Bolsheviks

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

In this connection it is that the second Russian revolution of 1917 which placed the Bolsheviks in power, is most illuminating. In Russia the breakdown was complete. In Russia the experiment of a new order was actually made. It had an air, a deceitful air, of being a final and conclusive trying out of the Socialist idea in practice. It did in fact demonstrate those insufficiencies of socialist theory to which we have already drawn attention, and particularly did it demonstrate the sterility of the Marxist school of socialism. It proved again the soundness of the principle that a revolution can create nothing that has not been fully discussed, planned, thought out, and explained beforehand. Otherwise i, revolution merely destroys a government, a dynasty, an organization as the case may be.

We have already told of the collapse of Russia in 1917 tue to the moral rottenness, and administrative incompetence of the Tzardom ; and how the moderate republican regime succeeded it gave way in November to an extremist régime, the Bolshevik dictatorship. It becomes necessary now to describe in outline this extraordinary phase in the social and political history of Russia.

We have given an account of the growth of socialist ideas in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and of the large part played in that development by the "class war" ideas of Karl Marx. These ideas flattered the pride and stimulated the ambition of the more energetic and discontented personalities in all the industrial regions of the world. Marxism became the creed of the restless industrial worker everywhere. But since there is no great appeal in the socialist formula to the peasant, who owns or wants to own the land he cultivates, and since the great town communities of western Europe and America are middle class rather than industrial in their mentality, the Marxists soon came to see that the social and economic revolution they contemplated could not wait for parliamentary methods and majority votes, it would have in the first place to be the work of a minority, a minority of industrial workers, who would seize power, establish institutions, and so train the rest of the world to the happiness of the millennium that would ensue. This phase of minority rule which was to bring about the millennium was called in the Marxist phraseology the "dictatorship of the proletariat." Everywhere, with an intense propagandist energy, unpaid, fanatical men spent their lives and energies in spreading this idea. In the opening decade of the twentieth century there were perhaps a million or more men in the world absolutely convinced that if this vaguely conceived "dictatorship of the proletariat" could be brought about, a new and better social order would follow almost automatically upon its establishment. How illusory that idea was we have already pointed out.

The Marxists had no clear and settled plans either for the payment of the worker, or for public discussion, or for economic administration when "capitalism" was destroyed. All these things had been provided for in what was no doubt a very empirical and unjust fashion, but which was neverthe less a working fashion, in the individualist capitalist system. The Marxists had never worked out an alternative method of doing those things, and did not seem to be aware that an alternative method was needed. They said in effect to the workers "give us power, and everything shall be done," And Russia, tortured, wasted, and betrayed by the Allies she had served so well, gave herself over in despair to the "dictatorship of the proletariat." The Communist party in Russia has never claimed more than 800,000 adherents, and it has in truth probably never exceeded a quarter of a million of members. But this comparatively little organization, because it was resolute and devoted, and because there was nothing else honest or resolute or competent enough in the whole of that disorganized country to stand against it, was able to establish itself in Petersburg, Moscow, and most of the towns of Russia, to secure the adhesion of the sailors of the fleet, (who killed most of their officers and occupied the fortresses of Sevastopol and Cronstadt) and to become de facto rulers of Russia.

There was a phase of Terroristic government. Bolsheviks claim that it was inevitable that at first they should rule by terror. The social disorganization of the country was extreme. Over large areas the peasants had risen against the land owners, and there was a cutting up of the estates and château burning going on very like the parallel process of the first French revolution. There were many abominable atrocities. The peasants took over the land and divided it up among themselves, being in entire ignorance of the teachings of Karl Marx in that matter. At the same time hundreds of thousands of soldiers with arms in their hands were wandering back from the war zone to their homes. The Tzarist government had conscripted over eight million men altogether, far more men than it could ever equip or handle at the front, it had torn them up by the roots from their own villages, and great multitudes of these conscripts were now practically brigands living upon the countryside. Moscow in October and November, 1917, swarmed with such men. They banded themselves together, they went into houses and looted and raped, no one interfering. Law and administration had vanished. Robbed and murdered men lay neglected in the streets for days together. This we have to remember was the state of affairs when the Bolsheviks came into power, it was not brought about by their usurpation. For a time in their attempts to restore order anyone found bearing arms was shot. Thousands of men were seized and shot, and it is doubtful if Moscow could have been restored to even a semblance of order without some such violence. The debacle of Tzarist Russia was so complete that the very framework and habit of public order had gone.

