ABSTRACT
In 1919 the left-wing socialists of eastern Europe believed that the bolsheviks had provided an infallible guide to the art and practice of revolution in an underdeveloped society. Their faith was absolute and simple: ‘They need only chant the magic incantation “All power to the Soviets”, and the walls of the capitalist Jericho would fall down.’1 The walls did not come tumbling down. Eastern Europe in 1919 was not analogous to Russia in 1917. Generally speaking there was peace, there were few communal tenures, and the large estates were in most places earmarked for redistribution to the peasants; there was in eastern Europe, outside the minority of the extreme left, a sense of revolution achieved rather than revolution pending. Furthermore, in eastern Europe the agrarians were better organised and more effective than the Russian social revolutionaries; the association of the extreme left with Russia was frequently a hindrance; and amongst the two peoples who showed considerable goodwill to the Russians, the Czechs and the Bulgarians, agrarianism was particularly well developed.
