The Crisis in Russia | Page 4

the existence of a far more serious struggle, in
which the revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are
fighting on the same side. They fight without cooperation, and throw
insults and bullets at each other in the middle of the struggle, but they
are fighting for the same thing. They are fighting the same enemy.
Their quarrel with each other is for both parties merely a harassing
accompaniment of the struggle to which all Europe is committed, for
the salvage of what is left of European civilization.
The threat of a complete collapse of civilization is more imminent in
Russia than elsewhere. But it is clear enough in Poland, it cannot be
disregarded in Germany, there is no doubt of its existence in Italy,
France is conscious of it; it is only in England and America that this
threat is not among the waking nightmares of everybody. Unless the
struggle, which has hitherto been going against us, takes a turn for the
better, we shall presently be quite unable to ignore it ourselves.
I have tried to state the position in Russia today: on the one hand to
describe the crisis itself, the threat which is forcing these people to an
extreme of effort, and on the other hand to describe the organization
that is facing that threat; on the one hand to set down what are the main
characteristics of the crisis, on the other hand to show how the
comparatively small body of persons actually supplying the Russian
people with its directives set about the stupendous task of moving that
vast inert mass, not along the path of least resistance, but along a path
which, while alike unpleasant and extremely difficult, does seem to
them to promise some sort of eventual escape.
No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind stating my
own reason for writing this one (which has taken time that I should
have liked to spend on other and very different things). Knowledge of
this reason will permit the reader to make allowances for such bias I
have been unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my
book perhaps nearly as objective as I should myself wish it to be.
It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battle
front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a
single army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when
countries, each one severally doing its best to arrest its private
economic ruin, do their utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each

other, we are witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization
itself. There are people in both camps who believe that armed and
economic conflict between revolutionary and non-revolutionary Europe,
or if you like between Capitalism and Communism, is inevitable. These
people, in both camps, are doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy
pessimists, in Moscow no less than in London and Paris, they go so far
as to say "the sooner the better," and by all means in their power try to
precipitate a conflict. Now the main effort in Russia to-day, the
struggle which absorbs the chief attention of all but the few Communist
Churchills and Communist Millerands who, blind to all else, demand
an immediate pitched battle over the prostrate body of civilization, is
directed to finding a way for Russia herself out of the crisis, the
severity of which can hardly be realized by people who have not visited
the country again and again, and to bringing her as quickly as possible
into a state in which she can export her raw materials and import the
manufactured goods of which she stands in need. I believe that this
struggle is ours as well as Russia's, though we to whom the threat is
less imminent, are less desperately engaged. Victory or defeat in this
struggle in Russia, or anywhere else on the world's surface, is victory or
defeat for every one. The purpose of my book is to make that clear. For,
bearing that in mind, I cannot but think that every honest man, of
whatever parity, who cares more for humanity than for politics, must
do his utmost to postpone the conflict which a few extremists on each
side of the barricades so fanatically desire. If that conflict is indeed
inevitable, its consequences
will be less devastating to a Europe cured of her wounds than to a
Europe scarcely, even by the most hopeful, to be described as
convalescent. But the conflict may not be inevitable after all. No man
not purblind but sees that Communist Europe is changing no less than
Capitalist Europe. If we succeed in postponing the struggle long
enough, we may well succeed in postponing it until the war-like on