Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/125

Rh the public were beaming- with delight, and seeing the rapidity of the mobilisation they rubbed their hands and said: "Well done! At last, for once in a way, we did not let ourselves be fooled!" Yanushkevich and Sukhomlinov said in their trial that the Tsar afterwards thanked them for not obeying his orders to postpone the mobilisation. They were too modest. They might with equal justification have said that "all Russia" thanked them.

The whole aspect of Russia in 1914, and especially the attitude of the militarists, goes to prove that the Government was looking for war. This is confirmed by certain documents which have lately been published. Baron Rosen, one of the prominent Russian diplomats (former Ambassador in Washington and in Tokio), who in the last years before the war was back in Russia as a member of the Council of the Empire, has affirmed that the Government was actually trying to engineer a war in order to drown the growing ferment of revolution in a flood of war enthusiasm. But even though it were not proved that the Government was looking for war, the Government was certainly not looking for peace. If it had no share in the conflict which was instigated by the Austro-German diplomacy, at any rate it cannot be doubted that in July, 1914, the Russian Government could not help regarding this conflict as a happy chance of turning the tide from questions of internal policy to external passions. It is a fact that July, 1914, was the most revolutionary month since the suppression of the Revolution in 1905. The arrival of Poincaré in Petrograd a few days before war broke out coincided with labour unrest and strikes which exceeded anything that had taken place since Stolypin's coup d'état. No doubt the strike and the revolutionary excitement in Petrograd (there were actually barricades erected in the labour quarters of the town) were duly estimated in Potsdam, and together with the Irish {{{smallrefs}}