I watched the development of anti-Ententism among those Russians with painful interest, and in favorable conditions for observation, and I say without hesitation that rancor against the Allies burns as vehemently and intensely among the anti-Bolshevists as among their adversaries.  “My country as a whole is bitterly hostile to her former allies,” exclaimed an eminent Russian, “for as soon as she had rendered them inestimable services, at the cost of her political existence, they turned their backs upon her as though her agony were no affair of theirs.  To-day the nation is divided on many issues.  Dissensions and quarrels have riven and shattered it into shreds.  But in one respect Russia is still united—­in the vehemence of her sentiment toward the Allies, who first drained her life-blood and then abandoned her prostrate body to beasts of prey.  Some part of the hatred engendered might have been mitigated if representatives of the provisional Russian government had been admitted to the Conference.  A statesman would have insisted upon opening at least this little safety-valve.  It would have helped and could not have harmed the Allies.  It would have bound the Russians to them.  For Russia’s delegates, the men sent or empowered by Kolchak and his colleagues to represent them, would have been the exponents of a helpless community hovering between life and death.  They could and would have gone far toward conciliating the world-dictators, to whose least palatable decisions they might have hesitated to offer unbending opposition.  And this acquiescence, however provisional, would have tended to relieve the Allies of a sensible part of their load of responsibility.  It would also have linked the Russians, loosely, perhaps, but perceptibly, to the Western Powers.  It would have imparted a settled Ententophil direction to Kolchak’s policy, and communicated it to the nation.  In short, it might have dispelled some of the storm-clouds that are gathering in the east of Europe.”

But the Allies, true to their wont of drifting, put off all decisive action, and let things slip and slide, for the Germans to put in order.  There were no Russians, therefore, at the Conference, and there lies no obligation on any political group or party in the anarchist Slav state to hold to the Allies.  But it would be an error to imagine that they have a white sheet of paper on which to trace their line of action and write the names of France and Britain as their future friends.  They are filled with angry disgust against these two ex-Allies, and of the two the feeling against France is especially intense.[287]