Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/17



The last phase of the—by no means unforeseen—collapse of the White anti-Bolshevist forces which may be said to have begun with the failure of Yudenitch to take Petrograd in October, 1919, and ended with the capture of Kolchak in the East, the retreat of Denikin in the South, the new threat to Poland and Central Europe in the West and to Persia and India in the East, had, at least, one signal merit; it at last brought us face to face with the reality of the situation—a situation which compels a total re-examination of our attitude and policy towards it, and which makes the once fashionable attitude of complacent indifference, not only ludicrous, but impossible.

It is easy to hear of an outbreak of cholera in some far distant land with becoming composure, and even, in the fullness of one's heart, to send two shillings to the fund for supplying Christian Hottentots with medical and spiritual comforts. In the same spirit of magnanimity it has been easy to watch from afar the conflagration in Russia, and, under the blissful delusion that it is no concern of ours, to mumble with decorous complacency, "Russia must work out her own salvation without interference from outside," or "Hands off Russia, business as usual." It is true that not very long ago Western Europe, engrossed as she was with a little quarrel of her own (purely about a matter of abstract principle—as to whether the world