the revolutionary ends. There has been worked out in the last few
hundred years an elaborate technique of revolutionary action, of which
the Russian Communists were the latest heirs. A good deal has been
written about this technique, which is in part simply the technique of
any successful pressure group: propaganda, electioneering, lobbying,
parading, street-fighting, delegation-making, direct pressure on
magistrates, sporadic terrorism of the tar-and-feather or castor-oil
variety. Jacobins, Communists, and Sons of Liberty did a notably good
job at this sort of thing. But it is rather surprising to note how many
of these techniques can be found in England, and especially in London,
as early as the seventeenth century. In this respect, as in many
others, the English revolution is clearly of a modern type. Here is a
bit that might have come from the French revolution: during the debate
on the Militia Order, a crowd of apprentices “came into the House of
Commons and kept the door open, and their hats on ... and called out
as they stood ‘Vote, vote,’ and in this arrogant posture stood until
the votes passed.” One suspects that these apprentices did not march in
spontaneously. This is the kind of thing that takes organization.
Finally, the extremists follow their leaders with a devotion and a
unanimity not to be found among the moderates. Theories of democratic
equality, which crop up at the start of all our revolutions, prove no
obstacle to the development among the extremists of something very
like the “Führer” principle we associate with Fascist movements.
Here it is the moderates who live up to their theories, and in the
early stages of the revolutions it is not uncommon to find complaints
that So-and-so is arrogating to himself powers no good man would
want to possess. Mirabeau and Kerensky, to take neat examples,
were accused by moderates and extremists alike of aiming at a
personal dictatorship. Yet Robespierre and Lenin followed in their
footsteps--almost literally--and this time only the cheering could
be heard. This magnifying of the principle of leadership runs right
through the organization, from the subalterns up to the great national
heroes--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin.
On the whole, this leadership is effective, and especially so at the
very top. Now if they are seen as full and rounded human beings, there
are unquestionably differences among the men who make up the general
staffs of the extremists. The psychologist and the novelist--indeed
the historian as well--could not lump them all together. Yet they have
in common one aspect which is of great importance to the sociologist;
they combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete
contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men
as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme:
they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the
realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had,
and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers
who expect the New Jerusalem around the next corner. They are practical
men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the
Beautiful and the Good.
A bit from Lenin will make the point clear. At a secret meeting of
the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party just before the October
revolution, Lenin was urging insurrection on the more tender-minded
of his colleagues, who thought that the Bolsheviks ought to respect
the will of the majority of Russians, which was clearly against them.
“We are inclined to consider the systematic preparation of an uprising
as something in the nature of a political sin,” said he. “To wait
until the Constituent Assembly, which will clearly not be with us, is
senseless.” There is the practical Lenin, unworried by a democratic
dogma that stands in his way. After the October revolution he writes
in _Pravda_ of “the crisis which has arisen as a result of the lack of
correspondence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and
the will of the people and the interests of the toiling and exploited
classes.” Here the will of the people is somehow at bottom the will
of the minority party of Bolsheviks. We are back again in the midst
of democratic dogma. Parallel cases could readily be drawn from
Robespierre, Cromwell, and even, one fears, from Jefferson.
Hypocrisy? To those of little imagination or experience of the world,
such acts must always seem hypocritical. But, on a less heroic scale,
they are far too much a part of normal human action to deserve so
opprobrious a label. The Robespierre who, as an enlightened young
man, had held capital punishment wrong did not hypocritically send
his enemies to the guillotine. He had convinced himself that his
enemies were scarcely men at all; they were sinners, corrupt souls,
agents of a worse-than-Satan, and their removal from this earth
wasn’t really capital punishment in the conventional sense at all.
You could still treat ordinary criminals in full accord with the most
humanitarian principles of jurisprudence. Most of us make this sort
of compromise with ourselves often enough in daily life. But with us
comfort, convenience, habit, even common sense, determine the limits
of compromise. For the revolutionary extremist such limits are off; in
the delirium, in the crisis, there is an extraordinary reversal of the
roles played in normal times by the real and the ideal. Here briefly
and at last the blind--or the seer--is king; plain earthly seeing, the
kind that concerns the oculist, is for once of very little use. The
seers have just enough of it to keep their positions of leadership.
Cromwell, indeed, had a good deal of what seems an English sense of the
contingent, and Lenin was certainly no academic idealist. Robespierre
is in some ways the most unadulterated seer of the lot.
