In view of these facts, and a mass of similar facts which might be cited, it was natural for the democrats of Russia to identify Germany and German intrigue and influence with the hated bureaucracy.  It was as natural as it was for the German influence to be used against the democratic movement in Russia, as it invariably was.  Practically the entire mass of democratic opinion in Russia, including, of course, all the Socialist factions, regarded these royal, aristocratic, and bureaucratic German influences as a menace to Russia, a cancer that must be cut out.  With the exception of a section of the Socialists, whose position we shall presently examine, the mass of liberal-thinking, progressive, democratic Russians saw in the war a welcome breaking of the German yoke.  Believing that the victory of Germany would restore the yoke, and that her defeat by Russia would eliminate the power which had sustained Czarism, they welcomed the war and rallied with enthusiasm at the call to arms.  They were loyal, but to Russia, not to the Czar.  They felt that in warring against Prussian militarist-imperialism they were undermining Russian Absolutism.

That the capitalists of Russia should want to see the power of Germany to hold Russia in chains completely destroyed is easy to understand.  To all intents and purposes, from the purely economic point of view, Russia was virtually a German colony to be exploited for the benefit of Germany.  The commercial treaties of 1905, which gave Germany such immense trade advantages, had become exceedingly unpopular.  On the other hand, the immense French loan of 1905, the greater part of which had been used to develop the industrial life of Russia, had the effect of bringing Russian capitalists into closer relations with French capitalists.  For further capital Russia could only look to France and England with any confident hope.  Above all, the capitalists of Russia wanted freedom for economic development; they wanted stability and national unity, the very things Germany was preventing.  They wanted efficient government and the elimination of the terrible corruption which infested the bureaucracy.  The law of economic evolution was inexorable and inescapable; the capitalist system could not grow within the narrow confines of Absolutism.

For the Russian capitalist class, therefore, it was of the most vital importance that Germany’s power should not be increased, as it would of necessity be if the Entente submitted to her threats and permitted Serbia to be crushed by Austria, and the furtherance of the Pan-German Mitteleuropa designs.  It was vitally necessary to Russian capitalism that Germany’s strangle-hold upon the inner life of Russia should be broken.  The issue was not the competition of capitalism, as that is commonly understood; it was not the rivalry for markets like that which animates the capitalist classes of all lands.  The Russian capitalist class was animated by no fear of German competition in the sense in which the nations