Page:Emile Vandervelde - Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution - tr. Jean Elmslie Henderson Findlay (1918).djvu/242

 be unjust, and still less should we forget what would have inevitably happened had the Russian Revolution not taken place, had the Sturmers and the Soukhomlinoffs not been put beyond all possibility of doing harm, had the Czar's régime, in a word, not collapsed beneath the weight of its own mistakes, crimes, and treasons.

Let us suppose, indeed, that Nicholas II had remained on the throne: is there any one who doubts that peace would have been made to-day between the armies of the North—a separate peace and a disastrous one, which would have opened up the way for Germany to the richest granaries of Europe? And instead of Russian liberty having been in spite of everything a great encouragement to the efforts of liberation and the other nations, this peace would have been followed by new grouping, a new coalition arising against Western Democracies, the Triple Alliance of the Czars of Petrograd, Vienna, and Berlin.

Thanks to the Revolution, on the contrary, Russia remains part of the great alliance of nations against all that remains of autocracy in the world. She is fighting