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INTERNATIONAL SITUATION (Continued) (5)

June a Belshevik judiciously concealed the fact on a tramway and in
company and might be roughly handled, in August nurses frightened naughty child-
ren into good behaviour by telling them The Bolsheviks will get you if you
don't watch out!"--in November they are bossing the show.

Tohaikevsky, of the father of the Peasants Cooperative Movement
and one of the most prominent figures in the Peasants Sovyet, the latter
organized on the lines of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Sovyet, said that the
Russians are young, naive, and a people of contrasts. Wonderfully devel-
oped theories boldly advocated, poor fulfillment in practice because of
lack of experiene. Electricity in Petrograd, not even kerosine in
the village. A brilliant school of authors and the great body of the
people in intellectual darkness. "And now" said he "they wish to complete
a social revolution, which no other country has been able to do, before
they have finished a political one." They will run the full course like a
disease and end up learning sense by bumping their hands against a brick
wall.

Certainly it seems as if the Revolution had about gone the limit
with such warped minds as Lenin and Trotsky in power, directing affairs from
the Emelny Institute. Yesterday a newspaper quoted Lenin as saying that
the train was going full speed ahead to the goal of social revolution, and
facetiously added in amplificiation of the figure, that if this were true
lots of passengers were jumping off! Among these passengers are a num-
ber of Bolsheviks, who have always been considered most extreme but for
when the Lenin-Trotsky tyranny is quite too high-handed.

The Bolshevik "government" lacks the mechanism of government and is
no government at all. The ministries are on a strike and will not work
for it. The Railway Employers Union is against it. Practically the
whole intellectual and spiritual force of Russia is against it, but the
"dark" (i.e. unenlightened) masses of workmen and soldiers support it
carried out the coup d'etat, which brought it in, and are still supporting
realization of PEACE, BREAD, and LAND. When they fail to realize these
in the face of the winter, which has now set in in earnest, Lenin and
Trotsky must fall.

It would seem that when they fall it will mean that the malady
has reached its crisis and that soberer forces must follow in a reversion
to a more reasonable situation. Here there are two guesses; either that
a "strong man" might arise and take charge of a country so miserable through
hunger and want as not to discuss political forms for some time, whereby
a monarchy might be established,- or the more moderate Socialists, now des-
pised and cast aside, might pick up the threads and slowly build up some-
thing. In the the latter either liberal non-Socialist elements might be
joined else. After much thinking I have come to have doubts about
the "strong man" theory in Russia, and to feel that, direct and satisfying
as it might be to have a new broom sweeping clean and brushing all opposition
aside, a Napoleon in short, it may never be. Russia is not compact and
centralized like France and the character is different.

Tchaikovsky and Skobalov, who called at the Embassy, took a
view midway between these two. They said that if nothing is done the coun-
try would go to the "bow-wows" and a monarchy would result, which would be
of a form to brush aside many of the liberties, which have been gained,
but they considered it possible by quick ation to form a moderate govern-
ment with the exclusion of the Bolsheviks, if that government could go to

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