By way of glozing over these incongruities Lenin’s ukase proclaimed that the measures enacted were only provisional, and aimed at enabling Russia to realize the great transformation by degrees.  But the impression conveyed by the history of the social side of Lenin’s activity is that Marxism, whether as understood by its author or as interpreted and twisted by its Russian adherents, has been tried and found impracticable.  One is further warranted in saying that neither the visionary workers who are moved by misdirected zeal for social improvement nor the theorists who are constantly on the lookout for new and stimulating ideas are likely to discover in Russian Bolshevism any aspect but the one alluded to above worthy of their serious consideration.

A much deeper mark was made on the history of the century by its methods.

Compared with the soul-searing horrors let loose during the Bolshevist fit of frenzy, the worst atrocities recorded of Deputy Carrier and his noyades during the French Revolution were but the freaks of compassionate human beings.  In Bolshevist Russia brutality assumed forms so monstrous that the modern man of the West shrinks from conjuring up a faint picture of them in imagination.  Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands were done to death in hellish ways by the orders of men and of women.  Eyes were gouged out, ears hacked off, arms and legs torn from the body in presence of the victims’ children or wives, whose agony was thus begun before their own turn came.  Men and women and infants were burned alive.  Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the awful torture of the “thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs broken and were left for hours in agonies.  Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive.  History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled.  One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes.  I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals.  The following account is from the pen of a French marine officer: 

“We have two armed cruisers outside Odessa.  A few weeks ago one of them, having an investigation to make, sent a diver down to the bottom.  A few minutes passed and the alarm signal was heard.  He was hauled up and quickly relieved of his accoutrements.  He had fainted away.  When he came to, his teeth were chattering and the only articulate sounds that could be got from him were the words:  ‘It is horrible!  It is awful!’ A second diver was then lowered, with the same procedure and a like result.  Finally a third was chosen, this time a sturdy lad of iron nerves, and sent down to the bottom of the sea.  After the lapse of a few minutes the same thing happened as before, and the man was brought up.  This time, however, there was no fainting fit to record.  On the contrary, although