Meanwhile, though a temporary truce was observed during the Duma’s sessions, its dissolution on July 21, 1906, two and a half months after opening, was the signal for a fresh outburst of outrages on both sides.  The country was fast drifting into anarchy; agrarian risings, indiscriminate bomb-throwing, pogroms, highway robberies carried out in the name of the “social revolution” and euphemistically entitled expropriation, outbreaks of a horrible kind of blood-lust which delighted in motiveless murder for the sake of murder, were the order of the day.  The revolution was strong enough neither to crush the reactionaries nor to control the revolutionaries themselves.  The foundations of the social structure seemed to be dissolving in a welter of blood and crime, and public opinion, which in its hatred of bureaucracy had hitherto sided with the revolution, suddenly drew back in horror from the abyss which opened out in front of it.  Stolypin, the Strafford of modern Russia, who condemned the extremists of both sides, was called to the helm of the State; his watchword, “Order first, reform afterwards,” was backed by the force of public opinion; and, as he stamped out the revolution with a heel of iron, the country shuddered but approved.  The peasants were pacified by the remission of the hated tax, and by measures for providing them with more land; and Russia sank once more into her normal condition.

But political incompetency is not a reason sufficiently weighty in itself to account for the remarkable revulsion of public feeling against the revolutionary party.  Behind the narrow political issue lay the larger philosophical and moral one; and it was the discovery by the country of the real character and ultimate aims of the party which for a few months in 1906 seized the reins of power that will alone provide a sufficient explanation of one of the most astonishing political debacles of modern history.  The revolution was nothing less than an attempt by a small minority of theorists and moral anarchists to force Western civilisation upon Russia, and not Western civilisation as it actually is but a sort of abstract “Westernism” derived from books.  For the revolutionaries were far more Western than the Westerns.  They had not merely swallowed wholesale the latest and most extreme political and social fads, picked up from the literature of England, France, and Germany, but they possessed a courage of their convictions and a will to carry them out to the logical conclusion which many “advanced thinkers” of the West lack.  They were not modernists or new theologians but atheists, not Fabians or social reformers but revolutionary socialists armed with bombs, not radicals but republicans, not divorce-law-reformers but “free lovers.”  A remarkable book was published in 1910 called Landmarks.  It was written by a number of disillusioned revolutionaries, and gives a vivid picture of the effect which the foregoing principles had upon the lives of those who upheld them.  Here is one extract: