"
Pretty quick, isn't it, to change from Utopia to threatenings of the
worst sort of Communism? But the great point for us in all this--the
great point for our private personal histories as well as the public
one--was that it was during these weeks that the real gulf between
Russia and the Western world showed itself! Yes, for more than three
years we had been pretending that a week's sentiment and a hurriedly
proclaimed Idealism could bridge a separation which centuries of magic
and blood and bones had gone to build. For three years we tricked
ourselves (I am not sure that the Russians were ever really deceived)
... but we liked the ballet, we liked Tolstoi and Dostoieffsky (we
translated their inborn mysticism into the weakest kind of
sentimentality), we liked the theory of inexhaustible numbers, we liked
the picture of their pounding, steam-roller like, to Berlin... we
tricked ourselves, and in the space of a night our trick was exposed.
Plain enough the reasons for these mistakes that we in England have made
over that same Revolution, mistakes made by none more emphatically than
by our own Social Democrats.
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