Yet all of them, including even Robespierre, were what the world calls
men of action. They could and did get things done, were administrators
and executives, ran organizations for which tradition and routine had
not yet been able to build up much that worked automatically. If they
have left behind them a reputation for unusual ruthlessness, this may
be in part a reflection of the ill repute terrorism has for most of
us. And the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went
while they were alive into the making of their leadership. Cromwell
gained credit among the Saints for his Irish massacres. The guillotine
in France was for a few months the “holy guillotine.” Trotsky, early
in his famous rallying of the Bolshevik troops in the Civil War,
ordered shot the commander, commissar, and one soldier out of ten in a
Petrograd workers’ regiment that had fled the enemy, and to the dismay
of gentler colleagues showed no hesitation about continuing the policy
of discipline through bloodshed. Trotsky became briefly a savior and a
hero. We are a long way from Order Number One!
For most men, there is a gap between their deeds and their professions,
between what they are and what they would like to be, between what
they are and what they think they are. Normally, however, they manage
to keep the gap small enough, or turn their attention away from one
side of it or the other, so that they are not unduly troubled by it.
For the leaders of the extremists in times of revolution the gap
looks to an outside observer enormous, bigger than it ever is in
normal times. A few men, like Fouché, seem to have been terrorists to
save their own skins. But, in general, only a sincere extremist in a
revolution can kill men because he loves man, attain peace through
violence, and free men by enslaving them. Such contrasts in action
would paralyze a conventionally practical leader, but the extremist
seems quite undisturbed by it. Where the ordinary man would be troubled
by something like a split personality, where his conscience or his
sense of reality, or both, would be haunted, the extremist goes boldly
ahead. Wide though the gap between the real and the ideal is in the
crisis period, he can cross it at his own convenience. He has, for the
moment, the best of both worlds. He can manipulate with equal skill the
concrete and complex human beings on committees, deputations, bureaus,
ministries, all the unsettling problems of administration, and yet use
gracefully and convincingly the abstract, indispensable, haunting words
which have in revolutions such magic power over large groups of men.
It is this last gift that seems to lie all but wholly beyond the
capacity of the most ambitious hypocrite. The great leaders of the
Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation
which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power. Their
belief in the Absolute is not assumed, and is as real as their ability
to handle the contingent. And for once the Absolute is practical
politics. F. W. Maitland has a passage, suggested by Coleridge,
which puts the point neatly: “Coleridge has remarked how, in times
of great political excitement, the terms in which political theories
are expressed become, not more and more practical, but more and more
abstract and impractical. It is in such times that men clothe their
theories in universal terms.... The absolute spirit is abroad. Relative
or partial good seems a poor ideal. It is not of these, or those men
that we speak, of this nation or that age, but of Man.”
_III. Fitness of the Extremists_
The transition from opposition to power is not a sudden one for
the extremists. The whole point about the _dvoevlastie_, the dual
sovereignty, is that it is not a struggle between government and
opposition, between ins and outs, but between two governments within
the same state. Under the old regime perhaps no more than a pressure
group, the revolutionists’ organization gradually takes over, in the
confusion of the first stages of actual revolution, governmental powers
which are never thereafter wholly subordinated to the provisional
government, the almost legal heir of the old regime. The process is
especially clear in Russia, though it is substantially uniform in all
our revolutions.
Practically all the soviets, even in the market towns, did
administrative work from the very beginning. Trotsky, here in his
role of historian, gives some good succinct examples: “The soviet
in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to
arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians,
introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned
factories.... In the Urals the soviets frequently instituted courts
of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia
in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory
cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials
and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured
goods and established a wage-scale. In certain districts of the Urals,
the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social
cultivation.” Obviously, in parts of Russia the slogan “All power to
the Soviets” had become a bit superfluous even before the October
revolution.
In France the “Societies of Friends of the Constitution,” at their
formation in 1789 hardly more than pressure groups, or possibly French
variants of the Yankee caucus, had by June 2, 1793, taken over a good
many functions normally carried out by governmental bodies. When
the “constituted authorities,” as the Jacobins respectfully called
governing councils and legislatures, failed to do what the Jacobins
wanted, the Jacobins went ahead and did it themselves. Notably the
whole repressive legislation on the non-juring (Catholic) clergy was
anticipated in practice by the Jacobin clubs in the provinces. The
clubs were organized like parliamentary bodies, with elaborate rules
on debating, with committees, officers, minutes, and indeed all the
apparatus of a proper legislature. Sometimes a club would overawe or
persuade municipal or departmental officers into an approved Jacobin
policy; sometimes, failing in this, a club would almost openly pass
laws and decrees. Those of the members who protested against this
shocking interference with authorities chosen by popular election--and
many did protest on just such grounds--were thereby ticketed as
moderates, and were lucky if they avoided the guillotine later.
