ABSTRACT
To the minds of Russia’s masses, made receptive by their sufferings during the war (we are apt to forget—if, indeed, we ever realized—how far more extreme these sufferings were in Russia even then in France or Belgium), the Great War stood as an overwhelming demonstration of the universal bourgeois faith in every method of brute force. We should study the history of 1914 to 1917 in Russia to realize how the culminating lesson of history for them was burnt into their souls. The Communists were not slow to point the moral. Let them use the same weapons as the bourgeois Government, but for ends which were really worth while—the liberation of the Peoples of all the world in place of their endless degradation. Similarly, in the Settlement of 1918, and in the Secret Treaties which so soon came to light, people saw the express repudiation of every 51moral principle, and even of specific promises for which the Allies had professed to fight. Here was the crowning indictment of bourgeois ethics and religion. Let us at least be honest, said the Communist instructors, let us have done with all the shams, all the hypocrisy of bourgeois ‘morality’ and bourgeois ‘religion,’ let us profess to believe only in that which is a demonstrable scientific truth, let us plant our feet squarely and honestly on the naked rock of materialism.
