decision, for France is a country of small shop-keepers, who never forget that Russia is in debt to them and who are even ready to bring ruin upon themselves, in order to claim their judicial rights to the last farthing. Therefore the voice of Robins had to remain the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and Mr. Wilson, the prisoner of Wall Street, while reading the pamphlet of our friend Ransome, doubtless shook his head and tearfully remarked: “What a pity that I cannot help Russia but have got to stab her in the back.”
But now, face to face with the attacks of the Allied bandits, Soviet Russia does not feel in the same mood towards the Allies as she did when Ransome wrote the last lines of his pamphlet. We are not going to die in order to go down to history, pure, like Antigone, who was forgiven everything because she served the will of God. “Ulster will fight! Ulster will be right!” The Allies’ attack on Russia, which in some ways reminds one of the attack on her of German imperialism, lets loose a flood of energy, calls forth an iron determination not to die a heroic death but to conquer in stubborn fight. And if Ransome finished his pamphlet with the words that history will judge England and America by the way in which they helped or hindered Soviet Russia, we are convinced that it will condemn them not only as capitalist countries which went to fight against a workers’ Russia. This condemnation is intolerable to the ethics of Ransome, but would be quite tolerable to the representatives of capitalist states, whose problem by no means includes help to a workers’ revolution. But history will punish them, for it will show they could not estimate the force of current events and in politics folly is punished more severely than ill-will. For either the Allies will not send great forces against Russia, and then they will, together with the Russian counter-revolutionaries, suffer disgraceful defeat, or else they will send great forces and then they will weaken themselves on their main fronts, which for geographical reasons are neither Siberian nor Northern Russian fronts. The allied attack also will show the working masses of England, France, America and Italy the meaning of such phrases as “democracy,” “freedom,” etc., in the name of which they are sent to die. It would be very good that at the moment when the Allies wish to concentrate all the strength of their people for war to the
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