The Problem of Foreign Policy by Gilbert Murray

Another group of wars and threats of war has its centre in Moscow. All the States on the borders of Russia -- Finland, Lithuania, Poland, the Ukraine, Hungary, Rumania, the new republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, and the kingdom of Persia -- are either at war or in fear of war or just recovering from war with Russia, or from civil war fomented by Russian agents and propagandists. Inside Russia itself, civil war has never ceased since the first outbreak of the Revolution in 1917. It is true that the civil war has been largely helped by foreign munitions and stirred up by foreign intrigues. But that only shows that -- as the world is now organized -- there is something in the present Russian Government which makes foreigners as well as Russians wish to take up arms against it. It may have been -- I think strongly that it was -- exceedingly unwise for the foreign Governments to intervene in the domestic troubles of Russia, but no one can pretend that the civil war was entirely created by foreigners. The rebellions were there before the foreigners joined in, and it is even thought by good judges that the opposition to the Bolsheviks might by this time have been successful if it had not been damned in Russian eyes by its foreign alliances.

For us the question is how the Russian Revolution has become such a plenteous and intense cause of strife. It is, of course, impossible to pass judgment on the whole of a vast movement with the very inadequate information that is now accessible to an average Englishman about Russia. Even the French Revolution, which has been studied by thousands of observers and historians, is not yet judged. The sum of infamies and high achievements is too complicated to add up. And the Russian Revolution is probably even harder to value than the French.