Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/3

 alleging that someone pretending to be Miliukov had been urging the workmen to come out into the streets, but that actually he begged the workmen, for their own sakes, to do nothing of the kind.

This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of the methods whereby the autocracy prepared the artificial fireworks which, unfortunately for them, turned into a very genuine volcano. It is enough to say that for several months before the revolution they had been running kindergarten classes for policemen in the use of machine guns just outside Petrograd, that armoured cars had been kept back from the front with a view to moving target practice in the streets of the capital, and that weeks before the actual disorders Petrograd had been turned into a fortified battleground, with machine-gun embrasures in the garrets of the houses at strategical vantage points. Meanwhile the food shortage, already serious in the preceding September, had been steadily emphasised. The whole labour of the country had been mobilised, put in uniforms, armed, and taken from the land, thus insuring starvation for the nation as a whole in the not distant future. Starvation in the present was assured by the complete break-down of the always inadequate transport. Dissatisfaction with the Government was common to every class of the population, although it had different causes. Thus the bourgeoisie were dissatisfied with the Government because it put difficulties in the way of a successful waging of the war that was to give Constantinople to Russia. The aristocracy were dissatisfied with the Tsar on account of his inability to keep his family in order, or to hide the fact that it was in disorder. The folk, the great bulk of the nation, were dissatisfied with the Government because they held the Government responsible for their increasingly difficult conditions. They were dissatisfied with the Government for waging the war, while the classes above them were dissatisfied with the Government for not waging it well enough.

For one moment these various discontents were united and in one matter. When the revolution had begun, when the flux had already gathered speed, when the banks of the hitherto placid stream were already crumbling under pressure of the torrent, there was not a single class in the nation that was not dissatisfied with the Tsar. The Tsar, accordingly, left the stage as politely as he could, as painlessly as a person in a play. And, seeing the bloodless character of his removal, and mistaking his removal for the object and end of the revolution, English, Americans, and French united in applauding the most moderate, the biggest, the most surprising revolution in the world. The bourgeois classes in the fighting countries and those of the labouring classes, who, by reading newspapers had been tamed to a_happy acquiescence in bourgeois ideas were a little troubled lest the disturbance in Russia should affect their war, they having forgotten that they were fighting for democracy and that the enfranchisement of 180 million souls was in itself a greater victory than they had set out to gain; so that, from