In the spring of 1918 the Bolsheviks had secured a control of the large towns, the railways, and the shipping of most of Russia. A Constituent Assembly had been dissolved and dispersed in January, the Bolsheviks could not work with it it was too divided in its aims and counsels they allege, for vigorous action; and in March peace, a very submissive peace, with Germany was signed at Brest Litovsk. At the head of the Bolshevik dictatorship, which now set itself to govern Russia, was Lenin, a little, very energetic and nimble-witted man who had spent most of his life in exile in London and Geneva, engaged in political speculations and the obscure politics of the Russian Marxist organizations. He was a quite honest doctrinaire, simple living and indefatigable, with no experience whatever of practical administration. Associated with him was Trotsky, who was presently to develop considerable practical military ability. Radek, Lunarcharsky, Zinoviev, Zorin, Kamenev, Krassin, were other conspicuous members of the small group which now set itself to reorganize Russia and steer it straight out of the disastrous position to which the war had brought it to a communist millennium.

But at first the ambition of the Bolshevik leaders went far beyond Russia. Russia was not a big enough task for them. They proclaimed the social revolution throughout the world, and called in the workers everywhere to unite, overthrow the capitalist system, and so bring about the planless, shapeless Marxist millennium. This procedure nettrally brought them into conflict with all other existing governments. It added to their task of establishing communism in Russia, the task of maintaining her against a series of counter attacks to which this denunciation of foreign governments exposed her.

In two or three years the failure of the Bolsheviks, so far as the establishment of a working communism went, and their demonstration of the uncreative barrenness of the Marxist doctrine, was complete. They did not get Russia to her feet again. They were quite unable to get the shattered Russian industries going. Most of their leaders were of the writing, talking type, without any managerial experience. At the outset of their rule, their narrow class hatred inspired them to destroy most of what remained in Russia of the class of works' managers, technical experts, foremen, and the like. They had no systematic knowledge and the conceit of the Marxist doctrinaires prompted them to despise any knowledge they did not possess of the psychology of the worker at work. They had not even the practical working knowledge of the old capitalist they despised. All they knew about that sort of thing was the psychology of the worker in a mass meeting. They tried to run Russia by exhortation, and neither the worker when he returned to the factory nor the peasant when he got back to his plough responded with any practical results. Transport and mechanical production in the towns fell steadily into dislocation and decay, and the peasant produced for his own needs and hid his surplus. When the writer visited Petersburg in 1920 he beheld an astonishing spectacle of desolation. It was the first time a modern city had collapsed in this fashion. Nothing had been repaired for four years. There were great holes in the streets where the surface had fallen into the broken drains, lamp posts lay as they had fallen, not a shop was open and most were boarded up over their broken windows. The scanty drift of people in the streets wore shabby and incongruous clothing, for there were no new clothes in Russia, no new boots. Many people wore bast wrappings on their feet. People, city, everything was shabby and threadbare. Even the Bolshevik commissars had scrubby chins, for razors and suchlike things were being neither made nor imported. The death rate was enormous, and the population of this doomed city was falling by the hundred thousand every year.

There are many reasons for believing that even in 1918 and 1919 the Bolshevik dictatorship would have recognized the error of its ways and begun to adapt itself to the unanticipated factors in the situation in which it found itself. They were narrow and doctrinaire, but many of them were men of imagination and intellectual flexibility, and there can be no disputing that in all the evil they did, they were honest in intention and devoted in method. Left to themselves they might have worked out an experiment of very great value to mankind. They would have been forced to link their system on to the slowly evolved economic tradition of the monetary system, and to come to dealings with the incurable individualism of the peasant cultivator. But they were not left to themselves. From the outset of their career they raised a frenzy of opposition in western Europe and America. None of the tolerance that had been shown the almost equally incapable and disastrous régime of the Tzar was shown to the Marxist adventurers. They were universally boycotted, and the reactionary governments of France and Great Britain subsidized and assisted every sort of adventurer within and without Russia to assail them. A press campaign of incredible malevolence, headed by an organ of such respectable traditions as the London Times, confused the public mind by a stream of fantasies and evil suggestions about the Bolsheviks. They were incapable doctrinaire men with a bad social and economic theory, muddling along with a shattered country. But the Times propaganda and the kindred propaganda in France and America represented them as an abomination unparalleled in the world's history. Something like a crusade against the Bolsheviks was preached.

As a consequence the Bolsheviks in Russia from the very beginning were forced into an attitude of defence against foreign aggression. The persistent hostility of the western governments to them strengthened them greatly in Russia. In spite of the internationalist theories of the Marxists the Bolshevik government in Moscow became a patriotic government defending the country against foreigners, and in particular defending the peasant against the return of the land-owner and debt collector. It was a paradoxical position, but communism in Russia created peasant proprietors. And Trotsky, who had been a pacifist, was educated into a great general in spite of himself. But this militarism, and this patriotism which was thus forced upon Lenin's government, this concentration of attention upon the frontiers, forbade any effective reconstruction of police and disciplinary method within, even had the Bolsheviks been capable of much re-construction. The old inquisitorial and tyrannous Tzarist police was practically continued under the new government. A clumsy and inaccurate detective system with summary powers and bloodthirsty traditions struggled against foreign emissaries from abroad and against sedition, fear, and betrayal within, and incidentally gratified its ugly craving for punishment. In July, 1918, the Tzar and his family there being some danger of their being rescued by reactionary troops were massacred at the instance of a minor official.

