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Never, in fact, could I have expected (despite the first rays of truth that had at last, by the very force of circumstances, penetrated in my mind) the prodigious burst of energy and vitality in face of the menace of death, which on the eve of our landing at Archangel, the bolshevik power seemed to on all sides put forward. Suddenly I saw, the latter rise to the height of a Government in the proudest revolutionary acceptance of the word; and, at this moment, I profoundly felt, contrary to what I had so long believed on the basis of vile calmuny, that, the Bolshevik government was really and essentially a Russian government, which relied on the popular masses of the people of the country and not upon a handful of adventurers, and foreign agents, imposed by artifice and violence, upon the passiveness of the people.
Without doubt in was as yet, as I wish to emphasize, only a first ray of truth: I still did not clearly understand bolshevism: its work of organization, its constitution of a new proletarian state continually escaped me. As yet I did not distinguish that the force of Bolshevism was due to the realisation of the Soviet idea. I continued to think of the latter as something apart from it. Now, however, one thing was clear to me and caused no longer the shadow of a doubt. It was that the Bolshevik Government at that moment was the true Government of Russia, and that far from being in the pay of German Imperialism, it fought against the latter with the same desperate energy with which it prepared itself to parry the blow by which we unjustly wished to crush it.
The Brest Treaty had been signed only with a
