Page:Ossendowski - The Shadow of the Gloomy East.djvu/134

118 woman drove her so often into the bloodstained, fiery embrace of revolution, into Bolshevik madness and its abominably cruel revenge, or into those extreme associations or groups which are entirely outside even Soviet law.

It may be this position made the woman generally ant easy prey to man, a being not desirous of tenderness of feeling, but only of excitement, and the easiest way of self-forgetfulness.

The heroism, high courage, and magnanimity of the Russian woman are the instinctive protest against such enslavement, against such degradation to the position of a mere factor, an outlaw in the social and national life.

At present, under Soviet rule, having obtained the rights of a "human being and citizen," woman was torn from the family frame, compelled to hard work equal to that of man, carried away by the whirl which tossed her on the men, who more and more lose the sense of respect for the woman that becomes gradually "socialised."

"The decree on the Nationalisation of Women," never passed by the Soviet Government, was enforced by the life created by the Soviets. For, deprived of the moral support of a father, a husband, or a brother, compelled to send her children to the Communistic asylum—because having no time and no means to keep them, she hands them over to the "children's asylum of the Third International"—disillusioned in her