Page:George Pitt-Rivers - The World Significance of the Russian Revolution (1920).pdf/52

 36 interesting. 'This auditorium,' they were told, 'has become a place for pacific meetings and for friendly intercourse between the bourgeois and the proletariat'; and from the revolutionary point of view nothing could be more inadmissible."

It is perhaps fair to point out that the religious movement, revived by the revitalised Russian Church, is a menace to Bolshevism, not merely because it calls itself Christian, but because it is national, spiritual, vigorous and integrating, and is incompatible with an anti-national, international, economic materialism. On the other hand, there was nothing which aided Bolshevism more thoroughly or effectively than the type of invertebrate Christianity (Tolstoyism), which a Russian author, writing from Ecaterinodar, refers to in the following excerpt: "Bolshevism," he says, "was fostered during the first six or nine months of the Revolution by the absurd idealism of the intelligentsia who quoted the text, "Do not overcome evil by evil!" This was the genuine spirit of the teaching of that quaint enthusiast, Leo Tolstoy, whose doctrine of non-resistance to evil suited the Bolsheviks so admirably, and which served to reconcile the teaching of the Great Nazarene so conveniently with the teaching of that other Hebrew Prophet, Karl Marx: a circumstance which no doubt greatly contributed to the popularity of that hybrid creed among the intelligentsia of Russia and Western Europe, before the war.

We can, at any rate, understand the very natural outburst of an educated Russian workman, witnessed and reported by an Englishman who escaped last year. "How