On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family of nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were ruling over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken, crushed in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia. They had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their men had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been taken from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high places, inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of revolt amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against men with whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel; peasants like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions and hatreds which they did not share. They turned to rend their own leaders and made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the explosive forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of tyranny by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its present representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man who loved his people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of democracy, united for a time to overthrow the Government and all its powers. Revolution, bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast leapt up in peasant minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but was swept on one side like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his crowd took command, and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-sounding, theoretically righteous, based upon the principles of equality and brotherhood and peace, put a spell upon the simple minds of the Russian folk. All opponents, critics, doubters, were destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and his friends, having taken command of the new machinery of Government by Soviet committees, were in supreme power over a people unarmed, half-starving, and submissive to those who had broken their old chains. It was some time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters which enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers published the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools taught economic history according to Karl Marx and world history according to Soviet philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in which discipline was more severe than under the Grand Duke Nicholas. The prisons were filled with people of all classes who came under the notice of the secret police. Execution became a habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as bad as that of the French Revolution of 1793.