was murdered in Switzerland in 1923 and lies buried outside the Kremlin walls, close to the grave of John Reed. On the afternoon of Vorovsky's funeral the author of these articles wandered through Red Square and meditated on the significance of the strange fellowship that could so unite in common burial a Russian revolutionist and the brilliant but erratic Harvard graduate.

Krassin, easily distinguishable among the other commissars as brains temporizing with victorious passions, recently succumbed to a mortal illness while Soviet Ambassador to England. Dzerzhinsky, chief of the dreaded secret police, the Cheka, executioner of 1,800,000 victims, the man with the eyes of a gazelle and the soul of a FouquierTinville, expired suddenly and mysteriously in 1926 after an impassioned speech of protest against certain heterodox tendencies of his colleagues. Voikov, who signed the death warrant of Tsar Nicholas II and the imperial family, was himself murdered in Warsaw on June 7, 1927, falling victim to the vengeance of an exiled Russian youth not twenty years of age.

But after each casualty the ranks closed tighter. Internal dissension is met by stern domestic discipline. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev dispute the supremacy of Stalin, Bucharin, and Rykov. They pay the penalty of schism by relegation to obscure posts within the Party. Thus the essential dictatorship of ten men, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, persists unchallenged over 140,000,000 Russians. With unshaken confidence, Moscow is celebrating its tenth year in continuous control of approximately one seventh of the habitable surface of the earth.

If history may be conceived as philosophy teaching by example, may it not be time, even as early as the

tenth year after the event, to seek a helpful interpretation of the Russian experiment?

For Russia not only presents a story that will engage the best historians of the world for generations to come; it is an actual, insistent fact of the present. Bolshevism is an international reality which only the hopelessly intransigent can ignore. If the World War did not entirely destroy modern organized society, it assuredly did bring civilization to the crossroads. The victors of the second Russian revolution, that of November 1917, frankly and brutally took the road to the extreme left, driving a weakened, demoralized Russia before them, calling on stronger nations to follow. That way madness lies, as they have now learned and reluctantly admitted, taught by the inexorable laws of nature operating through economic pressure. But it is my deliberate judgment, based on six years' close observation of European and Russian affairs, that no lasting peace is possible in Europe or Asia until the breach between Russia and the West is securely bridged. For that difference, that breach, is not a chasm dug by national hatred, by historic feud or racial antipathy. One or other of such specific motives made Greeks the natural enemies of Turks, made France distrust Germany, and set Celt against Saxon. But the issue created by the second Russian revolution strikes at the very concept of human society as now organized and proposes an entirely new

adapted to the impersonal 'mass man' who should displace forever 'the soulencumbered individual man.' It was meant, and so proclaimed by its protagonists, to be a challenge to the modern State as constituted, not merely in Imperial Russia, but throughout the entire civilized world. It was philosophic materialism in arms, the most radical school of thought that has ever come upon the stage of human affairs.

The leaders of Bolshevism deliberately identified and confused, in the estimation of the masses, all civilization with the particular Russian form detested by the peasants because of their economic serfdom under it and hated by the liberals because of the savage repression of all their efforts for the enlargement of human liberty through constitutional reform. Interpreting all life, therefore, in terms of their own memories of Siberia, the Bolsheviki generalized savagely, and, of course, erroneously. Lenin registered his bitter oath of universal revenge on the day his brother Alexander Ulianov was executed by the Tsarist Government in 1887 for attempted regicide. Lenin was wrong. But the Tsars were equally wrong in obstinately refusing to modify an insupportable autocracy that drove men to such desperation.

II

The Russian problem derives its hugeness and its complexity from the very soil that gave it birth, inheriting these characteristics as legitimately and historically as the Russian peasant does his wise simplicity and his naïve mysticism. To be sure, such of the intelligentsia as escaped the Cheka during the Terror often begged us foreigners to consider Bolshevism, not as Russian in character and origin at all, but as a distinctly foreign invention, imported into Russia by the

German High Staff during the war as a purely military manœuvre to destroy the morale of the Russian people and cripple the army. Both objectives were achieved with characteristic efficiency, even though the Frankenstein monster thus created almost destroyed its sponsor when Bolshevist revolutionary propaganda nearly triumphed in Germany in 1923.

In substantiation of their protests, it was often pointed out to us by native Russians that the anti-individualistic character of Soviet institutions is as far removed from the dreamy idealism of Slav peasantry as it is from the avowed aspirations of typical revolutionary leaders like Alexander Herzen, Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Chernov, Martov, Spiridonova, Milyukov, Pitirim, Sorokin, and Grandmother Breshkovskaya. This reservation must, however, be interpreted as their criticism of Bolshevism's impracticable, unworkable answer to Russia's century-long struggle for political freedom and economic independence. It does not, I think, invalidate my contention that Russia's present fate was clearly Russia's destiny, self-imposed, foreseen through decades, and inescapable, granted the policy pursued by the Russian Government for the thirtyseven years that elapsed between the assassination of Alexander II and the murder of Nicholas II.

