Page:Ossendowski - From President to Prison.djvu/355

Rh old times, customs, faith and ideals. The Soviet leaders also have not given this understanding, they who woke and duped the Russian soul with words pointing to liberty, only to shackle Russia even the more strongly with the chains of illegality and to deprive the nation of its last glimpse of hope, its faith in God, and to push it over the brink into the pit of hellish torture, the story of which is the most tragic page in the annals of humanity down through all the long centuries of recorded history.

Taken under the fostering care of wisdom and honesty, the Russian soul could certainly produce treasures of sacrifice and idealism; but, left to itself, it tends to turn criminal, its crimes resulting from its despair and the indescribable longing after something which it does not know itself and cannot visualize. This fact was very graphically demonstrated by the Ivans of the prison, in whom I saw fellow-men led and dominated by those two evil guides, suffering and despair.

Throughout the whole of my homeward journey across the wide continents of Asia and Europe I spent practically all my hours in such ruminations and especially in assembling and marshalling the more dramatic events of my prison life, with the purpose of founding upon them a romance with which I hoped to reach the hearts of thinking Russians and through them win for the mass of prisoners still left in the stone bags some amelioration of their lot. But, although I planned and resolved to execute this work immediately upon my arrival in St. Petersburg, it was really three years before I could batter down the continuing persecutions of the Government and gain for myself stable enough conditions to give me the necessary leisure and mental freedom to complete the work.