That the men who made the American revolution were by no means
unexercised in the art of actual governing has long been a commonplace
of proud Anglo-Saxon writers on both sides of the Atlantic. What we
must note here is that that preparation had by no means been wholly
of the conventional legal sort. Not only in town meeting and colonial
legislatures, but in caucuses, committees, and congresses that bear a
close parallel with soviets and Jacobin clubs, the American radicals
were schooled to take over the government from the agents of the Crown.
We shall see in the next chapter that they did not hesitate to use
terroristic means to preserve, as they had used to attain, that power.
In England the situation is complicated by the fact that though the
illegal organization headed up in the New Model Army, the various
Independent congregations were also in their way agents of the
extremists in their drive to power. The army itself, of course,
began very soon after Naseby to interfere in politics in a way no
conventional army does; and the first expulsion of Presbyterians from
Parliament was initiated and carried through by army resolutions and an
army committee. But the Independents, and especially the Independent
clergy, had much earlier taken a hand in matters very terrestrial
indeed. As Professor Grierson has said, “It is not what Laud did that
Baxter [a Puritan divine] seems to complain of, so much as what he
would not allow them, the parish pastors, to do, viz., to exercise
a moral discipline co-extensive with the parish.” And by a moral
discipline a Puritan meant something co-extensive with the whole of
human life.
The extremists are not, then, politically innocent or inexperienced;
they have had a long experience of oppression, and a briefer, but very
intensive, training in actual government before they come to full
power. To call either leaders or rank and file inexperienced, “pure
theorists,” and “metaphysicians,” as has long been the habit especially
among political writers in English, is misleading. Neither their aims
nor their methods are those that good Victorians like Bagehot or Maine
could approve or sympathize with. They are certainly heaven-storming
idealists, scornful of compromise. But they are not academic theorists
totally unadapted to action. _On the contrary, they are admirably
adapted, almost in the sense a biologist gives to adaptation, to the
special, the unique environment of the crisis._ That is why they
succeed.
The actual overthrow of the moderates is usually a very neat job, an
excellent example of the skill of the revolutionary leaders and the
close adaptation of the revolutionary organizations to their functions.
It is, as we have seen, by no means a great popular uprising. The
crowds whose confused milling about makes an exact account of the
taking of the Bastille or the February revolution in Petrograd
impossible for the historian, do not interfere with the professional
dispatch with which Pride’s Purge, the purge of the Girondins, and the
October revolution were put through. In France the extremists reached
power in two of these _coups d’état_. The first, the overthrow of
the monarchy on August 10, 1792, was achieved through an elaborate
but never confused collaboration of various organs of the illegal
government--Jacobin and other political clubs, the _fédérés_, local
militia from all over France assembled in Paris to celebrate the
anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and the ward organizations
out of which the revolutionary Parisian Commune was made. Almost the
same elements were integrated ten months later for the easier task of
bullying the Convention into giving up the Girondins. Danton, Marat,
possibly Robespierre, and certainly a number of less famous but very
skilled secondary leaders formed a general staff which engineered both
of these coups.
The October revolution was elaborately prepared, and has been clearly
described in Trotsky’s own _History of the Russian Revolution_. We
need not here go into details of this preparation. But a quotation
from Trotsky will show how the details were taken care of: “The
typographical workers, through their union, called to the attention
of the Committee [the Military-Revolution Committee in Petrograd, the
general staff of the October revolution] an increase in Black Hundred
leaflets and brochures. It was decided that in all suspicious cases the
printers’ union should come for instructions to the Military-Revolution
Committee. This control was the most effective of all possible forms
of control over the printed agitation of the counter-revolution.”
Naturally; printed agitation has to have printers as well as legal
freedom of the press. In a dozen such ways the moderates were hamstrung
in the last few days before the Bolshevik insurrection. There was no
nonsense about a general strike; there was simply a co-ordinated series
of seizures of centers of power, press, post and telegraph, banks, and
ministries.
The dramatic seizure of Charles I by Cornet Joyce on June 3, 1647, at
Holmby House is perhaps the first assumption of sovereign power by the
New Model. When Charles asked Joyce whence he had his commission to
remove him, Joyce is said to have replied, pointing to his soldiers
drawn up on the lawn, “There is my commission.” The reply will serve
in all our revolutions. Once the extremists are in power, there is
no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the
forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and
toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian
when they reach power. There is no need for us to sigh over this, or
grow indignant, or talk of hypocrisy. We are attempting to discern
uniformities in the behavior of men during certain revolutions in
specific social systems, and this seems to be one of the uniformities.
