As one can readily understand, the results achieved were not the fruits of the effort of a day, but rather of an organized labour, planned with the greatest care and followed with the greatest perseverance, accompanied by all the treachery and all the brutality of the Hun.
I met in society many who were much imbued with the idea of a constitution, and even of a Republic, a word which sounded like magic to them--magic, like something far off. They reminded me both by their advanced ideas and by their occasional indifference of the spirit about which I had often read: of the spirit that must have reigned at the Court of France on the eve of the Great Revolution. The Russian Empire, composed as it is of a number of races so diversely opposed to one another--neither sharing the same sentiments nor possessing any interest in common, races between which even a certain animosity exists always, an enormous population of uneducated, half savage people--would render, it seems to me, a Republic out of the question. I wrote of this twelve years ago!
Many an illusion has already taken wings at the sight of what is passing now, and of that which is bound to come. In the future we may not see the Great Republic dreamt of by Kerensky and others, but rather the destruction of Great Russia itself, and a collection of little republics springing up, small not by the narrowness of the confines of such, but by the weakness of their constitutions, which shall be either completely independent one from the other, or else bound together by the most slackened Federal system. They will probably be penetrated and dominated by German influence.
Where will be the dreams of those who thought to perceive in a republic a special autonomy for their province and with it complete liberty? It is necessary for this great homogeneous nation to be ruled by one hand, and it is essential that that hand should be a firm one.
Kerensky himself admitted that when he was in power. But why it must be so plebeian a hand is what I cannot understand. Kerensky has tried and has promptly proved himself to be a complete failure. He was bound to fail, all goes from bad to worse, and one must completely cease to count on the military or the political support of that Power, even up to quite recently so great; and thus it will be till the end of the war and for long after.