Page:René Marchand - Why I Side with the Social Revolution (1920).pdf/9

 When the Russian Revolution of February 1917 broke out I was staying at Petrograd on a convalescent holiday. The last sojourn I had made to the front, as also observations and impressions of the later months of 1916 did not allow of the least illusion as to the real State of affairs, i. e. the state of extreme fragility to which the Imperial Power had reached, the authority of which had been decreasing, in fact, ever since the disappearance of Stolypin, and which, in the course of the war, had rapidly foundered into anar­chic impotence, owing to a Bureucratism which was incapable of supplying the honesty and the  which circumstances demanded for the continuation of its work.

Nevertheless, I must confess, that the Revo­lution came to me as an unexpected for event. Absorbed as I was in the war, preocupied exclusively with the ways and means of concentrating a maximum of allied forces against Germany (who I knew was still powerful), it was no difficult task for me to mistake my wishes for actual realities. Unwilling to look at Russian internal politics front a standpoint other than that of the war, I finally persuaded myself (again following that which my feelings prompted) that—„the edifice would maintain itself somehow or other until the end, i. e. until victory“. I was too profoundly convinced, precisely owing to the extreme fragility of the whole, that any