Suchergebnisse

Territorial disputes are not the only, probably not even the main cause of war, and territorial settlement is not the only and perhaps not the most important aspect of a peace treaty. Still, territorial change after a war is its most conspicuous effect, one which is held in the memory of generations. For two generations of Frenchmen, Alsace-Lorraine was an open wound, a program unifying them much better than any slogan relating to internal affairs. For the generation of Germans which matured after the First World War, the idea of the lost provinces was an intolerable humiliation. During the past few years, similar ideas have become dominant in the minds of the Russians.

Pre- revolutionary Russia was a rapidly advancing society in which a number of definite trends could be detected. Assuming that this development had not been interrupted by war and revolution, certain conjectures of the effects of these trends might be formulated.We may assume that without the revolution the political forces of Russia would have achieved the transformation of the "dual" or "constitutional" monarchy, which ruled Russia since 1906, into a parliamentary monarchy in which the Crown would have yielded actual power to representatives of public opinion. The franchise of the Douma would have been gradually democratized. The establishment of Z.emstvos, that is, provincial and district self-government, which, between 1866 and 1914, had contributed so much to Russia's advance in the fields of public education and public hygiene, would have been extended throughout the Empire, with perhaps the exception of some semi-colonial territories; these agencies would have received a significant re-en-forcement through the modernization of obsolete institutions of peasant self-government. The excellent judicial system which Russia had already enjoyed since 1866, curbed during the reactionary period before the Russo-Japanese war, but partly restored under the Douma, would have been expanded and improved.

The Russian Revolution is one of the major events in the history of the 20th century. It is one of the "turning points" not only in the history of Russia, but also in universal history. Its result, i.e., the creation, in Russia, of a Communist society, has become a challenge to the Western World, as an invitation to imitation, and, at the same time, as a threat of forcible transformation