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INTERNATIONAL SITUATION. (3)

issue became defined, and the liberal and moderate Socialist elements
supported the war, which became popular as the Japanese War was unpop-
ular. Indeed the people supported it while the German-sympathizing
Court and the some of the aristocracy constantly blocked it, actively or
with criminal negligence. The motive of this resistance, which helped
to bring about the Revolution, was perhaps not so much sympathy for Ger-
many as sympathy for the autocratic idea, which would be endangered if
Germany were defeated. Nevertheless, in spite of bad organization,
and criminal negligence, the Russian army, equipped and aided not by the
Ministry, whose job it was, but by the public organizations like the
Zemsky Seyūz and the Central War Industry Committee, did good work,
showed courage, and held great quantities of Germans away from the West.

Three years of war are a burden for any people, and they were es-
pecially so for Russia, whose economic organization and popular education
are so far below the standard of the Western countries. It is true that
the war has in many respects been a benefit in Russia. It is also true
that she is comparatively so little developed industrially that the "ruin
of the industry", which has been so much discussed means proprotionally
very little compared to the ruin of Belgium's industry, which was like
throwing a monkey-wrench into the delicate mechanism of a watch. This is
all true enough in the long run but the immediate effects of the war in
Russia in everleading an already insufficient railroad system, paralysing
foreign trade, depreciating the currency and isolating the country,-
penning it up so to speak- were very real and far reaching.

Russia is first and last the country of a tragedy-- a tragedy of
isolation, unwieldiness, harsh climate, and an oppressive government
which knew how to make use of a people held back by the circumstances of
a tragic history. To many of the best minds and souls in Russia, who
had suffered in a way that no freeborn American, Englishman or Frenchman
can understand, the Tsar and his government were greater enemies than the
Germans: their tyranny more immediate. The versatility and the gifts
and faults of the Russian temperament, and the comparative absence of a
real bourgesisie in the country, except in the larger towns, and, because
as Kautsky says, the development capital was largely foreign, thus making
the Russian intelligent classes less directly dependent upon it-- all these
factors caused a very bitter feeling between the sharply contrasted large
landed proprieter and his peasant; between the big industrial capitalist
and his workmen. All classes except the circles about the Court were
a unit is desiring the overthrow of the autocracy, each of course for his
particular purpose. In the Revolution of 1905 there was great unamim-
ity at the start, then the burgeois Cadets started to disagree with the
more radical Socialists, who wished to carry the revolution to the end, i.e.
the achievement of the social as well as the political revolution. This
splitting up enabled the Autocracy to gain the upper and once more and go
on for twelve years more.

Another observation of Kautsky's is that it is very exhausting for
a country to be called upon to undergo a war and revolution at the same
time. This has happened in Russia, but it is idle to make the bremid-
ic remark that Russians should have waited until after the war. These
things never happen that way outside the story books, and the Russian
Revolution and the war will go down in history as two intertwined, corre-
lated phenomena.

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