Page:Albert Rhys Williams - Through the Russian Revolution (1921).djvu/197

Rh than the great upheaval in France in 1789—was no saturnalia of revenge. It was to all intents a "bloodless revolution."

Take the most exaggerated estimates of the shootings in Petrograd, the three days' battle in Moscow, the street-fighting in Kiev and Irkutsk, and the peasants' outbreaks in the provinces. Add up the casualties and divide it into Russia's population—not the 3,000,000 involved in the American Revolution, nor the 23,000,000 of the French Revolution, but the 160,000,000 of the Russian Revolution. The figures will show that in the four months it took the Soviet to establish and consolidate its power—from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the White Sea on the north to the Black Sea on the south—less than one in 3,000 Russians were killed.

Sanguinary enough to be sure!

But look at it in the perspective of history. Rightly or wrongly, when the fulfillment of the national destiny of America demanded that we cut out the cancer of slavery, vast property rights were confiscated, and in doing this we did not stop until we had killed one in every 300 people. Rightly or wrongly, the peasants and workers feel it essential to cut out of Russia the cancer of Czarism, landlordism, and capitalism. Such a deep-seated and malign disease called for a major surgical operation. Yet it was performed with comparatively little letting of blood. For, like children, the nature of a