Revolutionary Russia renounced all the loot of the secret treaties. She no longer wanted Constantinople and other portions of the Ottoman Empire. She was willing to withdraw from Persia and consent to the emancipation of Poland. Let Great Britain and France and Italy give the Russian people solemn assurances that they also renounce their shares of the hoped-for loot, and promise that they would apply the principle of self-determination to peoples subject to them, and the war would be continued. This proposal was refused. The refusal gave the Bolshevists their chance to get control of the revolutionary Government. The Soviet régime would probably have followed the lot of all extremist groups and been drowned in its own bloodshed had it not been for the support given by the Entente Powers to various counter-revolutionary movements and to the invasion of Russia at various points by Entente armies. The Russians came to believe that the rest of the world was conspiring to destroy them. They rallied around Lenin and Trotzky, moved by the instinct of every people to repel the invader. French, British, Italians, Greeks, Americans, Japanese thus voluntarily took their place with Germans as enemies of Russians. Hundreds of thousands in every part of the country would have welcomed the counter-revolutionary movements and have stuck by them until the Bolshevists were overthrown had they not become convinced that outside nations were supporting the counter-revolutionists, not for Russia’s sake, but to feather their own nests. All that happened in 1918, 1919, and 1920 tended to confirm this impression. We accuse the Russians of having deserted the common cause during the war. The Russians accuse us of having involved them in a war, in which their losses were greater than those of any other belligerent, by territorial bribes to the old Czarist Government, and then, when regenerated Russia spoke for an idealistic peace, of having turned against them. In dealing with the internal evolution and foreign policy of Russia during the years following the World War, we must get away from the belief that Boshevism and Russia are synonymous and from the comfortable feeling that Russia’s ills and the international troubles those ills have created for us, are due to the attempt of the Communists to set up in Russia a Soviet form of government and to impose their doctrines upon the rest of the world. This is only one factor, and not the most important, in the great problem of Russia’s internal and international relations. The difficulties arose before the Communists got control of the Government. They continued during the period of the Communists’ attempt to demonstrate the practicability of their doctrines. They remain, now that Communism has proved a failure in a country where it had a better chance of success than in any other great nation.[8]