Page:Karl Kautsky - Georgia - tr. Henry James Stenning (1921).pdf/11

 the practical development of the two experiments side by side to its culminating point. The process of consolidation of the Georgian community was brutally interrupted by the Russian neighbour and competitor.

When, in January of this year, I set out upon my return journey to Europe, I heard that the representative of Soviet Russia spoke to the Georgian Government in tones of warmest sympathy. To-day the representatives of Georgia are in possession of proofs that already in December, 1920, the Russian Government were making their military preparation for the invasion of Georgia, which followed in February. Then the country again became a province of Russia, in the form of an independent Soviet Republic. The small country was hedged in by a Russian Red Army, which numbered 120,000 men, and plundered to the utmost extent. As a subjugated territory, Georgia suffered more severely from the domination of Bolshevism than unhappy Russia itself. The course of its complete ruination, up to the point of absolute starvation, which was completed within the Russian Empire in four years, only occupied a few months.

I described, in the German edition of this work, conditions which I had just seen, but which have been completely superseded by other conditions at the time this English edition appears. Nevertheless, the subject still retains vital interest. For we are still confronted with Russian Bolshevism, the antithesis of the Social-Democratic Republic of Georgia, a knowledge of which is so helpful in enabling us to judge rightly the methods of Soviet Russia.

The dictatorship of the Moscow tyrants cannot become permanent in Georgia, any more than in Russia itself. The Georgian people have survived many barbarous invasions; they will also survive the devastation of the Red Army, and the horrors of the Extraordinary Commissions. In Russia, and consequently in Georgia, too, democracy must eventually triumph again.