Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/128

 116 to climb down and to adopt a more reasonable tone in its attitude to the people. The mutual interdependence between victory and reaction on the one hand, and defeat and Liberalism on the other, was only too clearly demonstrated during the first two years of war. This might well be expected to lead to defeatism, as it did in the Russo-Japanese war. But it is a most remarkable fact that defeatism never did appear in Russian progressive society during this war. There has been much talk about defeatism lately, and people have tried to accuse progressive Russia of being defeatist. Some publicists have not hesitated to represent Maxim Gorky as the head of the defeatist movement. But, as a matter of fact, there was no defeatist movement in Russia. Neither Maxim Gorky nor any other progressive Russian was defeatist—for the simple reason that the defeat of Russia would mean a victory of Germany and would thu9 strengthen the very source of Russian reaction. What was growing was not defeatism but the revolutionary spirit. It was becoming more and more evident that the Russian Government must be defeated, not by the enemy armies, but by the Russian people itself. Honest observers mistook this revolutionary feeling for defeatism, and dishonest reporters deliberately misrepresented it as such.

This revolutionary spirit began down below among the workers. It grew and grew, taking hold of greater and greater parts of the population and rising higher and higher in the social scale. The spirit of revolution became so great and powerful that the more observant members of the propertied and ruling classes began to urge the Government to make reforms. The famous programme of the progressive block of the Duma and of the Council of the Empire was the outcome of this foreboding of the inevitable Revolution. At length only one question remained: revolution must come—was it possible to achieve it during the war? The people were