In January, 1919, four Grand Dukes, uncles of the Tzar, were executed at Petersburg by the police commission in flat defiance of Lenin's reprieve.

For five years the Russian people under this strange and unprecedented rule maintained its solidarity against every attempt to divide and subjugate it. In August, 1918, British and French forces landed at Archangel; they were with-drawn in September 1919. The Japanese made strenuous attempts from 1918 onward to establish themselves in eastern Siberia. In 1919 the Russians were fighting not only the British at Archangel and the Japanese but they had a reactionary force under Admiral Koltchak against them in Siberia, Roumanians in the south with French and Greek contingents, and General Denikin with an army of Russian reactionaries and enormous supplies of British and French war material and the support of the French fleet in the Crimea. In July Koltchak and Denikin had united and held south eastern Russia from Odessa to Ufa, and an Esthonian army under General Yudenitch was marching on Petersburg. It seemed as though the end of Bolshevism could be but a question of weeks or days. Yet by the end of the year Yudenitch was routed and forgotten, Koltchak was in full retreat to Siberia, and Denikin to the Black Sea. Denikin and the remnant of his forces were taken off by British and French ships in the early part of 1920, and Koh-&k was captured and shot in Siberia.

But Russia was to have no respite. The Poles, incited by the French, opened a new campaign in April, 1920, and a fresh reactionary raider, General Wrangel, resumed the task of Denikin in invading and devastating his own country, The Poles, after being driven back upon Warsaw, recovered with French assistance and supplies, and made a victorious advance into Russian territory; and a treaty, much to the territorial advantage of Poland, was made at Riga in October, 1920. Wrangel, after destroying crops and food over great areas, suffered the fate of Denikin and retired upon the hospitality of the western powers at the end of the year. In March, 1921, the Bolshevik government had to suppress, and did suppress, an insurrection of the sailors in Cronstadt, "the Pretorian Guard of Bolshevism."

Throughout 1920 the fantastic and irrational hostility to the Bolsheviks in western Europe and western America was slowly giving way to saner conceptions of the situation. There were many difficulties in the way of "recognizing" the Bolshevik government fully and completely, difficulties largely due to the unreason that also prevailed on the Bolshevik side, but by the end of 1920 a sort of uncivil peace existed between Russia and most of the rest of the world, and British, and French enquirers American, were able to go in and out of the country. Early in 1921 both Britain and Italy made Trade Agreements with Russia, and Russian representatives in the form of "Trade Delegations" opened communications between that outcast land and the rest of the world.

But now a new and still more frightful disaster was preparing for this most tragic people. In 1921 there was an unusual drought. The attentive reader of this history will have noted already what a precarious and fluctuating thing is the climate of the great land areas about the Caspian sea, Naturally these are nomadic lands; it is doubtful if they. will ever be safe for a large agricultural population. Now with the drought the crops over vast areas of south-eastern Russia failed absolutely, and the most terrible famine in the whole recorded history of our race ensued. Millions perished. Multitudes, whole villages, and townships sat down in their homes to die, and died. Many ate hay and earth and indescribable filth. Men dug in the graveyards, and became cannibals. Great areas were depopulated. Yet there was corn to burn not only in America but even in the Ukraine and Roumania and Hungary. But the communications of this country had been hopelessly shattered by the operations of Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, and the Bolshevik government had neither the resources nor the ability to cope with this monstrous disaster. An American commission and. a commission under Dr. Nansen, the great Artic explorer, organized relief with the assent and assistance of the government, and fairly generous American supplies were poured into the country. But the chief European governments, their people being misled by the propagandist dishonesty of the European press, responded grudgingly or not at all to the extreme appeal of the situation. The British government, which had spent a hundred millions in illegitimate military operations against her former ally, smirched the good name of Britain in the world by refusing any contribution to the work of relief. So little as yet had the lesson of human solidarity, that the great war should have taught mankind, been learnt. And while the hapless multitudes perished in Russia, corn wasted in the granaries a few hundred miles away, ships lay up for want of freight, steel works where rails and engines could have been made stood idle, and millions of workmen were unemployed because, said the business men, "there was nothing for them to do." And so thousands of square miles of south-eastern Russia became a desert of abandoned fields and of towns and villages of the dead.

Yet amidst this desolation the Bolshevik government remained. And gradually the necessity of recognizing and dealing with this strange new sort of state, however uncongenial it might be, was borne in upon the European mind.

At last at Genoa in April, 1922, Russian Bolshevik representatives found themselves sitting on terms of practical equality in council with the other European powers, discussing whether it was still possible to save Europe from economic collapse. They were prepared now to abandon their propaganda against the "capitalist" states, to "acknowledge" the Tzarist debts, and to make enormous concessions of Marxist doctrine ; and in return the western powers with such grace as was possible, were to mitigate the harshness of their earlier intolerance.