These very successes, however, awakened growing uneasiness among Soviet Russia's nationalist proteges. The various Oriental nationalist parties, which had at first welcomed Moscow's aid so enthusiastically against the Entente Powers, now began to realize that Russian Bolshevism might prove as great a peril as Western imperialism to their patriotic aspirations. Of course the nationalist leaders had always realized Moscow's ultimate goal, but hitherto they had felt themselves strong enough to control the situation and to take Russian aid without paying Moscow's price. Now they no longer felt so sure. The numbers of class-conscious "proletarians" in the East might be very small. The communist philosophy might be virtually unintelligible to the Oriental masses. Nevertheless, the very existence of Soviet Russia was a warning not to be disregarded. In Russia an infinitesimal communist minority, numbering, by its own admission, not much over 600,000, was maintaining an unlimited despotism over 170,000,000 people. Western countries might rely on their popular education and their staunch traditions of ordered liberty; the East possessed no such bulwarks against Bolshevism. The East was, in fact, much like Russia. There was the same dense ignorance of the masses; the same absence of a large and powerful middle class; the same tradition of despotism; the same popular acquiescence in the rule of ruthless minorities. Finally, there were the ominous examples of Sovietized Turkestan and Azerbaidjan. In fine, Oriental nationalists bethought them of the old adage that he who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.