Posted by Ian E-N on September 05, 2006 at 19:21:37 from 86.130.94.59 user IanEN.
In Reply to: Re: Class posted by Joe Windsor on September 05, 2006 at 17:47:05:
"I do not think I shall ever be so happy in my life as I was during those first days when I saw working men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class and not of mine. I remembered Shelley's:
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many - they are few."
"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. "
The Truth About Russia - Arthur Ransome