RUSSIAN CRISIS.
EVACUATING PETROGRAD.
Telegraphing from Petrograd yesterday, Reuter’s correspondent states that the evacuation of Petrograd continues uninterruptedly; and the removal of the government to Moscow seems to have been definitively decided upon. Numerous hotels and houses in Moscow were requisitioned to house the state departments from Petrograd.
NATION REAWAKENING
From Our Special Correspondent. Petrograd, Tuesday (Delayed).
Peace has been concluded, but there is no feeling of peace, there is no ease after, war, no surcease of the pain. True, the Germans, after taking Narva, have stopped their advance on the northern front, though apparently continuing it in Ukraine, while preparing to meet the congress which is finally to ratify or not to ratify the peace concluded in Brest. It is interesting to speculate on the probable attitude of this congress. Among the two government parties, the Bolsheviks and Left Social Revolutionaries, there is a strong divergency of opinion as to the possibility of accepting the peace, as the Russian delegation has not yet arrived from Brest, and the sum total of the peace terms, with all their implications and complications, is still the theme of very vague and varied rumour.
The Left-social Revolutionaries in particular are clamorously demanding a continuance of the revolutionary war as a protest against the humiliating and predatory peace, and there is a strong group among the Bolsheviks who take the same line. Lenin is so far inexorable, and insists on the acceptance and ratification of the peace as the only temporary issue from the dilemma, and as the only measure calculated to guarantee the continued existence of the Soviet government on even limited Russian territory. His opponents urge that in any case once peace is signed and the Germans gain political and economic control over Russia the existence of the Soviet government and the execution of its Socialist policy will become impossible, and the Soviet government can only secure its existence by maintaining desperate war with German imperialism. About half the Soviets in the country have reluctantly voted for the acceptance of the peace terms, while the other half have demonstratively voted in favour of a continuance of revolutionary war. The war party seems to be daily gaining ground, and it is a moot question whether the Moscow conference may not end in tearing the treaty to pieces and declaring a wild and desperate revolutionary war on Germany.
The situation is full of the oddest incongruities. A demobilisation order is issued today, but it is accompanied by an order to arm the whole people, so that every workman and work-woman, every peasant and every peasant woman may learn how to shoot. The monstrously humiliating terms of peace have had the effect of stinging the national feeling to keen and bitter resentment. Many even of those who a few days ago were looking forward with longing to the restoration of order by the Germans are infuriated by the manner in which Germany is planting her heel on the neck of Russia. I believe that this disgraceful peace is not the end of Russia, but the beginning of a strong Russia. It is the end of the old war and the beginning of a new, tougher, and more complex war. The air is full of varied possibilities of national resistance.
I do not know what the Bolshevik congress will do next week. The Bolsheviks have destroyed the army and are responsible for the success of German aggression. But I still insist that, in spite of the ruin and suffering caused by the Bolsheviks, in spite of the crushing military defeat they have brought on Russia, their leaders were emphatically not intentionally working for German interests. They were working fanatically for their own revolutionary aims. They have been worsted in their amazing encounter with Germany, and now it is against German imperialism that the chief violence of their wrath is directed. For the moment they are carrying on among the masses a furious agitation against Germany, and it is astonishing that the men who despised patriotism are now stimulating a patriotic feeling of a new type.
This new Bolshevik patriotism is an asset. It is certainly one of the factors in the revival of national sentiment. At the Moscow congress it may or may not find expression in a declaration of war against Germany, but there it is, fermenting among the masses in the towns, strangely confused, with all kinds of fierce class, prejudices and fantastic emotions, but at any rate violent in its resentment against the German oppressor. I may be wrong, but I do believe that a turning-point has come, and that the shock of national humiliation may set the Russian people on the road to national recovery.