A TEST OF CHARACTER.

RUSSIAN CRISIS.

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. PETROGRAD, TUESDAY. Events in Russia are elusive, unreal, intangible. The dream life and the real life coalesce. Things are not what they seem. The struggle and the turmoil are like the fighting of shadows on a screen. Catchwords and watchwords, persons and policies, are losing their power to attract or repel. Russia is in solution; she is passing through a deep formative process, of which the Petrograd struggle for power is duly a superficial symptom. Watching events here, judging them only at their surface value, one might easily become cynical. The faults of the old regime are mingled with the faults of the new regime: principles of right and wrong are subordinated to the interests of parties and cliques, and the result is chaotic and demoralising.

The revolution is a fierce and cruel test of character and capacity. Reputations are made and lost in a month. Individuals and groups are tried in the furnace and found wanting, and are mercilessly flung on to the slag-heap. But all this does not mean that the revolution has failed. It means that certain subjective conceptions of the revolution are inadequate, that the revolution is not an end, but a beginning; that Russia, once set free, is only slowly and with great difficulty finding herself.

Russia is very much bigger than all the formulas offered in explanation of her strange caprices, and the process by which she is finding herself is broader and deeper than any of us can quite understand. M. Kerenski said in Moscow that the Provisional Government can afford itself the luxury of risings and plots. That is not true of Government as a particular group of men or of any one man, but it is true of Russia. Russia can and will survive convulsions that would wreck states that are more compact and more highly organised.

It can hardly be said that the men on top are guiding Russia, except in a very limited sense. They are rather guided by an inevitable and inexorable course of events. And for us Allies and friends, faith in Russia is not so much faith in particular persons and parties as in that larger process which with all its elements of suffering and tragedy is tending towards final liberation. Now the present position is this. M. Kerenski and the Ministers of War and Marine have gone to Headquarters to consult with General Alexeieff. Of the Directory of five only two, M. Terestchenko and M. Nikitin, remain in Petrograd.

Theoretically, the formation of a complete Government is left till the meeting of the conference summoned by the Soviet for next Monday, but as the days pass the prospects of this conference having any decisive influence steadily lessen. The Soviet is still under Bolshevik influence, to the great displeasure of the Moderate Socialists. Trotsky has been released on bail; but, on the other hand, M. Purishkeviteh, who was arrested last week near Dvinsk, has also been released.

The Government has given orders that all the Revolutionary Committees, with their amateur police and detectives, who were last week set in operation by the Soviet to combat counter-revolutionary movements, should now cease work and surrender their functions to the normal organs of justice.

Petrograd is simmering with rumours, which find credence in proportion to their baselessness and improbability.