Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/103

 Armenians. But they would have us believe that it was Georgian workers and peasants who rose against their own Government and captured Tiflis.

One Moscow telegram stated: "The Georgian Revolutionary Committee announce the seizing of Tiflis by the revolutionary Georgian workers and peasants."

Thus the same Georgian Communists, who up to January could only secure an insignificant representation in any worker's or "peasant" organisation of Georgia, under conditions of the fullest liberty of legal activity, had suddenly gained sufficient strength in February to overthrow the Georgian Government.

This is sufficiently remarkable, but more remarkable is the following.

A rebellion of revolutionary workers usually first breaks out in an industrial centre, and thence spreads over the remainder of the country. The Communist revolt of the: "revolutionary workers of Georgia" did not break out, in Tiflis, which comprises half of the industrial workers of Georgia, but, as the Russian report itself establishes, in remote villages, inhabited by a backward agrarian population.

In such villages there were, indeed, numerous Communists, well armed, and led by those who cherished implacable hatred of any Menshevist organisation. They were the Russian Armies, and only they were in a position to lend the "Georgian Revolutionary Committee" the strength to advance successfully against Tiflis, and to seize the town.

If, in spite of all, the Russian Government still attempts to create the belief that its three strong armies on the southern, eastern, and north-western boundaries of Georgia refrained from any share in the fight between the Communists and Menshevist Georgia, this is obviously because invasion by the Russian Armies would represent the most impudent and shameless mockery of the principles most sacred to every Socialist, which principles even the most hardened