Petrograd was brought about by hunger, and the commissariat troops were the first to revolt. The lack of weapons for the army, the senseless recruiting of masses of men which, in the autumn of 1916, swept the labourers from the soil, were symptoms and effects of a moribund administration. I am entitled thus to judge Russia during the war because I had judged and condemned her before the war. My judgment is not founded only upon her failures in the war, since these were but the outcome of the severe moral disease of the whole Tsarist system and, therewith, of the Russian people. On this point, study of pre-revolutionary Russia and especially of her literature leaves no room for doubt. Her greatest writers show us the sickness and enfeeblement of the Russian soul, yet also its elemental yearning for truth. Tolstoy did but bring this yearning into high relief when he descried the foundations of art in truth and truthfulness. Tsarism was untrue; and the war brought out its untruthfulness no whit more clearly or fully than it had been revealed by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontoff, Goncharoff, Turgenieff, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy and Gorky. The Russians now call Dostoievsky the Prophet of the Revolution—in the war and the Revolution, Russian literature found bloody confirmation.
Russia fell, had to fall, as Kirieyevsky would say, through her own inner falsehood. This inner falsehood merely found in the war a great opportunity to stand forth in all its nakedness, and Tsarism collapsed in and through itself. It had contrived to civilize Russia crudely, to lend some European quality to the nobles, the officials and the officers; but the peasantry and the peasant soldier—who were Russia—lived outside this Tsarist civilization. Hence they gave it no protection when, in the war, it failed through its own insufficiency and inward poverty.
As to the Russian Church, to whose inertia much of the blame is assigned, its sin was a sin of omission. It cared too little for the moral education of the people. What the Slavophils, and especially Kirieyevsky, praised in the Russian Church was, as Chaadaieff saw, precisely its chief shortcoming.
Russia and the Slavs.
This conviction as to the moral basis of Tsarism I had reached long before the war; and, in my book on Russia which appeared before the war, I had analysed and described Russia’s unhappy state. Thus, when war broke out, I could not agree
