armies of Kolchak , Denikin and Wrangel, with the flower of the old professional officers at their head. As a feat of organization under inordinate difficulties, his work ranks as the most remarkable performance of the revolution.
It is not the business of a preface to anticipate the argument of a book, still less to obtrude personal opinions. Kautsky’s labored essay, to which this book is the brilliant reply, has been translated into English, and is widely known. The case against the possibility of political democracy in a capitalist society could hardly be better put than in these pages, and the polemic against purely evolutionary methods is formidable. The English reader of to-day is aware, however, that the Russian revolution has not stood still since Trotsky wrote. We have to realize that, even in the view of the Bolsheviks themselves, the evolution towards Communism is in Russia only in its early stages. The recent compromises imply, at the best, a very long period of transition, through controlled capitalist production, to Socialism. Experience has proved that catastrophic revolution and the seizure of political power do not in themselves avail to make a Socialist society. The economic development in that direction has actually been retarded, and Russia, under the stress of civil war, has retrogaded into a primitive village system of production and exchange. To every reader’s mind the question will be present whether the peculiar temperament of the Bolsheviks has led them to overestimate the importance of political power, to underestimate the inert resistance of the majority, and to risk too much for the illusion of dictating. To that question history has not yet given the decisive answer. The dæmonic will that made the revolution and defended it by achieving the impossible may yet vindicate itself against the dull trend of impersonal forces.