reaucracy, reactionary
pro-German officials were animated by the belief that the victory of
Germany was essential to the permanence of Absolutism and autocratic
government. They, too, like the Socialist "defeatists," aimed to weaken
and corrupt the morale of the army and to divide the nation.

These Germanophiles in places of power realized that they had unconscious
but exceedingly useful allies in the Socialist intransigents. Actuated by
motives however high, the latter played into the hands of the most corrupt
and reactionary force that ever infested the old regime. This force, the
reactionary Germanophiles, had from the very first hoped and believed that
Germany would win the war. They had exerted every ounce of pressure they
could command to keep the Czar from maintaining the treaty with France and
entering into the war on her side against Germany and Austria. When they
failed in this, they bided their time, full of confidence that the superior
efficiency of the German military machine would soon triumph. But when they
witnessed the great victorious onward rush of the Russian army, which for a
time manifested such a degree of efficiency as they had never believed to
be possible, they began to bestir themselves. From this quarter came the
suggestion, very early in the war, as Plechanov and his associates charged
in their Manifesto, that the Czar ought to make an early peace with
Germany.

They went much farther than this. Through every conceivable channel they
contrived to obstruct Russia's military effort. They conspired to
disorganize the transportation system, the hospital service, the
food-supply, the manufacture of munitions. They, too, in a most effective
manner, were plotting to weaken and corrupt the morale of the army. There
was universal uneasiness. In the Allied chancelleries there was fear of a
treacherous separate peace between Russia and Germany. It was partly to
avert that catastrophe by means of a heavy bribe that England undertook the
forcing of the Dardanelles. All over Russia there was an awakening of the
memories of the graft that ate like a canker-worm at the heart of the
nation. Men told once more the story of the Russian general in Manchuria,
in 1904, who, when asked why fifty thousand men were marching barefoot,
answered that the boots were in the pocket of Grand-Duke Vladimir! They
told again the story of the cases of "shells" for the Manchurian army which
were intercepted in the nation's cap