Page:Arthur Ransome - The Truth about Russia.djvu/9

 eyes. Those working men sent from the Allied countries, less with the idea of studying the revolution, but of telling it to do what the Allies wanted, have also been men specially chosen, and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open mind they should have had. Socialists especially, who had long dreamed of revolution, found it particularly difficult to recognise in this cloudy, tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened for them into something more docile, less self-willed. Nothing has been more remarkable or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who by their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest from the revolutionary movement.

I do not propose to recapitulate the programme of the Soviet Government, nor to spend minutes, when I have so few, in discussing in detail their efforts towards an equitable land settlement, or their extraordinarily interesting work in building up, under the stress of famine and of war, an economic industrial organisation which shall facilitate the eventual socialisation of Russia. That is material for many letters, and here I have not time for one. I therefore take the two events which have been most misused in blackening the Soviet Government to those who should have been its friends. These were the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the negotiations which ended, temporarily at least, in a separate peace between Russia and the Central Empires. I take these two events, and try to show what happened in each case, and why the reproaches flung at the Soviets on account of them were due either to misunderstanding or to malice.

I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was one of the events that best served the people who were anxious to persuade public opinion that the Soviet Government was a government of usurpation holding its own by force, and not representing the will of the people. I think that, without any special pleading, it will be possible to bring together facts which put an entirely different light on that event. The mere fact that the parties opposed to the Bolsheviki had spent eight months in murdering the Constituent Assembly, putting it off day by day in hopes that the country would change, and that the revolution would come crawling home asking for a quiet life, leaving the gentlemen to do the work of the Government, should be set against the short speech of the sailor who told the Assembly it had talked enough, that its guards were tired, and that really it was time to go to bed. It should be remembered that the Constituent Assembly was for neither party an end in itself. For each party it represented a political instrument, not a political aim. It was a tool, not a task. It was thrown away when further use of it would have damaged the purpose for which it was invented. Look back, fora moment, on its history. The very idea of a constituent assembly was first put forward by the