Page:René Marchand - Allied Agents in Soviet Russia (1918).djvu/7

 That is why not only is she not going to strengthen her action in Russia, but, on the contrary, I am convinced that she is about to be forced to evacuate, between now and the winter, an important part of the occupied territories. Doubtless she is, and probably will continue some months, engaged in saving appearances, in huckstering and haggling. But for any keen observer it is beyond doubt that her days in Ukraine—the region of most interest to her—are numbered henceforth, in spite of the atrocities she is committing there. Her detachments, as I have definite proof in many cases, frequently reduce whole villages to ashes. And, as far as the Ukraine is concerned, everyone can discover for himself that, as a matter of fact, the Bolsheviks do not cease supporting in a more and more active manner the peasants' and workmen's revolts in that territory, and especially that they transmit munitions and money to the insurgents. This fact, which I have been able to verify from various anti-Bolshevist sources, seems to me absolutely incompatible with the existence of a hidden alliance between the Soviet Government and Berlin.

I will not return to the subject with which I have attempted to deal in my letter to M. Albert Thomas; I wish to speak of the situation actually created in Russia by the latest events.

Of course, more than ever, I long for the day when the revolutionary and dictatorial procedure of the present Government makes way for normal methods, and when another Government will be able at length to put an end to the prostitution and street licence, to the uncontrolled rule of irresponsible adventurers, to the current corruption of administrative officials, to the odious abuses of Demagogy (inseparable, alas, from every revolution), to the legalised pillage of churches and the gratuitous insulting of religion when it will be able to recreate, in the breasts of the masses, the great principle of human fraternity!

These excesses, so deeply painful, so cruelly unworthy of our age, are, all the same, in large measure the inevitable result of the state of anarchy which has spread little by little throughout the country. I am, however, profoundly convinced that, in any case, what we are actually witnessing here is purely transitory, and that, by revolution or evolution—for an evolution of Bolshevism itself, at a certain moment, is not a priori an impossibility—we shall proceed to new forms.

But, contrary to what I had thought, Bolshevism is not the artificial government of one city (Petrograd, Moscow), thrown up by the hazard of a revolt and destined to disappear again in a revolt; it is a government which, if supported only by one part of the popu-