Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

Racial Passions

It is in the very heart of Europe. Certainly the majority of the German people refuse stubbornly to accept the consequences of the defeat inflicted upon them as more than a temporary check to their strength and supremacy among civilised people. They are so conscious of their own genius in organisation and industry, so confident in the future destiny of the German folk, so sure that their increasing population is bound to prevail over the weaker and dwindling stock of a nation like France, that they are only waiting for the time when, as they think, the inevitable laws of history will carry them in a tide over the present barriers that have been imposed upon them. Meanwhile, they rage at the humiliations they have to suffer, and brood over the injustice of their present condition. Their sense of being the victims of world injustice is a fixed idea or what, in the present jargon of psycho-analysis, is called a “complex.” It is not less dangerous for that, and to regain their liberty of action, freedom from foreign interference with foreign occupation, and release from immense burdens of foreign debt, there are large numbers of Germans who would willingly die with a racial patriotism and passion exalted above all self-interest. Many old women in Germany would like to march with sharpened scissors behind the German troops. Many young girls would gladly go with their hatpins to stab a Frenchman or two in revenge for the Ruhr. Europe will not be safe until that racial hatred between France and Germany has died down or has been killed by a new spirit and a community of interests. Herriot, the democratic Prime Minister of France, was the first to offer a truce to that hatred, and the new spirit has begun to work a little on both sides of the Rhine, though it is a delicate growth which will need great encouragement. In Hungary, and to a less extent in Austria, racial passion is also smouldering, and could be quickly fanned into flame. The Hungarians are a proud fighting race, who feel themselves superior to neighbours like the Serbs and Roumanians occupying some of their ancient territory. “It will not always be like this,” some of them told me. “Something will break, and we shall move. Not all the tears of women will put out the red flame of that future war of liberation when we shall join hands with our kinsfolk and smash these artificial boundaries imposed by a scandalous peace.”

The Balkans are still a stewpot of racial passions and rivalries—Serbs, Bulgars, Montenegrins, Albanians, Roumanians, Greeks and Turks all snarling at each other, all waiting until the Great Powers get to grips again, or are too busy to intervene between these smaller nations.

The Racial Ambitions of Russia

Russia is becoming race-conscious again. Now that the revolutionary period seems to have ended, and internal peace has been established, the Soviet Government is thinking far more racially than communistically. Communism no longer exists in Russia as a strict system. It died before Lenin, who re-established the right of private trading and private property with certain reservations which do not affect the private citizens within the state to any appreciable extent.

The Communistic propaganda is reserved mainly for foreign consumption, in order to create trouble in other states and especially to weaken those countries which are most antagonistic to the Russian form of government. Men like Radek and Tchicherin, whom I interviewed in Moscow at the time of famine, were beginning to think again of Russia as a world power. All their talk was of that. They are Russians before they are Communists. They would be glad to see a world revolution, and their agents are doing what they can to provoke it, but mainly because they see the Slav race rising above that economic ruin and taking advantage of its weakness. Their eyes are turned to Riga, outside their present boundaries, as an open port when Petrograd is blocked by ice. They have no love for those new Baltic nations—Latvia, Esthonia, and Lithuania—which gained their independence at the expense of Russia. They hate the Poles, and the new war, if it happens in Europe, will begin when Germany and Russia try to join hands across the prostrate body of Poland.

The Germans are already in close commercial alliance with Russia. German ploughs, railway engines, manufactured goods, are being exchanged for Russian wheat, flax, furs, oil, and diamonds. The Russians do not love the Germans, but they will co-operate with them in self interest. A German revolution would please them mightily. But German Imperialism will not be spurned by Soviet Russia, certainly not by Tchicherin and his friends, if a military and trade alliance would result in the downfall of Poland, followed perhaps by the capture of Constantinople and the way through Serbia to the Adriatic.

The old dreams of Pan-Slavism are stirring again among those who control the destiny of Russia. Radek, the chief propagandist, sees red in the direction of India and Afghanistan. The downfall of the British “Raj” in India might be followed by a Russian Empire in the East.

The Dark Horse

Russia is the Dark Horse of Europe. It is impossible to foretell what road it will travel. Above the mass of ignorant and patient peasants desiring peace in their fields and praying God for good harvests, there is a crowd of nimble-minded men holding the machinery of power: ambitious, cynical, with some cause, of the high moralities preached by other powers, unscrupulous and adventurous. Some of them, in my opinion most of them, are not personally ambitious for gold or luxury or greed. They lead austere lives. Tchicherin spends most of his days and nights in two little rooms barely furnished. Radek has an untidy old den crammed with books along a whitewashed corridor in the Kremlin. Most of them, I believe, have a sincere desire to improve the conditions of their people, to eliminate disease, to give them a decent share of human happiness. They were relentless against their political enemies, like all leaders of revolution who live in terror of reaction, and by their terror are made cruel. They have an Oriental indifference for human life, and they believe that a life is forfeited by crime or political hostility to their way of rule. Many of these men were not personally responsible for the atrocities which happened in the fever and frightfulness of revolutionary madness. They are intellectual, highly educated, irreligious men, devoid of sentiment, suspicious of each other, with a cold passionate hatred for the old régime, and with a fanatical belief in their own form of tyranny, a contempt for the ignorance of the peasant mind, and a detestation of the Orthodox Church and all forms of Christian faith, as many of the recent Ministers of France, including Clemenceau, Millerand and Briand were in earlier days. They are amused by the fear of “Bolshevism” in other countries. It flatters their vanity and appeals to their sense of humour. Many are for the most part “realists” who believe in Force as the only argument, or, failing force, guile. They are not, as a class, pacifists or humanitarians, nor do they trouble to give any lip service to their ideals. In the Red Army, officered by many sons of the old bourgeoisie, they have a weapon which is not negligible in training or equipment. As ambassadors and agents they have men whose intellectual abilities are more than a match for the elder statesmen of Europe and not bound by the same code of honour because the foundations of their faith are different. Many of their officials and agents are honest and patriotic men, desiring to serve their people in a time of dreadful uncertainty, and all over Russia there are men and women—millions of them—who accept the Soviet Government as something better than Tsardom, however bad, and, while hostile or scornful secretly to the “eyewash” of Soviet propaganda, give their labour ungrudgingly for the sake of Russia and the reconstruction of its life after war and revolution. They believe in peace, but many would fight for Russian liberty against Royalist invaders. They even give the Soviet Government the credit of good intention towards the people, and believe in the “idealism” of Lenin and the “genius” of Trotsky, and the patriotism of other men who in the outside world are painted as devils incarnate.