Time, before whose impartial tribunal all men and institutions pass for judgment, is gradually furnishing the perspective indispensable for an objective and unobstructed view of that sinister record of blunder, Asiatic callousness, reaction, and Byzantine haughtiness. The unfolding panorama of Russian history from 1613- when young Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch Philaret, mounted the throne - until the last of the Romanovs perished in the hideous massacre of

Ekaterinburg reveals a destiny that swept to its finale with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. A thesis common in monarchist and émigré circles labors to prove that the Bolshevist revolution was an unnatural, un-Russian phenomenon artificially created by two foreign influences, German militarism and Jewish hatred, and then imposed by treachery on a demoralized and exhausted people. But on the strength of the record, and in view of documentary evidence now becoming increasingly available, I am obliged to reject that theory. Though the instrumental rôle played both by Jews and by Germany was considerable and active, and though I am familiar with the remarkable work of Mrs. Webster tracing the revolutionary movement, through Lenin and Marx, back to Bakunin, Anacharsis Clootz, Gracchus Babeuf, and the Illuminati of Weishaupt, I maintain that Bolshevism is a natural phase in the evolution of a strictly historical process originating in the soil, the culture, and the politics of Russia itself. When one disentangles the matted roots of that gnarled and knotted growth he will discover many domestic causes: one philosophic, another geographic, some political, economic, and racial, one religious, and the final, psychological and emotional. The first six can only be touched upon lightly here and will form the subject of a later and more detailed study. The last will be examined more minutely in the present paper.

1. The impetus and direction given to revolutionary thought by the morbid pessimism of so many Russian intellectuals during the latter half of the nineteenth century only served to tighten the noose around their own necks. Despite the prophetic warnings of true lovers of the fatherland, like Dostoievsky and Ivan Bunin, they

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popularized a philosophy of despair that helped Russia into the abyss.

2. The 'land hunger' of the peasants, that perennial thirst of all predominantly agricultural communities, was but poorly satisfied, nay, was aggravated, by the terms of the political emancipation of 1861, which still left them, to all intents and purposes, economic serfs.

3. The 'constitution hunger' of the moderate and truly patriotic liberals was answered by a stupid policy of savage repression and a reassertion of autocracy that drove the revolutionaries underground, thus creating a multiplicity of secret organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Tsardom through ruthless direct action and political assassination.

4. The rapid growth of industrial and factory life in Russia, notably from 1867 to 1897, without a corresponding improvement in the status of labor, gave rise to a surly class consciousness. And class consciousness is the fertile soil where professional agitators sow the bitter seeds of class hatred. Class hatred is the herald of revolution.

5. The bewildering ethnological composition of a population which was nothing more than a loose agglomeration of over two hundred unassimilated nationalities will, I think, bear me out in believing that Russia was probably the only land on the face of the earth that could have produced so swiftly and so completely the chaotic enigma she now presents to the civilized world. Walk with me through the streets of Moscow, that mart where East and West meet, but blend not. Let your gaze range from the fair-haired Slav or Aryan from Great Russia and Siberia to the semibarbaric countenances and Asiatic types discernible among the slant-eyed soldiers, worshipers of Buddha, who thronged the streets in 1922. Kirghiz, Kalmuks, Chuvashes,

Tatars, and Chinese! In a word, visualize the component human elements of the far-flung empire of the Tsars and you will begin to appreciate what Kipling meant when he wrote that Russia must be considered, not as the most eastern of western nations, but as the most westerly nation of the East. And you cannot but agree that this heterogeneous admixture of races, religions, and antagonistic interests contained within itself the fatal germs of domestic discord, the seeds of fratricidal strife and bloody revolution, to end eventually in complete economic and social disintegration.

6. The influence of sectarianism cannot be overlooked in any complete account of the progress of revolution in Russia. Apart from the twelve million Roman Catholics residing within the confines of the Empire, mainly of Polish origin and consequently treated with hostility as tolerated aliens, and the seven millions or more of Protestants, there existed a bewildering complexity of dissident sects. Tenacious of their old and new beliefs, fanatically opposed to the state religion, the sectarians were prepared to die, as they frequently did, for their religious practices. If we add to the strictly Orthodox communities of Raskolniks (Separatists) and Starovyeri (Old Believers) the rationalist and chiliastic groups, the Adventists and the New Adventists, the Nemoliakhi and Neplatel'shchiki (nonpayers of taxes), the Stranniki (pilgrims), the Medal'shchiki (medalists), the Jehovists (universal brothers), the Sviatodulkhovsti (adherents of the Holy Ghost), the Dukhobors and Molokani (Zionists), the Fire Baptists and Morel'shchiki (self-immolators), the Khlysty (scourgers), the Skoptsy (selfmutilators), and the Trudnoviki (cloistral communists), a total is reached which embraced probably a third of the population. And since orthodoxy and

autocracy were inseparably linked in the Russian idea of the State, nonconformers were penalized and systematically oppressed. The victims were in moral and intellectual rebellion long before the armed revolt of 1917. They constituted a sociopolitical factor of truly elemental power, smouldering with resentment and ripe for explosion.

