rampant. Never since the days of Ivan the Terrible has Russia suffered from such tyranny; and when, some weeks ago, the Bolsheviki feared that their power was on the wane, they indulged in an

orgy of massacre and pillage, in the hope of overawing a helpless people with the Red Terror. Nobody's life is safe all their political opponents, whether belonging to the Socialist or non-Socialist parties, to the working classes or to the aristocracy, are styled counter-revolutionaries, and as such are judged guilty and sentenced to death. The process of passing sentence on individuals is even found too slow, and they are massacred in batches, the Red Guard or the Chinese mercenaries employed as executioners being free to choose their victims from the list of the proscribed. Such are the methods by which those pseudo-democrats, Lenin and Trotzky, have attempted to found their Socialist State, and such are the precepts of the Bolshevik gospel which they fain would see preached in this and other countries. They have voted money for Bolshevik propaganda abroad, and, though I have too much faith in the common sense and patriotism of the British workman to believe that he would ever listen to their insidious pleadings, it would be well that he should be on his guard and that he should realize the ghastly suffering and ruin which Bolshevism has brought on Russia.

The sympathy felt in certain quarters for Bolshevism is due entirely to ignorance of what Bolsheviki really are. They are not democrats as we understand the meaning of that word. They are anarchists, and I am convinced that, were any of our so-called Bolsheviki to go to Russia and see with their own eyes the crimes that are being committed there in the name of liberty, they would never call themselves Bolsheviki again.

I am often asked how Russia can ever emerge from the chaos in which she is plunged, and how the present anarchy is to end. This is no easy question to answer, and I can only say that

I firmly believe in Russia's eventual regeneration provided that the Allies will help her to cast off the Bolshevik tyranny which is sapping her vital force, and that they will further with all the means at their disposal her political and economic reconstruction. Dark as is the present outlook, it is, let us hope, that darkness which precedes the dawn, for in the East the first rays of light are already breaking through the clouds. The success that Siberia has achieved in the war of liberation which she is waging against the Bolsheviki and their German masters will, if it be sustained, inspire the other nationalities of Russia to rise and overthrow their oppressors. There are signs moreover, of a revival of the national spirit of a tendency, which all Russians should encourage, to sink old party differences and to unite to save Russia from permanent disruption. The great victories won by the Allies in the West must also, sooner or later, react on the Russian situation and force Germany to relax her grip, for the Allies, I trust, will not forget Russia when the moment comes for settling accounts with Germany. Perhaps the most hopeful sign of all is the reawakening of the national conscience The Fortnightly Review

and the growing tendency of peasants and workmen alike to revisit their deserted churches. After the revolution, in which she had taken no part, the church lost her hold over the masses, who, left to themselves, turned liberty into license and indulged in every kind of excess. Now that their sufferings and privations have awakened in them feelings of remorse for the ruin which they have wrought, their old faith and their old beliefs are moving them to make their peace with God through the Orthodox church. The church may in time form the rallying point of a great national movement. Moscow will then be purged of the Bolsheviki, who have desecrated the glorious churches in the Kremlin with sacrilegious acts and who have reddened her streets with blood. She will again become the centre of Russian political and religious life, and, as she gathers her erring and repentant children around her, she will once more be, as she was in the past, the historic shrine in which the great heart of the Russian people lives and beats. God grant that, when that day dawns when a new, free, and united Russia arises from the ashes of the old, her heart will ever beat in unison with

ours.

tions, has placed under German control some of her richest provinces, and has imposed on her an indemnity of of £300,000,000. The army, it is true, has been disbanded, but there has been no peace for Russia, rent as she is by class war. The land hunger of the peasants has been satisfied by a decree proclaiming the confiscation of all private estates and of all church and Crown land, but, as no legal machinery was set up for its partition, villages and individual peasants fought one another for its coveted possession, and the land went to whoever could seize and hold the most. The workmen, on the other hand, to whom the control of the factories was entrusted, did not know how to manage them, and as nobody cared to work, most of the factories have been closed and the workmen thrown on the streets. As there are, consequently, no manufactured goods in the country, the ruble has lost its purchasing power, and the peasant, who has stocks of grain, refuses to part with them. The promised food has not been forthcoming, and famine is claiming thousands of victims. Workmen and peasants alike have realized too late by bitter experience what Bolshevik rule means, and how it has spelled ruin both for themselves and their country. Liberty, the watchword of the February revolution, has long been a dead letter it is the monopoly of a single class, of a minority which through its Red army terrorizes the majority of the nation. All who do not subscribe to the articles of the Bolshevik creed are disfranchised, all papers which do not support the Government are suppressed. Justice is unobtainable, or only to be bought, and corruption is rampant. Never since the days of Ivan the Terrible has Russia suffered from such tyranny; and when, some weeks ago, the Bolsheviki feared that their power was on the wane, they indulged in an

orgy of massacre and pillage, in the hope of overawing a helpless people with the Red Terror. Nobody's life is safe all their political opponents, whether belonging to the Socialist or non-Socialist parties, to the working classes or to the aristocracy, are styled counter-revolutionaries, and as such are judged guilty and sentenced to death. The process of passing sentence on individuals is even found too slow, and they are massacred in batches, the Red Guard or the Chinese mercenaries employed as executioners being free to choose their victims from the list of the proscribed. Such are the methods. by which those pseudo-democrats, Lenin and Trotzky, have attempted to found their Socialist State, and such are the precepts of the Bolshevik gospel which they fain would see preached in this and other countries. They have voted money for Bolshevik propaganda abroad, and, though I have too much faith in the common sense and patriotism of the British workman to believe that he would ever listen to their insidious pleadings, it would be well that he should be on his guard and that he should realize the ghastly suffering and ruin which Bolshevism has brought on Russia.

