Page:Michael Farbman - Russia & the Struggle for Peace (1918).djvu/35



WELL remember how at the beginning of the war people in Russia used to discuss the chances of Germany's economic exhaustion under the pressure of the blockade, and I wonder now that no one realised that the economic isolation of Germany was, in fact, a double-edged weapon. Nobody seemed to grasp that the same process which was injuring Germany was bound to injure Russia still more.

It is astonishing that neither the Russian Government nor the Russian economists foresaw any danger in the economic isolation of Russia. At any rate, I can state definitely that the Russian Press, which used to prophesy the inevitable and rapid economic ruin of Germany under the pressure of the blockade and the war, had not a single article on the danger of the isolation of Russia from the West. Neither before, nor at the beginning of the war, did the Russian Government take a single measure to ameliorate the dangerous position in which Russia actually found herself after the war broke out.

And yet nothing could be more clear than that the closing of Russia's frontiers with the Central Empires, the chief countries for Russian exports and imports, was bound to have the worst effects on the economy of Russia.

The predominance of Germany in Russia's foreign trade is a matter of common knowledge. Particularly since the war, much has been written about the extent of Germany's trade with Russia in peace time. And when the war broke out there was a considerable amount of rejoicing in this country at the prospect of