safeguards" go by the board "for the public good," in
Moscow as elsewhere. Under that stress it becomes clear that, in spite
of its novel constitution, Russia is governed much as other countries
are governed, the real directive power lying in the hands of a
comparatively small body which is able by hook or crook to infect with
its conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A visitor
to Moscow to-day would find much of the constitutional machinery that
was in full working order in the spring of 1919 now falling into rust
and disrepair. He would not be able once a week or so to attend All-Russian
Executive and hear discussions in this parliament of the questions of
the day. No one tries to shirk the fact that the Executive Committee has
fallen into desuetude, from which, when the stress slackens enough to
permit ceremonial that has not an immediate agitational value, it may
some day be revived. The bulk of its members have been at the front or
here and there about the country wrestling with the economic problem,
and their work is more useful than their chatter. Thus brutally is the
thing stated. The continued stress has made the muscles, the actual
works, of the revolution more visible than formerly. The working of the
machine is not only seen more clearly, but is also more frankly stated
(perhaps simply because they too see it now more clearly), by the
leaders themselves.

I want in this book to describe the working of the machine as I now see
it. But it is not only the machine which is more nakedly visible than
it was. The stress to which it is being subjected has also not so much
changed its character as become easier of analysis. At least, I seem to
myself to see it differently. In the earlier days it seemed quite simply
the struggle between a revolutionary and non-revolutionary countries. I
now think that that struggle is a foolish, unnecessary, lunatic incident
which disguised from us the existence of a far more serious struggle, in
which the revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are fighting
on the same side. They fight without cooperation, and throw insults
and bullets at each other in the middle of the struggle, but they are
fighting for the same thing. They are fighting the same enemy.
Their quarrel with each other is for both parties merely a harassing
accompaniment of the struggle to which all Europe is committed, for the
salvage of what is left of European civilization.

The thr