The Russian Army no longer exists and the Russian Navy no longer exists.
The Rumanian Army--that most gallant and most unfortunate body, which
might have and would have co-operated to preserve both Russia and
Rumania from the tyranny of the Central Powers--had been betrayed by
Russia itself. The unhappy results of the revolution from the military
point of view are quite plain and obvious to the most casual observer.
The actual course pursued by the Bolsheviki has rendered them completely
helpless in the face of German aggression. Now they express the
desire--I am sure they express it genuinely and earnestly--that they
should reconstitute the Russian Army for the purpose of Russian defense,
and they would welcome our assistance, doubtless, in carrying out this
object. But can you reconstitute it for purposes of national defense?
Can you improvise a new instrument when fragments of the old instrument
are lying shattered around you? It cannot be done in a day.
Had Russia not been at war I believe it would have taken many years to
complete what I hope and believe is to be the beneficent course of the
Russian revolution. Autocracy--and it is very difficult to see how the
Russia we know could have been created without it--showed itself quite
incapable of bringing into existence that frame of mind which makes a
great self-conscious nation independent of the particular form which its
institutions may have at the moment. Autocracy was destroyed, and
immediately Russia fell into chaos.
I am not sure that it was not my honorable friend (Mr. MacCallum Scott)
who said exactly the same thing happened in France. The same thing
really did not happen in France. I do not say we cannot find in this or
that episode parallels to the French Revolution, but the total effect of
the Revolution was not the disintegration of France but its integration.
The units out of which modern France was constructed were no doubt
compacted into a nation under the old monarchy, but the divisions
between these units were still obvious; they still remained in the
institutions of the country, and it was not until the Revolution that
France became homogeneous from end to end and all the old provincial
distinctions were swept away.
Precisely the opposite has happened in Russia. The revolution comes and
immediately all the old divisions between populations, between different
regions, between different creeds, suddenly become marked and
prominent. First this body and then that body threatens to fall way, and
it must inevitably take time before we see the end of that process and
know clearly how much of the old Russia, if any, ought to cease to form
part of the new Russia and how the new Russia will be constituted. A
very difficult process in time of peace, a very difficult process in
time of prosperity, but how are you going to carry it out in time of war
when you have at your gates an enemy remorseless, persevering, quite
unscrupulous, like that which is dealing at its own sweet will with
Russia at the present moment? That is the real difficulty which we have
always had to deal with and to think over to the best of our ability
when we consider some of the problems raised by the honorable gentleman
who initiated this debate.