Posted by Ian E-N on March 04, 2005 at 11:10:59 from 148.88.149.8 user IanEN.
In Reply to: Re: Evgenia (was : Ransome & the British Secret Services) posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on March 04, 2005 at 10:20:00:
no very strong political views, but was a loyal British subject with ties of sympathy to the Bolsheviks, espescially Radek.
"No one contends that the Bolsheviki are angels. I ask only that men shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds them, and see that the ideal for which they are struggling, in the only way in which they can struggle, is among those lights which every man of young, and honest heart sees before him somewhere on the road and not among those other lights from which he resolutely turns away. These men who have made the Soviet Government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with clean shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will live beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have written a page of history more daring than any other which I can remember in the story of the human race. They are writing it amid showers of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours' and in my own. But when the thing is over, and their enemies have triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic at noon, and that page will be as white as the snows of Russia, and the writing on it as bright as the gold domes that I used to see glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in Petrograd.
And when in after years men read that page they will judge your country and mine, your race and mine, by the, help, or hindrance they gave to the writing of it. "
sounds more political than ties of personal sympathy