But if the Bolshevik Government was successful in its struggle against foreign intervention and internal revolt, it was far less happy in its attempts to set up a new social order based upon communist ideas in Russia.
The Russian peasant is a small land-hungry proprietor, as far from communism in his thoughts and methods as a whale is from flying; the revolution gave him the land of the great landowners but could not make him grow food for anything but negotiable money, and the revolution, among other things, had practically destroyed the value of money.
Agricultural production, already greatly disordered by the collapse of the railways through war-strain, shrank to a mere cultivation of food by the peasants for their own consumption.
The towns starved.
Hasty and ill-planned attempts to make over industrial production in accordance with communist ideas were equally unsuccessful.
By 1920 Russia presented the unprecedented spectacle of a modern civilization in complete collapse.
Railways were rusting and passing out of use, towns were falling into ruin, everywhere there was an immense mortality.
Yet the country still fought with its enemies at its gates.
In 1921 came a drought and a great famine among the peasant cultivators in the war-devastated south-east provinces.
Millions of people starved.
But the question of the distresses and the possible recuperation of Russia brings us too close to current controversies to be discussed here.