Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/27

 Rh Is it any argument in favour of the Bolshevik régime that their White opponents are corrupt and incompetent, owing, in part, to the conditions forced upon them by the Allies (who throughout have encouraged only a negative and vacillating policy, viz.: anti-monarchial and anti-Bolshevik), and in part to the presence and influence of alien intriguers on the White side? Yet General Gough and many other superficial thinkers in England appear to imagine it is.

Is it surprising that discipline cannot be maintained in an army composed of warring elements, where the few loyal officers are exposed to the sabotage and conspiracy of alien intriguers and traitors? A system of sabotage which began with the first organization of the Volunteer Army in Siberia where a few loyal officers rallied round the Czecho-Slovaks. The same Czecho-Slovaks who eventually stabbed Kolchak in the back and secured his defeat; finally surrendering him to the Bolsheviks for execution. Is it surprising that Kolchak found it next to impossible to administer occupied territory when his political counsellors could unite on no policy beyond a willingness to defer all questions of policy and principle to the decision of a Constituent Assembly which is to be convoked after the destruction of the Soviet administration, and decline to accept even the temporary makeshift which might bind them to a definite principle?

Above all is it surprising that the White administration could have no policy, and the White Army could have no discipline, when one remembers the history of its growth. The part in it for instance, played by one, Savinkoff, who after a little difference with his next-of-kin the Bolsheviks and his failure to find employment with Denikin, joined