The Russian Revolution by Frank Alfred Golder, Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper, Robert Joseph Kerner

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Whatever may be its final outcome the Russian Revolution of 1917 bids fair to remain one of the great events of modern history. Its consequences are still immeasurable and today to many they appear as fraught with menace as with hope. They have within less than a year led a mighty empire to the brink of dissolution and no man can foretell where and how the process will end for worse or for better. The Russian Revolution saved the Central Powers at the moment when their prospect looked darkest, but on the other hand it facilitated the entrance of the United States into the war as one for liberty and democracy. Time has yet to show whether the loss or the gain has been the greater for the Allied cause and for mankind. It will be paid for at a heavy price but our hope cannot easily be shaken that sooner or later an event so full of promise for the misruled millions of the autocratic empire of the Tsar will mark a step forward, not backward, in the progress of the world. The whole story of the sudden out-break in

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re unable to derive sufficient income from their own land to pay the heavy taxes and to support their families. Scarcely any landowners understood anything of agriculture and few paid any attention to it. I know splendid estates which brought in miserable incomes, not normal even under the antiquated system of four year crop rotation and quite absurd if measured by standards of modern American farming, yet sufficient to place at the disposal of the owners a splendid mansion in Moscow or Petrograd and a no less splendid summer home on their estate. There, during the hot summer days, the owners were enjoying their comfort in idleness and talking of reforms necessary for the benefit of the peasants, while peasant women were cutting the wheat for them with sickles, stooping and sweating under the scorching rays of the sun. The superintendents of those estates enriched themselves at the expense of the blind or careless and carefree owners under the very eyes of the peasants who hated the superintendents, pitied or

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