Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/83



For many inexperienced observers, as well as interested judges of this great historical question, Russian bolshevism, founded on the principles of universal sociology of Marxian « critical » and « scientific » world-economics, is the beginning of a new era.

More attentive observation, however, quickly shows that the phenomenon is a purely Russian one: not a theory of Russian thinkers based on Marxism, but the inevitable result of long development and, because the past of no other nation contains the same elements, bolshevism, as such, cannot be transplanted, but, at best, can only provoke a corresponding contagion of social reform and economic change in other nations, admittedly under the same title, but necessarily as a heritage of a quite different past and the heir of quite other moral and material necessities of the present.

Communism, in other words, is not a strange doctrine for the Russians, but the doctrinary presentation of certain very old traditions and its adoption in our day meets a hitherto unsatisfied desire of the Russian masses in the historical progress of their country.

As early as the 9th century the immense Russian territory contained thousands of scattered villages where life was primitive in the extreme and which were unable by themselves to form a state. The state emanated from beyond the borders of this chaotic leviathan. The Roumanians