The War and DemocracySeton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
History
The War and Democracy
Seton-Watson, R. W. (Robert William)
Europe -- Politics and government -- 1871-1918; Nationalism -- Europe; World War, 1914-1918
have to limit myself to a few rather bald generalisations which I must
ask the reader to accept not as the truth, but as what one man of limited
experience and vision conceives to be the truth about the Russian
revolution.
The main reason why English people get mistaken ideas about Russia is that
they imagine Russians to be nothing but Englishmen picturesquely disguised
in furs and top-boots, and because they interpret the political situation
in Russia in terms of English history and politics. As I have already tried
to show, Russians are built differently from English people, _from the soul
outwards_, while the political and social condition of the Russian Empire
is totally unlike anything that has ever existed in this country. If
therefore the real causes of the movement of 1905 and of its failure are to
be rightly understood, we must put away from our minds the desire to find
analogies in the English revolutions of 1642 and 1688, or the French
Revolution of 1789, or the social revolution of which Karl Marx dreamed;
Russia can only be interpreted in terms of Russian history and Russian
conditions. In one thing, however, the Russian revolution was like all
revolutions which have ever been or are ever likely to be, viz. that it was
concerned with two distinct issues, one a narrow question of political and
constitutional reform, and the other a far wider question involving an
attempt to reconstruct not merely the institutions of society but also to
transform the ideals and conceptions upon which society rested.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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