blic opinion, when it has not been indifferent, has swayed now to one
side and now to the other, according as it was stirred by some flagrant
act of oppression on the part of the bureaucracy or some outrageous act of
terrorism on the part of the revolutionaries. The truth is that the civil
war in Russia--for it was nothing less--was confined to quite a narrow
section of society. It has been said that there are practically speaking no
class distinctions in the English sense of the word, in Russia; there is,
however, a very real distinction between the _intelligentsia_ and the
peasants. The _intelligentsia_ are the few million educated Russians who
control, or seek to control, the destinies of the 145 million uneducated
tillers of the soil. There is nothing quite like them in this country,
though the expression "the professional class" describes them in part.
Broadly speaking, they are people who have passed through school and
university, and can therefore lay claim to a certain amount of culture;
their birth is a matter of no moment, they may be the children of peasants
or of noblemen. It is from this "class," if we can call it so, that both
the bureaucracy and the revolutionary movement draw their recruits. The
real tragedy of Russia is that neither the party of reform nor the party of
reaction shares, or even understands, the outlook and ideals of the people.
Russian culture is still so comparatively recent that it has not yet passed
out of the imitative stage; and, in spite of the work of Pushkin, Gogol,
and Dostoieffsky, the books that are read and studied in Russia are for
the most part translations from foreign authors. The result is that the
political and social ideas of the _intelligentsia_ are almost wholly
derived from countries whose structure is totally different from their
own. We shall presently see that this fact had an important bearing on the
development of the outbreak of 1905. It is sufficient here to notice
that the struggle was one between two sections of the _intelligentsia_,
political idealism against political stagnation, the Red Flag _versus_ Red
Tape.

After twenty years of bureaucratic government the country as a whole began
to grow once again restless. In this period a proletariate had come into
being. It was a mere drop in the bucket of 145 millions of peasants,
but its voice was heard in the towns, and it was steeped in the Marxian
doctrines of Social Democracy. Moreover the peasants themselve