I lacked. As I knew that the middle-class and the Socialists (the Democrats and the Revolutionaries) were unprepared, I had expected a demonstrative outbreak, not a revolution, to follow the reverses in the field. The meeting of the Duma, notwithstanding its dissolution by the Tsar, had been such a demonstration. What surprised me was that the army and the whole machinery of State, together with the Tsarist system itself, should be so deeply shaken, however clearly I had long seen through and condemned Tsardom and its incapacity.
With official Russia my relations had not been pleasant. For years I had been on the Index; but, on the other hand, I had friends in the progressive parties. Though the Russian translation of my first book “On Suicide” had been destroyed, it had aroused the interest of Tolstoy. The censorship passed my “Critique of Marxism,” which was widely read in Russian and made my name known. The Marxists disagreed with it but it did not estrange even them. Then, once again, my “Russian Studies” were banned. Nevertheless, in the German edition, they attracted attention. In the autumn of 1914 Trotsky wrote disparagingly of my “Russia and Europe,” from a one-sided Marxist standpoint, in the Viennese Social Democratic Review, “Der Kampf.”
Knowing that the Russian reactionaries liked neither me nor the Allies, I did not hasten to Russia during the Tsarist régime. A conflict, which might have arisen with the Russian Government, would have encouraged our enemies. For this reason I had always tried to influence official Russia through Russian and Allied diplomatic channels and by means of Svatkovsky and other Russians who came often to the West, and to keep in touch with our own people in Russia by letters and messengers and through members of our colony who came to see me. But when the Revolution had put my personal friends and acquaintances in power, some of them being members of the Government, I decided to go to Russia and to carry through the creation of an army among our prisoners of war. Upon Milyukoff as Foreign Minister I counted especially. We had long known each other and, as I have said, we had met in England during the war and had agreed upon the chief points of a war and peace programme.
Another reason for going to Russia, where I expected to stay a few weeks, was the serious position that had grown up on the Western front at the beginning of 1917. So, having made the necessary arrangements in London and discussed conditions in Russia with Lord Milner, who had just returned
