conscientiousness and their geographical location on the most important
sea-coast. But their forces were engaged in the struggle not with the Russian
administration of the State, but with the Germans representing the upper
class of that region. This struggle began a long time before the conquest
of the Baltic provinces by the Moscovites; and during the last war, when
the country was threatened by the danger of being annexed by Germany,
the Letts supplied troops voluntarily for the assistance of the Russian army;
and only when disturbances broke out, i. e., when the State lost its hold,
the century-old struggle here also (as it happened in 1905) assumed a keen
revolutionary character. F inland was constantly finding herself not so much
inside the domains of Russia, as adjacent to them; the Grandduchy, if cir-
cumstances had been favourable, could have separated itself from the
Empire, but this would have called forth in Russia, not a revolution, but
an outburst of patriotism, as it happened after the Polish revolt. — Finally,
there was Poland. Is there any need to speak about the difficulty of the
situation in which the Poles found themselves when divided between three
adjoining Empires? Is there any need to prove that this difficulty to a large
extent paralysed the forces of the Poles? The Polish problem, although a
difficult problem for Russia, could not, for all that, become the source of
the general Russian revolution. Only the war which was waged first of all
on Polish soil, strained the situation there, and loosened the forces of the
Poles: but the cause was the war — not the Old Regime¥).
There still remain a few words to be said about the condition of the
Jews. Here an “Old Regime” actually did exist, 1. e., a striking noncon-
formity between the forms of life and its contents. On another occasion I
have proved in detail that, in spite of all their limitations of rights, the
Jews in Russia flourished and grew, increased in numbers, reinforced
themselves materially and developed spiritually together with the growth
of prosperity and culture in the country**). But just the actual growth made
*) I make no mention of the Ukrainians because up to the time of the Revo-
lution there was no question concernig the Ukraine as an actual factor in practical
policy. How little Ukrainism means even at the present time after ten years of
perfidious Bolshevistic propaganda in Russia, the following will go to prove. The
Newspaper “The Communist”, the central organ of Ukrainian communistic party,
published in Kharkow, the capital of the Ukrainian Republic, had an issue of
100,000 copies while 1t was printed in Russian language; but when — in 1926 —
the Russian was replaced by the Ukrainian language, the circulation dropped to 35,000,
i. e. to 1/3rd. A similat transition has taken place with the central organ of the
“White Russian” communistic party, “The Star”, although no exact figures have
been mentioned by the communistic source.
**) See “Russia and the Jews”, p. 84/85 (in Russian and German), and the
article by Dr. Pasmanik in this book.