No one contends that the Bolsheviks are angels. I only ask that men shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds them and see that the ideal for which they are struggling, in the only way in which they can struggle is among those lights which every man of young and honest heart sees before him somewhere on the road, and not among those other lights from which he resolutely turns away. These men who have made the Soviet Government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with clean shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will live beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have written a page of history more daring than any other which I can remember in the history of humanity. They are writing it amid showers of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours and in my own. But, when the thing is over, and their enemies have triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic at noon, and that page will be as white as the snows of Russia, glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in Petrograd.
And when, in after years, men read that page they will judge your country and mine, your race and mine, by the help or hindrance they gave to the writing of it.
Arthur Ransome.
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