Page:Pavel Ivanovich Biryukov - The New Russia - tr. Emile Burns (1920).djvu/15

 cage, and the public is astonished at the friendly relations between man and lion.

Before my departure from Moscow I read in a Soviet journal an article headed "The End of the Terror." In this article the author declared that the Russian Revolution was entering into its second period—a period of organisation, of work, of legislation—as the Revolutionary Government had now become so strong that it need no longer rely on those extraordinary measures which had been inevitable at the beginning. The beast had been tamed. I may add that during my stay in Moscow I went out day and night into the streets of the capital and never met with the least interference.

We often read in the Press articles headed "The End of Bolshevism," "The Dying Struggles of the present regime in Russia," and so on. These articles have appeared from time to time during the whole period of nearly two years that this regime has been in existence, and yet in spite of these articles the Soviet Government, is still alive and is growing stronger.

What then is the reason for its survival? We must first ask, why did it first succeed? The present Government overthrew the preceding Government at the moment of greatest chaos, resulting from the dethronement of the Czar, military defeat, the realisation by the people that their hopes had been disappointed, and the general misery caused by the protracted war. Demobilisation, or rather the dispersal of the army of its own accord, increased the disorder. The present Government, by its decrees, gave legal sanction to two of the people's aspirations—its desire for peace and its desire for land—and by doing this it won the people's confidence.