Page 36 - All India Magazine Oct-2025

In the new Russia the bourgeoisie during its brief rule rejected
the political ideas of the Czardom in internal affairs and helped
to overturn autocracy, but preserved its ideas in external affairs
minus the German influence and stood for the expansion of Russia
and the possession of Constantinople. Certainly, there is an im-
portant difference. The monarchical or aristocratic State is politi-
cal in its mentality and seeks first of all territorial aggrandisement
and political predominance or hegemony among the nations,
commercial aims are only a secondary preoccupation attendant
on the other. In the bourgeois State there is a reverse order; for
it has its eye chiefly on the possession of markets, the command
of new fields of wealth, the formation or conquest of colonies
or dependencies which can be commercially and industrially ex-
ploited and on political aggrandisement only as a means for this
more cherished object. Moreover, the monarchical or aristocratic
statesman turned to war as almost his first expedient. As soon as
he was dissatisfied with the response to his diplomacy, he grasped
at the sword or the rifle. The bourgeois statesman hesitates, cal-
culates, gives a longer rope to diplomacy, tries to gain his ends by
bargainings, arrangements, peaceful pressure, demonstrations of
power. In the end he is ready to resort to war, but only when these
expedients have failed him and only if the end seems commensu-
rate with the means and the great speculation of war promises
a very strong chance of success and solid profit. But on the other
hand, the bourgeois-democratic State has developed a stupen-
dous military organisation of which the most powerful monarchs
and aristocracies could not dream. And if this tends to delay the
outbreak of large wars, it tends too to make their final advent sure
and their proportions enormous and nowadays incalculable and
immeasurable.
CWSA 25: 480

1. So also has Socialist Russia taken over from the Czars these ideas and habits
withvery little or no modification.

36 All India Magazine, October 2025