The Paris Conference faced by the Russian Sphinx
The Peace Conference finds itself facing the Russian sphinx, whose problems a mind of western culture can neither comprehend nor solve.
The agglomeration of heterogeneous peoples in Russia leaves the ragged Hapsburg empire far behind. In Russia you have the complicated psychology of the Oriental, barely intelligible to his western brother. You have also the tangled economic questions and the centuries-old crimes of corrupt governments, the devastation of a world-war, and still more the material and moral destruction brought about by the awakening instincts of the half-barbaric masses which call themselves Bolsheviki. And all this is intermingling and boiling over in an indescribable chaos which even the liveliest imagination could not conceive.