sceptical eye, it was too late to criticize her publicly or to reduce our pro-Russianism to proper proportions. Even before the war my “open-eyed love” of Russia—as our poet Neruda might have termed it—had often been misunderstood. Now, amid the war excitement, it would not have been understood at all. Yet I was no whit behind our pro-Russians in my love of Russia, that is to say, of the Russian nation and people; but love cannot and ought not to silence reason. A cool, clear head is needed in war and revolution, for wars are not waged or revolutions made by imagination and enthusiasm, feeling and instinct alone. I trod in the footsteps of Havlíček,[1] who first showed us Russia as she is, and I would let no man and nothing lead me astray. I knew well when, how and how far even a democratic politician—precisely because he is democratic—could and should go with the majority and be guided by general opinion.
Russia, especially official Russia in whose hands lay the decision to make war, was confronted with a Slavonic problem of her own. In her aspirations to Constantinople, aspirations strengthened and even hallowed by old religious tradition, she had encountered the resistance of Austria who, in the service of Rome and of the pan-German idea, was likewise pressing towards the Balkans. For Austria, as for Russia, the small Balkan peoples were but means to an end. Here the Catholic Austrian and the Orthodox Russian tendencies collided. Austria and Russia competed for influence and supremacy in Serbia, Roumania and Bulgaria—countries bordering on the territories of the two rivals, nearest to them in historical development and therefore objects of their special attention.
To the north also—in Galicia and Poland—political and religious antagonism had long made rivals of Austria and Russia. It was here that official Russia saw her main Slavonic problem, though it had been, from time immemorial, subordinated to political and ecclesiastical ambitions. Really, in its broader, racial, pan-Slav sense, the Slavonic problem was understood by few in Russia—only by some Slavonic specialists and historians and by a part of the intelligentsia, who nevertheless looked upon it largely from a Russian religious standpoint. For this reason Russian interest in us Czechs, as in the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, lacked keenness. The Russian people
