Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/106

 the first Napoleon. In this quality, and not in their positive achievements, rests the great power of attraction which they exercise over so many persons who live far from their jurisdiction.

One of the stages of the road to India is Persia, into which the Bolshevists have already penetrated, although unsuccessfully, last year. At that time, their basis was too narrow. It would be considerably broadened by the possession of Georgia. Thus Moscow world policy required this country for further military progress.

As chance had it, "Rosta" at the same time as it announced its account of the Georgian conflict had the following dispatch from. Moscow. "On February 28th an agreement was signed in Moscow between Russia and Afghanistan."

The conquest of Georgia is a part of Russia's Eastern policy directed against England.

The likeness: to the policy of Napoleon is a close one, and has already been pointed out. But the resemblance is more than a mere chance. We are struck more and more with the manner, in which the course of the great French Revolution has been repeated in that of Russia, although the international situation and ideology are of quite a different order to-day than at the end of the eighteenth century.

Montesquieu, Voltaire, and J. J. Rousseau are scarcely read to-day; Marx dominates the hour, and present-day Russia is not, like the France of one hundred years ago, the most highly developed, but the most backward of the countries of the European continent. But the principal tasks, agrarian reform and the overcoming of Absolutism, corresponded in Russia in 1917 so closely with those of France in 1789 that since that date the Revolution here has followed the same stages as there, only in Russia with younger and simpler social sections in considerably grosser forms.

Here, as there, we find first of all, a middle class revolution. In France, it developed into the Reign of Terror of the Jacobins, who were supported by the