Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/4

ii current events—facts, I believe, which you have carefully and personally collected and selected, not only from books, but from the lips and letters of Russian eye-witnesses and sufferers, from foes as well as from friends of the great Revolution. What I appreciate more than this new light thrown on a dark subject, more than the conclusion drawn by you from this wealth of facts, is the psychological insight which you display in detecting the reasons why a movement so extraordinarily bestial and so violently crazy as the Revolution was able to succeed and finally to overcome its adversaries. For we are confronted with two questions which need answering and which, in my opinion, you have answered in your pamphlet. These questions are: (1) How has the Soviet Government, admittedly the Government of an insignificant minority, succeeded not only in maintaining but in strengthening its position in Russia after two and a half years of power? And (2) Why has the Soviet Government, in spite of its outward bestiality and brutal tyranny succeeded in gaining the sympathies of an increasing number of people in this country? You give the answer: Bolshevism was opposed by Democracy only, and a Democracy which was too cowardly to draw the last consequences of its own creed, which, of course, is ultimately nothing else but Bolshevism. The Bolshevist simply did what his father, Mr. Democrat, said he would do if he could but never dared to do—hence the latter's vacillation and hypocrisy and failure, hence the former’s energy, sincerity and success. "No movement" you rightly say on p. 14 about the "White Opposition"—"representing a heterogeneous jumble of contradictory elements can ever defeat another movement, which at any rate knows its own mind and allows of no compromise."

What, then, is this wonderful "own mind" of the Bolshevists? You rightly recognize that there is an ideology behind it and you clearly diagnose it as an ancient ideology. There is nothing new under the Sun, it is even nothing new that this Sun rises in the East.