EPILOGUE 361
main body of the troops—the world proletariat, and above
all the Germans—had caught up and gone ahead. When
Lenin said at the time of Brest-Litovsk that c land must be
sacrificed to gain time ', he was still thinking of the time
needed for the victory of the world proletariat to free Russia
from.its contradictions and isolation. For Lenin Russia
was only a pawn, the first available on the chessboard of
world revolution.
World revolution never took place, and for several years
Russia's isolation was enhanced by the policy of the c cordon
sanitaire' followed by other states, particularly by those of
the Entente. So the process was reversed, and the bol-
sheviks had to rely on their own resources. Although this
reversal was forced on them by the necessity of keeping a
hold on power, the lustre of its more dramatic aspect for
long hid from them its real significance and consequences.
The Soviet State, which was to have broughte direct democ-
racy' with it, the 'people's State' of which Lenin had talked
in 1917, set up a dictatorship which became more and more
severe and gradually swept in every kind of organization
inside the community—Soviets, syndicates, the Communist
Party itself, and in other countries utilized any force, party,
or principle that might serve its needs, as interpreted solely
by the leaders. Use is made indifferently of anti-militarism
or Chauvinism, the Reic/iswehr or the Red Front; the League
of Nations is denounced as a c fortress of imperialism' or
exalted as the c bulwark of peace *. The defence of demo-
cratic liberties becomes alternately an unforgiveable sin of
the changers-on of capitalism3 and the supreme aim of
the Popular Front. Leon Blum is criticized in 1934 for
saying in the Chamber that the socialists would resist a
German attack on France, and violently attacked in 1936
because as head of the government he received Dr, Schacht.
Family feeling, which once stank of the petit-bourgeois, is
honourably reinstated, not because socialism may be en-
riched thereby, but because the Soviet State wants France
to have a big army and consequently as many recruits as
possible.
This method of completely subordinating the material
interests of the working-class and socialist movement and