Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/5

 men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class and not of mine. I remembered Shelley's

and wondered that this thing had not come to pass before. And I thought how applicable to revolution are Sir Thomas Browne's words on the Flood, when he wrote: "That there was a Deluge once seems not to me so great a Miracle as that there is not one always."

Immediately there became visible a definite fissure, soon a wide gulf, between the ideals of these two bodies, the Government and the representatives of the people. The people, the working classes, the peasants, who suffered most from the war, demanded that steps should be taken to secure peace. They did not want to fight to get territory for the sake of some phantasmagoric gain which did not affect them, which they did not understand. They were starving already, and saw worse starvation ahead. The Government, on the other hand, was, if anything, except for the presence in it of Kerensky, the labour member, more definitely imperialistic than the autocracy whose place it had taken.

The gulf between the working classes and the Government became suddenly deeper when it was realised that the future of the revolution depended on the possession of the army. If the army were not to be swept into the revolution, if it were allowed to remain apart from politics, it would be a passive weapon in the hands of the Government, which would thus be able to suppress the Soviets, and so the true expression of the people's will, whenever it should think fit. If the Government had been able to retain possession of the army, then Miliukov might have had his way and the bourgeoisie would have secured the profits of the revolt of the masses.

This, however, was not to be, and immediately the contradiction between a revolution and war of the imperialistic kind became evident. The army, which at that time meant practically the whole of the younger peasantry, took the share in politics it had a right to take. From that moment the future of the Soviets was assured, and the bourgeois Government was doomed to be a government only by the good will of the Soviets, who, within a few days of the beginning of the revolution, were the only real power in the country.

That they had been right in fearing retention of the army by the bourgeoisie was proved again and again, by Kerensky, Kornilov, Kaledin, Alexeiev, Dutov, at subsequent periods of the revolution, each one in turn basing his resistance to the Soviets on some part of the army which had been kept free from the contagion of free political expression.

Then began the long struggle of the summer. The Soviets, in which the moderates, who, mistrusting their own abilities, desired to keep the Government as a sort of executive organ, were in a majority, exerted all their influence on the Govern-