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influence on Europe more than the short-sighted Bolsheviks imagine. In the meantime Russia needs the help of the Allies.
Russia gained influence in Europe through Pushkin, Tolstoy, Turgeniev, Dostoyevsky, Gorky; Russia will also have a great political influence, if she carries out the revolution consistently, the revolution of heads and hearts. With Russian Tsarism will fall the tsarism of Vienna and Berlin, a more dangerous species of tsarism because it uses science and developed capitalism. The tsarism of the Romanoffs was without culture and brutal, and for that very reason less noxious. The tsarism of the Russian masses and revolutionaries is worse; they rid themselves of the Tsar, but they have not yet ridden themselves of tsarism.
18. What about a Criticism of the Allies?
42. Someone will raise the objection that I am criticising the Germans and Austrians and have not a word to say about the Allies.
In doing so I would be formally justified; the Germans, not the Allies, offer themselves as teachers, leaders, the saviours of nations and mankind, and therefore it is our duty to scrutinize them carefully, especially when they force their culture upon us by way of their heavy artillery. The German is a peculiar mixture of a schoolmaster and a bully; he will give you a soul-gladdening sermon and then hit you with his fist in the eye or he may do it the other way round.
I would have enough to say concerning the French, English, Americans, Russians, etc., and could find plenty to criticise; I proved that by my work on Russia and by my critical activity at home. I have never been a national chauvinist; I have not even been a nationalist; I have stated frequently that nationality appealed to me from the social and moral side—the oppression of nations is a sin against humanity.
The sense of my arguments is not, and cannot be, that we should approve without reserve either of the French, or of the English, or of any other Western culture. The question at issue could be only as to a synthesis of all the elements and the component parts of culture worked out by all nations. That in fact is done by philosophers and specialists of all nations, and that is done, too, by many men, practically, who have the opportunity of becoming acquainted with various nations. Internationalism is not only the easy communication with foreign nations, but its cultural synthesis.
In this synthesis will also be included the German part, and it will not be a minute part; but as far as the political element of this synthesis is concerned, we cannot accept German Prussianism and Austrianism; we have to turn our faces to the example of the French, American, and English democracies: the general principles, not all the particulars, must come from the West.
We are told that one nation, one State, must be the leading, the principal State. Granted; but it must be primus inter pares, not above the others; the organisation of Europe must be democratic, not aristocratic. The mediæval idea of the aristocratic, theocratic imperialism is superseded by the philosophical, ecclesiastical, political and social revolution of the modern age.
The modern age? We are really in a period of transition, and all of us suffer from the defects, the halfway stage of this transition; the new era will come, and let us hope that this war, which compelled all mankind to revise its history and its efforts, will induce all nations to labour in an enlightened manner for themselves and for all mankind. History, as far as we know it and learn from it, has existed for only a few thousand years; what is that in comparison with the infinite number of centuries of life which the astronomers promise to our planet? Humanity is, indeed, at the beginning of its development; the philosophers of history in all nations declare that the epoch following the Great Revolution, political and philosophical, to be the beginning of an entirely new era; this war
