e how
helpless even the Russian _intelligentsia_ (relatively far more numerous
and matured than the Indian _intelligentsia_) has proved to control the
great ignorant masses as soon as the whole fabric of government has been
hastily shattered."[304] In Afghanistan, likewise, the Ameer was losing
his love for his Bolshevist allies. The streams of refugees from
Sovietized Turkestan that flowed across his borders for protection,
headed by his kinsman the Ameer of Bokhara, made Amanullah Khan do some
hard thinking, intensified by a serious mutiny of Afghan troops on the
Russian border, the mutineers demanding the right to form Soldiers'
Councils quite on the Russian pattern. Bolshevist agents might tempt him
by the loot of India, but the Ameer could also see that that would do
him little good if he himself were to be looted and killed by his own
rebellious subjects.[305] Thus, as time went on, Oriental nationalists
and conservatives generally tended to close ranks in dislike and
apprehension of Bolshevism. Had there been no other issue involved,
there can be little doubt that Moscow's advances would have been
repelled and Bolshevist agents given short shrift.

Unfortunately, the Eastern nationalists feel themselves between the
Bolshevist devil and the Western imperialist deep sea. The upshot has
been that they have been trying to play off the one against the
other--driven toward Moscow by every Entente aggression; driven toward
the West by every Soviet _coup_ of Lenin. Western statesmen should
realize this, and should remember that Bolshevism's best propagandist
agent is, not Zinoviev orating at Baku, but General Gouraud, with his
Senegalese battalions and "strong-arm" methods in Syria and the Arab
hinterland.

Certainly, any extensive spread of Bolshevism in the East would be a
terrible misfortune both for the Orient and for the world at large. If
the triumph of Bolshevism would mean barbarism in the West, in the East
it would spell downright savagery. The sudden release of the ignorant,
brutal Oriental masses from their traditional restraints of religion and
custom, and the submergence of the relatively small upper and middle
classes by the flood of social revolution would mean the destruction of
all Oriental civilization and culture, and a plunge into an abyss of
anarchy from which the East could emerge only after generations, perhaps
centuries.

FOOTNOTES:

[284] For these early forms of unrest, see A. Le Chatelier,