The Washington herald., 1917-03-16
Russia.

lnkcu asia anu G@uiOpS 10 hO lilOIC.
Nothing the war has brought the
world is more sensational than this.
The Gar Nicholas. unable longer to
resist the flame of revolution, has
abdicated. His throne is empty. The
winter palace at Petrograd is vacant
The soaring, scourging wrath of an
outraged people has swept over the
land-a land which stretches from
the Vistula to the Behring Straits,
from the Black Sea to the Arctic.
The mind sweeps back more than
century to the French revolution
for a parallel. The same world-old
story of monarchical and aristocratic
corruption and degeneracy, ineffici-.
ency and ineptitude. But apparently
the great Slavic empire has over
thrown its absolutism WITHOUT the
murderous violence with which the
French blotted put the House of
Bourbon. Russia seemed to have &C
complished its own salvation almost
bloodlessly.
That CARBON could be cast out
during the progress of the world
war seems miracle. Russian armies
! are far-flung from the Baltic to the
Tigris; they have held fast in the
face of the treason of Soukhomlinof,
the Vaccinations of Protopopoff and
Rasputin, the astounding depravity
of a bureaucracy, pro-German at
heart, which left the soldiers of the
Grand Duke Nicholas, practically
destitute OF ammunition and supplies,
to the tender mercies of Won Mack
ensen in the summer and fall of 1915
on the Niemen and the Dneister. The
Russ escaped annihilation; he wants
to maintain the fight for the land he
loves; the revolution is his answer
to the malign attempt to knife him in
the back once more.
Was the Gar pro-German? That
we do not know. That the oligarchy,
the bureaucracy, was secretly the
enemy of the nation it professed to
serve has been a matter of common
knowledge since the beginning of the
war. Its desperate game doomed it,
but no apostle of pan-Slavism dream
ed it would come this soon. In fact,
there have been grave fears and
anxiety that the pro-German move
ment for separate peace" would
sweep over Russia if the war were
prolonged for another year. This
crisis now is passed. Russia, by man
date of her people, is in the war to
the end.
The Duma, organized hardly more
than a decade ago after the disas-
trous war with Japan, today controls
Russia. The fact is nothing less than
a modern miracle of democracy.
Even the Slav, with more than
thin streak of Oriental fatalism in
his nature, broken to oppression and
despotism through the centuries, has
joined the great modern liberal move
ment. Only Germany and Japan are
left to maintain the doctrine that
government does not rest upon the
consent of the governed. And we
may see German revolution before
the war comes to close.
1nefficiency, rather than corruption
and treason, ruined the Gar and the
bureaucracy which clung to him like
a parasite. For weeks sinister stories
have leaked out OF Russia about the
breakdown OF army transport; about
food shortage and semi-starvation in
many districts; about raging popular
discomfort over the conduct OF the
war. Collaterally reports came from
London showing that the entente
military leaders were not counting
upon powerful Russian offensive in
the spring; that pessimism prevailed
over the failure of Petrograd to solve
the munitions and supply problem. 1t
nov appears that these reports mask
ed the real story; that nothing less
than the mightiest revolution of mod
ern times was pulverizing the empire
founded by Peter the Great into dust;
that the new age among the Slavs
had arrived
AS for the war, it means the end
Of German hopes for a separate
peace" for which they had been
working through Rasputin and
thousand powerful agents of intrigue.
1t means that the Zemstvos, or pro-
vlncial councils, which for more than
wear have borne the reR burdens
OF the conduct of the war, are about
to virdicate the claims of Russia to
be called modern nation.