Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/2



Revolutions are not definite political acts carried out by the majority in a nation who are unanimous in desiring a single definite object. Revolutionaries and their historians often try to give them that character afterwards, but that is only an illustration of man’s general tendency to supply his instinctive acts with family pedigrees of irreproachable orderly reasoning. It would be less dignified but more honest to admit that revolution is a kind of speeding up of the political flux, during which tendencies that in ordinary times would perhaps only become noticeable in the course of years, reach a full fruition in a few weeks or days. Revolution turns the slow river of political development into a rapid, in which the slightest action has an immediate effect, and the canoe of government answers more violently to a paddle dipped for a moment than in more ordinary times to the organised and prolonged effort of its whole crew.

Those servants of the autocracy who fomented disorder in Petrograd in March, 1917, believed that by creating and suppressing an artificial premature revolt they could forestall and perhaps altogether prevent the more serious revolt against themselves which they had good reason to expect in the future. They were wrong, precisely for the reason suggested in the first paragraph. They were wrong because revolution is not an act of political life, but a state of political life. Hoping to crush a political act, they created the state in which the old means of control slipped from their hands, and they became incapable of the suppression of any acts whatsoever.

Their immediate political opponents made the same mistake as the servants of the autocracy. They believed that the autocracy could carry out its plan, and therefore did their best to prevent the revolution. Thus in the days before the revolution of March, 1917, began, we had the spectacle of the autocracy wrestling with the bourgeoisie, both far removed from the actual people, both gambling with the lives of the people, with entirely different objects. The autocracy was trying to create a revolution which should fail. The bourgeoisie was trying to prevent the autocracy from creating a revolution at all. Looking back over a year, it is almost laughable to think that it was the autocracy that arrested the whole Labour Group of the Central War Industries Committee because that group of patriotic socialists had shown themselves capable of preventing trouble with the workmen. It is more laughable to remember that Miliukov, the Cadet leader, sent a statement to the papers