It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely to be worse this winter than it has yet been.Forcible attempts to get food from the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town and country.There has been a very bad harvest in Russia.The bringing of food from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make that impossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequate transport.Yet I think internal collapse unlikely.It may be said almost with certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no one left to defend them.That moment had arrived in the case of theTsar.It had arrived in the case of Kerensky.It has not arrived in the case of the Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons.For one thing, a collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time would be disconcerting, if not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies.It would, of course, open the way to a practically unopposed military advance, but at the same time it would present its enemies with enormous territory, which would overwhelm the organizing powers which they have shown again and again to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks.Nor would collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into a good one.Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of all existing organizations, and would intensify the horrors of famine for every town dweller.Consequently, though the desperation of hunger and resentment against inevitable requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and there throughout the country, the men who, in other circumstances, might coordinate such events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort.I do not say that collapse is impossible.I do say that it would be extremelyundesirable from the point of view of almost everybody in Russia.Collapse of the present Government would mean at best a reproduction of the circumstances of 1917, with the difference that no intervention from without would be necessary to stimulate indiscriminate slaughter within.I say "at best" because I think it more likely that collapse would be followed by a period of actual chaos.Any Government that followed the Communists would be faced by the same economic problem, and would have to choose between imposing measures very like those of the Communists and allowing Russia to subside into a new area for colonization.There are people who look upon this as a natural, even a desirable, result of the revolution.They forget that the Russians have never been a subject race, that they have immense powers of passive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea that they understand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is difficult not to understand.Any country that takes advantage of the Russian people in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later, first that it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given all Russians a single and undesirable view of the history of the last three years.There will not be a Russian who will not believe that the artificial incubation ofcivil war within the frontiers of old Russia was not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of so far weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy.Those who look with equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe of a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign nations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum will set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a struggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will have done for Russia.
It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolution may prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a stricken civilization.My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russia will not die without infecting us with its disease.It seems to me that our own civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, and liable, like a man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravate the malady.I think that the whole of the Russian war, waged directly or indirectly by WesternEurope, is an example of this sort of dementia, but I cannot help believing that sanity will reassert itself in time.At the present moment, to use a modification of Gusev's metaphor, Europe may be compared to a burning house and the Governments of Europe to fire brigades, each one engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of the building.It seems a pity that these fire brigades should be fighting each other, and forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact that some of them wear red uniforms and some wear blue.Any single room to which the fire gains complete control increases the danger of the whole building, and I hope that before the roof falls in the firemen will come to their senses.
But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculations as to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to the changes in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely to happen supposing it does not collapse.I have already said that I think collapse unlikely.Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carry out their programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrelling of the firemen as to make that task impossible?
