At the Crossroads

Abstract

For a long time after October, it seemed to me that we participants in the Russian patriotic movement were spared only by the oversight of the victors. "The Swedes forgot to crush us," in the words of a poet. Or, even worse, they were playing with us like a cat plays with a mouse it has caught: Keep on squirming. I'm surprised you even try. Even the most vile of alternatives could not be excluded, that the half-strangled mouse might be used as bait—that, sooner or later, sympathizers would gather around it and then … then they could all be felled with a single blow.