This wholesale plundering, if I may be forgiven for using such a word, was of course not the fault of Kerensky and of his colleagues, under whose ministry it began, but whereas the latter realised immediately that it was taking place and resigned rather than countenance it; the former, though aware of it, found his hands tied in every attempt he made to subdue it, by the fact that those who were principally guilty were either his personal friends or his former partisans, or people with whom he had associated in earlier times, and with whom he had compromised himself to a considerable extent. With regard to those associates of his former life, Kerensky found himself in the same position as Napoleon III. after his accession, in presence of the Italian Carbonari, who claimed from the Sovereign the fulfilment of the promises made to them by the exiled Pretender. Kerensky had also given certain pledges at a time when he never expected he might be called upon to redeem them; and when he became a Minister he had to give way to the exigencies of all the radicals, anarchists, and extreme socialists among whom he had laboured, and with whom he had worked at the overthrow of the detested and detestable government of the Czar. He could not cast them overboard or set them aside. He had to listen to them, and in a certain sense to submit to their demands. For example, in the case of the exile to Siberia of the unfortunate Nicholas II., a measure which in the first days of the Revolution he had declared that he would never resort to, but which he nevertheless executed under conditions of the most intense cruelty, simply because it was demanded from him by persons to whom he could not say no. People who knew him well say that the fact of his powerlessness caused him intense suffering, but he had neither the strength to assert himself in presence of his former comrades, nor, perhaps, the will to do so. In a certain sense, he was the man of the hour, “le maitre de l’heure,” as the Franco-Arab proverb says. He was even to some extent the one indispensable element without which it would have been impossible for a Republic ever to become established in Russia. And everybody seemed to agree, one year ago, that a Republic was the only form of government possible after the fall of the Romanoffs. Of this Republic Kerensky rapidly became the symbol and at the same time the emblem of a new Russia; a regenerated and better one, in the opinion of his followers of the moment; a worse one from what it had been formerly, in that of his adversaries, but at all events of a different Russia from the one previously known.