The sympathy felt in certain quarters for Bolshevism is due entirely to ignorance of what Bolsheviki really are. They are not democrats as we understand the meaning of that word. They are anarchists, and I am convinced that, were any of our so-called Bolsheviki to go to Russia and see with their own eyes the crimes that are being committed there in the name of liberty, they would never call themselves Bolsheviki again.

I am often asked how Russia can ever emerge from the chaos in which she is plunged, and how the present anarchy is to end. This is no easy question to answer, and I can only say that

I firmly believe in Russia's eventual regeneration provided that the Allies will help her to cast off the Bolshevik tyranny which is sapping her vital force, and that they will further with all the means at their disposal her political and economic reconstruction. Dark as is the present outlook, it is, let us hope, that darkness which precedes the dawn, for in the East the first rays of light are already breaking through the clouds. The success that Siberia has achieved in the war of liberation which she is waging against the Bolsheviki and their German masters will, if it be sustained, inspire the other nationalities of Russia to rise and overthrow their oppressors. There are signs moreover, of a revival of the national spirit - of a tendency, which all Russians should encourage, to sink old party differences and to unite to save Russia from permanent disruption. The great victories won by the Allies in the West must also, sooner or later, react on the Russian situation and force Germany to relax her grip, for the Allies, I trust, will not forget Russia when the moment comes for settling accounts with Germany. Perhaps the most hopeful sign of all is the reawakening of the national conscience

The Fortnightly Review

and the growing tendency of peasants and workmen alike to revisit their deserted churches. After the revolution, in which she had taken no part, the church lost her hold over the masses, who, left to themselves, turned liberty into license and indulged in every kind of excess. Now that their sufferings and privations have awakened in them feelings of remorse for the ruin which they have wrought, their old faith and their old beliefs are moving them to make their peace with God through the Orthodox church. The church may in time form the rallying point of a great national movement. Moscow will then be purged of the Bolsheviki, who have desecrated the glorious churches in the Kremlin with sacrilegious acts and who have reddened her streets with blood. She will again become the centre of Russian political and religious life, and, as she gathers her erring and repentant children around her, she will once more be, as she was in the past, the historic shrine in which the great heart of the Russian people lives and beats. God grant that, when that day dawns when a new, free, and united Russia arises from the ashes of the old, her heart will ever beat in unison with

ours.

OUR present relations with Russia are about as indefensible as can be imagined. The Foreign Office, or those who control the policy of the Foreign Office, can hardly be ignorant of that - how should they be?-but, so far as appears, are preparing to cover one error with a greater error and to make bad worse. In the midst of the preoccupation of a great war the little war with Russia has received comparatively little attention, and it is hardly realized that, though the great war is over, the little war goes on, and, moreover, that if it is not stopped now or soon it is likely to become a very much larger war and a more and more intolerable and indefensible one, so intolerable and indefensible, indeed, that it is capable of producing grave reactions here, extending to the overthrow of a government. We originally embarked on this Russian adventure under wholly different circumstances and for reasons

SO

far as reasons were given which have no present application whatever. After the intervention by Germany in the civil war between 'Reds' and 'Whites' in Finland and her virtual occupation of the country there was a real, if somewhat remote, danger that she might strike through Finland at the narrow strip of Russian territory which divides the north of Finland from the Arctic Ocean and establish for herself a naval station on the Murmansk coast giving her access to the Arctic and a new outlet for her submarines. At a moment when the submarine war was at its height and Russia lay helpless and subservient there was reason, if not very urgent reason - since the district was extremely inaccessible and a long railway would have had to be built

guarding against this peril. That was the extent of the danger and the extent of the need for our occupation. Its extension to Archangel, which is not ice-free, and to a large stretch of country inland had no such justification. The occupation of Vladivostok, Russia's ice-free port in the Pacific, five thousand miles away, followed by the advance, with the coöperation of Japan, westward into Siberia, was as a military measure equally unjustified. Both these extensions of the original intervention were defended on quite other grounds. It was said that Russia had become the mere tool of Germany, and that it was necessary, first, to prevent the further extension of Germany's influence and her increasing exploitation of Russian resources and, secondly, to 'reconstitute the eastern front.' In this connection the happy discovery was made of scattered bands of Czecho-Slovak prisoners who, it was urged, must in the first place be rescued and in the second place utilized in this process of reconstituting the eastern front.

So matters stood at the time of the collapse of Germany and the conclusion of the armistice. Obviously every reason hitherto alleged, whether for the original occupation of the Murmansk coast or for the subsequent expeditions to Archangel and Siberia, had now disappeared. They were all in the nature of defenses against the attack of Germany, and there was no longer any attack or possibility of attack from Germany. Germany as a military Power was dead. But were the defensive measures, the counter-attacks, dead also? Not at all; they continue in full force. There is quite a prospect