Russia was an ethnological museum superintended by a vigilant autocrat and policed by the Third Section of Chancery, the Political Police. With the downfall of the overseer and the murder of the policeman, bedlam broke loose. Russia was a pyramid, but an inverted pyramid with a huge, unwieldy, and inert superstructure of discontented, illiterate masses balanced unsteadily on that slender apex furnished by the fraction of the population included in the nobility, the aristocracy, and the bureaucracy. With the crumbling of the demoralized autocracy, upon which practically the whole of organized life was balanced, human society turned turtle. As the area affected was one sixth of the surface of this planet, and as the human element then involved numbered over 170,000,000 people, the resulting chaos was proportionate to the possibilities for disorder and destruction, which were boundless, inherent in such an unstable system, never far from the surface and only outwardly controlled by the Okhrana, the secret police of the Tsars. Consequently, when the crash came, it marked the most stupendous single political event, I believe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Not only did the ensuing human wreckage cover the plains of Muscovy, but the flotsam and the jetsam have been washed up on every shore of the civilized world, so that the Russian émigré - that most tragic and, be it truthfully said, that most amiable personagecan claim kinship with Vergil's Æneas

when he says, 'Quae regio in terra nostri non plena laboris! What corner of the earth has not known our sorrow!' Russia was the last island fortress of absolutism in the rising tide of democracy, the outstanding anachronism of the twentieth century. Ringed round by the bayonets of the Preobrazhenski and Volinski regiments, its ukases executed by the knouts of Cossacks and the flashing sabres of the Hussars, it defied the elements for three hundred years - until the deluge came. Whose hand unloosed the flood gates? In my opinion, a woman, all unconsciously, had more to do with the final debacle than any other single cause.

III

The part played by this unhappy woman in the final catastrophe cannot be overestimated. A German princess of the House of Hesse, it would appear that she never completely won the sympathy and confidence of her adopted people, but, like her equally unfortunate prototype, Marie Antoinette, she was vaguely distrusted by the Russian people as a foreigner and a Germanophile. Of the charge, however, of treason, history probably will clear the memory of Alexandra Feodorovna, if it can never clear her memory of tendencies, practices, and imprudences that contributed notably to Russia's ruin. The domination which this imperious, proud, aloof, and resolute woman exercised over her irresolute and impressionable husband became such a menace that more than one grand duke, duchess, and general cried out in warning against it. They were usually exiled to their estates, far from Petrograd.

Russia had touched the nadir of misfortune and corrupt administration. Food supplies were insufficient; transportation, the nerves of the body

economic, was paralyzed; the supply of ammunition was not only inadequate, but systematically sabotaged; shells were manufactured in Russian factories that fitted no Russian ordnance; soldiers were sent to the front barefoot. Mr. Francis, the American Ambassador to Russia during the Revolution, recounts in his correspondence that Russian troops were sent to battle with but one rifle for every two men. The unarmed trooper was instructed to seize the rifle of a comrade as the latter fell. The defeatists destroyed the morale and confidence of the people and evoked the gaunt spectre of national disaster.

Intelligent ministers, who realized the gravity of both the internal and the external situation and dared to protest, out of loyalty to Russia, were summarily dismissed at the bidding of 'dark forces' and 'invisible influences,' acting through the Empress. Twentyone cabinet members followed each other to disgrace during the merry game of 'ministerial leapfrog.' The head and front of the offending was the unspeakable Rasputin, whose sinister influence over the Tsarina gave rise to a mass of scandalous reports that discredited the monarchy, encouraged the enemies of the throne, and drove patriotic Russians to desperation.

Unsavory as this episode must ever be, it cannot be dismissed as a legend. Gregory Rasputin was one of the contributing causes of the Russian Revolution.

This coarse and depraved adventurer was born a Siberian peasant. While posing as one inspired of God, a staretz, as the type is called in Russia, he was 'discovered' by the wife of a wealthy Moscow merchant during a pilgrimage to a Siberian shrine. Under her auspices he was introduced to the most exclusive circles of the capital. It should be noted at this point that