Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/30

 18 When Lord Milner was in Russia the situation was, briefly, this: The army was rapidly disintegrating, and there were many obvious indications of it. Discipline and obedience had in many instances to be upheld by sheer force, and two million deserters from the army were roaming about Russia. It is impossible to believe that the Allied Military Missions in Petrograd and at the Russian front were ignorant of these facts. Yet Lord Milner's Commission was obviously ignorant of them, for the deplorable situation of the Russian army and the mass desertions of Russian soldiers did not shake its confidence in the might of the Tsardom.

But not alone the army—the whole of Russia was in a terrible state. Petrograd was actually starving, but Lord Milner's Commission was unable to perceive even that patent fact. Let it be supposed that the Russian Government tried its very best to mislead the British Commission and to conceal the real situation. Even then it could only be put down to some miracle of blindness that the Commission was unaware of starvation in Petrograd. The Commissioners could not fail to observe the endless queues all day long before the bread shops all over the capital. Queues must then have been a new and disquieting thing to the British Commissioners, and yet even the sight of women standing for hours in the snow and bitter frost before bread shops had practically no effect upon the Commission's report about Russia's situation. But perhaps the food question was no concern of the British Government Commission. How, then, was it possible that Lord Milner paid so little attention to the grave political situation of Russia? We must assume that the British Ambassador at Petrograd informed Lord Milner about the seriousness of the political situation.

At present, of course, the former British Ambassador sees the situation of Russia before the Revolution in a very different light. But at that time he considered the situation grave enough.