eat of a complete collapse of civilization is more imminent in
Russia than elsewhere. But it is clear enough in Poland, it cannot be
disregarded in Germany, there is no doubt of its existence in Italy,
France is conscious of it; it is only in England and America that this
threat is not among the waking nightmares of everybody. Unless the
struggle, which has hitherto been going against us, takes a turn for the
better, we shall presently be quite unable to ignore it ourselves.

I have tried to state the position in Russia today: on the one hand to
describe the crisis itself, the threat which is forcing these people to
an extreme of effort, and on the other hand to describe the organization
that is facing that threat; on the one hand to set down what are the
main characteristics of the crisis, on the other hand to show how the
comparatively small body of persons actually supplying the Russian
people with its directives set about the stupendous task of moving that
vast inert mass, not along the path of least resistance, but along a
path which, while alike unpleasant and extremely difficult, does seem to
them to promise some sort of eventual escape.

No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind stating my
own reason for writing this one (which has taken time that I should have
liked to spend on other and very different things). Knowledge of this
reason will permit the reader to make allowances for such bias I have
been unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my book
perhaps nearly as objective as I should myself wish it to be.

It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battle
front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a single
army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, each
one severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do
their utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are
witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization itself. There
are people in both camps who believe that armed and economic conflict
between revolutionary and non-revolutionary Europe, or if you like
between Capitalism and Communism, is inevitable. These people, in both
camps, are doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy pessimists, in
Moscow no less than in London and Paris, they go so far as to say "the
sooner the better," and by all means in their power try to precipitate
a conflict. Now the main effort