“It was but a bare six months,” writes Gardiner, “since the Independent
leaders [Cromwell and Vane] who now permitted some hundreds of
sufferers to be excluded for conscience’s sake from the University of
Oxford, had been striving to lay the foundations of a broad system of
toleration in _The Heads of the Proposals_ and had even taken into
consideration a scheme for extending that toleration to the Roman
Catholic priesthood itself.” Later under the Rump a strict censorship
of the press was instituted, and the various canons and tastes of
Puritanism enforced as far as possible by government policy. Similarly
in France and Russia the new government clamped down at once on its
enemies and began to build up the machinery of the coming Terror.
Where, as in France and Russia, the army had lost its discipline
under active attempts to introduce Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity,
discipline was reintroduced with a good deal of firmness. Mr.
Chamberlin describes the Russian situation: “The Bolshevik military
authorities now began to talk about the harmful and disruptive
influence of army committees very much as Kornilov, Denikin, and the
old army officers had spoken in 1917; and strict obedience to the
orders of the officers gradually became embedded in the discipline of
the Red Army.”
_The Heads of Proposals_ and _The Agreement of the People_, radical
platforms adopted by the army under Leveller influence, had proposed
something very close to what came to be conventional nineteenth-century
democracy--equal electoral districts, frequent parliaments, specific
limitations on the executive power, even universal manhood suffrage.
Cromwell seems never to have been in any sense a doctrinaire rebel,
and indeed probably had many of the sentiments about authority and
tradition one would expect from a country gentleman. If he suffered at
all in mind about the situation, it was probably because the good old
parliamentary institutions could not be restored. Certainly the last
thing that could be done was to hold an open and free election on any
conceivable franchise. The so-called Parliament of Saints which met in
1653 after the dissolution of the Rump was hardly more than a council
sent up from trustworthy Independent groups and chosen by caucus
methods.
Similarly in France, the victors of June 2nd did not dare go to the
people. As a gesture they promulgated the so-called Constitution of
1793, based on universal suffrage, bill of rights, and the rest of the
paraphernalia of democracy, but they took good care to go no further
than printing it. It was never put into effect.
The Bolsheviks had for months attacked the Provisional government
for not calling a constituent assembly. Such an assembly was finally
chosen by universal suffrage just before the Bolshevik _coup_. In it
the Bolsheviks were in a minority. Lenin dissolved this constituent
assembly in January, 1918, with a light heart, but many of his
followers, in spite of their Marxist training, were really hurt by such
a defiance of democratic sentiments and traditions. Many good Jacobins
were also worried by the fact of their new dictatorship.
Theory came to provide a salve to wounded consciences. The theory of
revolutionary dictatorship is very nearly identical in all three of
our revolutions. Liberty for everyone, liberty full, free, and fair,
is of course the ultimate goal. But such liberty at present would
mean that men corrupted by the bad old ways would be able to realize
their wicked plans, restore the bad old institutions, and frustrate
the good men. On reflection, the extremist continues, it is clear
that we must distinguish between liberty for those who deserve it,
and liberty for those who don’t, which latter is, of course, false
liberty, pseudo-liberty, license or anarchy. God had given liberty to
the Saints--true liberty, which is obedience to Him--but he clearly
did not give liberty to sinners. You repress papists as you would
repress devils. To argue that such sinners ought to be left alone
would have seemed to seventeenth-century English Puritans as absurd
as it would to us to suggest that yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes be
left alone. Robespierre himself phrased it with classic neatness: the
revolutionary government, he said, was the despotism of liberty against
tyranny. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary
transitional stage, in which the last vestiges of capitalistic methods
and capitalistic mentality are wiped out. Ruthless use of force will be
necessary in this period--unfortunately of indeterminate length. Once a
capitalist, always a capitalist, apparently. But when men are finally
brothers, then the freedom of the classless society will finally begin.
Solaced by the knowledge that they are serving Liberty--in the high,
true sense of the word--by a rigorous application of what to the
unbeliever seems tyranny, the extremists go ahead to consolidate their
power through institutions. Before we attempt a brief, generalized
description of these institutions, we may note another uniformity. With
the triumph of the extremists as we have defined them, the process of
transfer of power from Right to Left ceases. The extremists are not
indeed exempt from the difficulty other triumphant groups had faced
from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. They develop
internal conflicts, tend to split up into groups too hostile among
themselves for co-operation. But these groups cannot be neatly ranged
from Right to Left; and their dissension is ended quickly and without
even the turmoil and confusion of a _coup d’état_. The dissensions
have by now become so subtly doctrinal, so remote from the masses of
the population, that they can be centered on a few leaders. And they
are settled by the banishment or “judicial murder”--as it seems to
the defeated partisans--of some of these leaders. What began with
large-scale popular uprisings has now come to the dramatic intimacy of
a courtroom.