Russia is the Dark Horse of Europe. It is impossible to foretell what
road it will travel. Above the mass of ignorant and patient peasants
desiring peace in their fields and praying God for good harvests,
there is a crowd of nimble-minded men holding the machinery of power:
ambitious, cynical, with some cause, of the high moralities preached
by other powers, unscrupulous and adventurous. Some of them, in my
opinion most of them, are not personally ambitious for gold or luxury
or greed. They lead austere lives. Tchicherin spends most of his
days and nights in two little rooms barely furnished. Radek has an
untidy old den crammed with books along a whitewashed corridor in the
Kremlin. Most of them, I believe, have a sincere desire to improve
the conditions of their people, to eliminate disease, to give them a
decent share of human happiness. They were relentless against their
political enemies, like all leaders of revolution who live in terror
of reaction, and by their terror are made cruel. They have an Oriental
indifference for human life, and they believe that a life is forfeited
by crime or political hostility to their way of rule. Many of these
men were not personally responsible for the atrocities which happened
in the fever and frightfulness of revolutionary madness. They are
intellectual, highly educated, irreligious men, devoid of sentiment,
suspicious of each other, with a cold passionate hatred for the old
régime, and with a fanatical belief in their own form of tyranny, a
contempt for the ignorance of the peasant mind, and a detestation of
the Orthodox Church and all forms of Christian faith, as many of the
recent Ministers of France, including Clemenceau, Millerand and Briand
were in earlier days. They are amused by the fear of “Bolshevism” in
other countries. It flatters their vanity and appeals to their sense
of humour. Many are for the most part “realists” who believe in Force
as the only argument, or, failing force, guile. They are not, as a
class, pacifists or humanitarians, nor do they trouble to give any lip
service to their ideals. In the Red Army, officered by many sons of
the old _bourgeoisie_, they have a weapon which is not negligible in
training or equipment. As ambassadors and agents they have men whose
intellectual abilities are more than a match for the elder statesmen of
Europe and not bound by the same code of honour because the foundations
of their faith are different. Many of their officials and agents
are honest and patriotic men, desiring to serve their people in a
time of dreadful uncertainty, and all over Russia there are men and
women—millions of them—who accept the Soviet Government as something
better than Tsardom, however bad, and, while hostile or scornful
secretly to the “eyewash” of Soviet propaganda, give their labour
ungrudgingly for the sake of Russia and the reconstruction of its life
after war and revolution. They believe in peace, but many would fight
for Russian liberty against Royalist invaders. They even give the
Soviet Government the credit of good intention towards the people, and
believe in the “idealism” of Lenin and the “genius” of Trotsky, and the
patriotism of other men who in the outside world are painted as devils
incarnate.