imprisonment for its promoters--this is the reality of a system which
still professes to govern in the name of the proletariat.

At the same time the internal and external peril has necessitated the
creation of a vast army recruited by conscription, except as regards a
Communist nucleus, from among a population utterly weary of war, who
put the Bolsheviks in power because they alone promised peace.
Militarism has produced its inevitable result in the way of a harsh
and dictatorial spirit: the men in power go through their day's work
with the consciousness that they command three million armed men, and
that civilian opposition to their will can be easily crushed.

Out of all this has grown a system painfully like the old government
of the Tsar--a system which is Asiatic in its centralized bureaucracy,
its secret service, its atmosphere of governmental mystery and
submissive terror. In many ways it resembles our Government of India.
Like that Government, it stands for civilization, for education,
sanitation, and Western ideas of progress; it is composed in the main
of honest and hard-working men, who despise those whom they govern,
but believe themselves possessed of something valuable which they
must communicate to the population, however little it may be desired.
Like our Government in India, they live in terror of popular risings,
and are compelled to resort to cruel repressions in order to preserve
their power. Like it, they represent an alien philosophy of life,
which cannot be forced upon the people without a change of instinct,
habit, and tradition so profound as to dry up the vital springs of
action, producing listlessness and despair among the ignorant victims
of militant enlightenment. It may be that Russia needs sternness and
discipline more than anything else; it may be that a revival of Peter
the Great's methods is essential to progress. From this point of view,