RUTHFULLY YOURS

BARCELONA—Catalonia’s leader said Monday that any declaration of separation from Spain won’t come for at least several days, putting pressure on the government in Madrid to make the next move in the standoff between the country and the restive region.

The two sides were carefully weighing their next steps the day after Catalan voters appeared to overwhelmingly back independence in a referendum boycotted by opponents and marred by violence, leaving hundreds of civilians injured and raising the political stakes.

Carles Puigdemont said Catalan authorities were still tallying the official results and weren’t likely to send them to regional lawmakers until at least Wednesday. The Catalan parliament, where separatists have a majority, would then have 48 hours under the vote’s enabling legislation to declare Catalonia’s separation from Spain.

The central government in Madrid says the vote was illegal because it violated Spain’s constitution, which upholds the “indissoluble unity” of Spain. Police, acting on court orders, tried to prevent voters from entering polling stations and using voting material.

Mr. Puigdemont’s slight delay throws the ball into the court of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a conservative who has taken a hard line against Catalan separation. A strong reaction from Mr. Rajoy—for instance preemptively stripping Catalonia of the autonomy it currently has—would likely bolster Mr. Puigdemont’s support among his voters. The pause also allows the Catalan leader to present himself as open to dialogue, and not solely focused on declaring independence.

Many analysts think secession is unlikely to materialize. “There will ultimately be a settlement on regional financial reform and greater autonomy for Catalonia within Spain but this will be a drawn-out process,” Fitch Ratings analysts said in a research report.

Mr. Puigdemont is seeking to muster international attention and backing for his independence push and assess his domestic support by playing down his urgency, analysts said.

“You burn political capital by moving too quickly and unilaterally,” said Antonio Barroso, a political analyst at consulting firm Teneo Intelligence. CONTINUE AT SITE

A hundred years ago, in the early hours of November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Petrograd. Within weeks they took advantage of Russia’s collapsing political and social structure to impose control over the country’s heartland. The result of the coup was a tragedy of world-historical proportions. A vibrant, flourishing culture (see “Remembering the Old Russia,” Breaking Glass, September) was destroyed amid a bloodbath 100 times worse than la Terreur.

In the preceding quarter-century Russia had undergone rapid modernization. On the eve of the Great War she was the world’s fourth-largest economy, her annual growth rate comparable to that of China after Deng’s reforms. Her railway network exceeded 50,000 miles, and her gold reserves were second only to Britain’s. Her wheat harvest had doubled in the two decades preceding 1913. That year Russia had the lowest direct taxes in Europe, four times lower than those of France and Germany, one eighth of the British rate. Real incomes had increased sixfold between 1893 and 1913. Workers’ rights, public health, and literacy were improving accordingly. Of some 150,000 new book titles published worldwide in 1914, over one fifth of them were published in Russia—as many as in Britain, France, and the United States combined. Paul Valéry called the late empire one of the wonders of the world, which, despite its modernity and unlike Western Europe, still retained a Christian outlook.

The leaders of Wilhelmine Germany feared that Russia’s growth would turn her into Europe’s hegemon. As Fritz Fischer established in his 1961 Germany’s Aims in the First World War, the Kaiserreich military and political elite engineered the crisis after Sarajevo to wage a “preventive” war and thus preempt Russia’s rapid economic, demographic, and military rise. The same people actively helped Lenin et al. on their sealed train journey from Zurich to Petrograd three years later, thus sealing Europe’s destiny (as well as their own).

The revolution that ended monarchy in March 1917, leading to its Bolshevik sequel eight months later, did not come because the material condition of Russian peasants and workers was unbearable, or because the war was going badly. The weakness of Nicholas II, the role of his unstable wife, the influence of Rasputin—all were on balance peripheral. The revolution came primarily because Russia’s political and intellectual elite had lost its faith, focus, and nerve.

The most significant trait of the Bolshevik terror during the civil war and in the ensuing decades was the promotion of a quasi religious forma mentis based on anti-Christian zeal, and the parallel insistence on the creation of a New Man divorced from his ancestors, his naturally evolving communities, and his culture. As Trotsky wrote in 1924,

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.