NICOLAI LENIN REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA T BY JOHN SPARGO I HE Russian Revolution is not yet a completed event. It is in process. The time for passing judgment upon it has not yet arrived. All we can do is outline the background of historical causes. When the time comes that the epoch of upheaval and change through mankind is now passing can be objectively viewed, in what Matthew Arnold used to call "the dry light of history," it is quite possible that Thursday, March 15, 1917, will be regarded as the most fateful day in that most fateful of all historical epochs. Its importance may well be held to be greater than the day which marked the beginning of the World War. Upon that fifteenth of March 1917 occurred one of those great events which changed the whole subsequent history of mankind. Because of the happenings of that day, new and undreamed of problems have arisen to harass the statesmen of every civilized nation; great imperial dynasties disappeared, new nations came into being, and old nations took on new forms. Because of the happenings of that day the greatest war in human history was indubitably prolonged at a cost in human life and suffering which, if it could be computed, would stagger the imagination; the Peace Treaty of Versailles could not have been other than it was; and the whole tragic aftermath of the war was inevitable. Upon March 15, 1917 Czarism ceased to exist in Russia. The mighty Russian Empire, one-sixth of the land area of the globe, populated by 180 millions of people, in the most dramatic manner imaginable, broke with its historie past. In so doing it precipitated a crisis involving all civilization, a crisis which, seven years later, had not yet been outlined. It was the opening scene of a tremendous drama of Revolt, which is still being enacted upon the world's vast stage, moving from tragic episode to tragic episode to ends not yet disclosed. What the wisest statesman in the world cannot now comprehend or foreknow, it may be, by the end of the century will be fully understood by children; and an American boy, in a little prairie school house, will recite to admiring parents the by then familiar story of the drama that opened on that day in March, 1917, when the Roman off dynasty fell. Under the Czars Russia held a peculiar place in the world. Many called it "the land of paradoxes". Great contradictions and incompatibilities were so universal, that the incongruous was more usual and familiar than the congruous. This was the result of its geographical position and its historical evolution. Divided between Europe and Asia, it was the meeting -and also the mingling-place of the civilizations of the Orient and the Occident. Throughout the Nineteenth Century it had been increasingly Occidental in its aspirations, steadily aiming at Western standards. Indeed, the passion for "Westernization," which began as a cult, idealizing everything in Western Europe, became one of the dominant psychological forces in Russia. At the same time, Asiatic traditions and ideas, frequently the more powerful because unrecognized or repressed, exerted a profound influence. Latent but tremendously potent Asiatic factors subtly wove themselves into the psychology of Russia. This great Empire had been consolidated under the rule of successive czars by processes and methods as varied as its component parts, or as the numerous peoples and tribes it comprehended. This is attested by the sovereign's official title: he was "Czar of all the Russias.' On the West and South Russia had grown because virile and intelligent peoples occupying the hinter |