are numerous survivals of the intense asceticism of the true Communist
party members of the crisis period. In their innocent book on Soviet
Russia, the innocent Webbs declare that there is no asceticism in
Russia, of course, and then go on and explain how the Comsomols
(Communist Youth) are encouraged to take the pledge--not for any
silly evangelical reasons, heavens, no, but because drinking anything
alcoholic is “a breach of the rule requiring maintenance of perfect
health.” Petting, too, is very definitely discouraged as unworthy of
the Communist Youth, especially when it is done in public. “Nothing
pornographic is allowed in literature or in any form of art. There is
less public sex appeal in evidence in Russia than in any Western land.”
Since the Webbs wrote this, the Russians seem to have relaxed a bit in
their public restraints, and the Germans, in the freshness of their
revolution, have gone very puritanical in such matters. Berlin, which
used to provide the broadest range of sexual activity in the world,
has now outwardly taken on a Lutheran and Teutonic virtue, while the
existence of public prostitution in Moscow and Leningrad can hardly
escape even visiting members of the British Labour party.
The Russians of old being notoriously dirty about their public
places--almost as dirty as we Americans are--the new regime has made it
a point of discipline that no litter, papers, and such-like truck be
left in public parks, streets, and stations. Indeed, membership in the
Communist party itself, always a very select and disciplined minority,
demanded for years, and to a certain extent still demands, the exercise
of a great deal of self-restraint, a willingness to live simply, to
work hard, to conform to very high standards of personal morality.
As usual in such circumstances, and as we have already noted for the
Puritans and the Jacobins, self-restraint was apparently not enough,
and there grew up in Russia all sorts of official and unofficial
methods of spying, prying, checking-up on the actions of individuals,
and controlling them by Terrorist methods. Many of these agencies are
now serving the Stalinite reaction, as similar agencies in France and
in England served the Thermidorean reaction and the Stuart restoration.
Now groups thoroughly disciplined into lives almost as unnaturally
ascetic as those our Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevists sought to
impose have existed for relatively long periods. The Spartiates
contrived to support an almost heroic Communism for several centuries.
But this discipline is of slow growth, intimately tied up with the kind
of behavior in men that changes with geological slowness. A revolution
cannot manufacture this kind of discipline overnight, and perhaps
the violence--and here is meant rather spiritual violence than mere
bloodshed--of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the
inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with
them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark. Again, the
existence in individuals of a certain amount of inclination to meddle
with their neighbor’s private affairs is probably a useful thing,
part of what cements societies together. But here, too, the ardent
revolutionists overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their
neighbors.
There are traces of this kind of organized asceticism, this crusade
against the customary vices, even in the American revolution, where
the crisis stage was never as intense as in our other revolutions.
There were many restrictive measures justified chiefly as necessary to
the efficient prosecution of the war against George III. There were
others quite as obviously dictated by the traditions of middle-class
Protestant ethics which had long been established in the Middle
Colonies and in New England. But here and there one encounters the
true accent of revolutionary idealism. Here is a passage worthy of
Robespierre: “Titles are the offspring of monarchical and arbitrary
governments. While the object of the present war with Great Britain
was reconciliation, the titles of excellency, honorable, etc., were
submitted to by the people of America, but since the Declaration of
Independence, the colonies have divorced monarchy forever, and become
free, independent states. It becomes then necessary to adopt the simple
language of free governments.... Let us leave the titles of excellency
and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King ... while we
satisfy ourselves with beholding our senators, governors, and generals
rich in real excellence and honor.”
The Baltimore Committee which in April, 1775, “recommended to the
people of the county not to encourage or attend the approaching fair
because of its tendency to encourage horse-racing, gaming, drunkenness,
and other dissipation” was going beyond the strict necessities of
the situation. Again we find a neat illustration from the pen of a
Connecticut patriot writing in July, 1775: “Wednesday evening last,
a number of ladies and gentlemen collected at a place called East
Farms, in Connecticut, where they had a needless entertainment, and
made themselves extremely merry with a good glass of wine. Such
entertainments and diversions can hardly be justified upon any
occasion; but at such a day as this, when everything around us has a
threatening aspect, they ought to be discountenanced, and every good
man should use his influence to suppress them.”
Our orthodox and successful extremists, then, are crusaders, fanatics,
ascetics, men who seek to bring heaven to earth. No doubt many of them
are hypocrites, career-seekers masquerading as believers, no doubt
many of them climb on the band-wagon for selfish motives. Yet it is
most unrealistic to hold that men may not be allowed to reconcile
their interests with their ideas. Many an ardent and sincere follower
of Robespierre, many a seeker after Calvinist truth, was able, with
the best of conscience, to buy lands confiscated from the unrepublican
or the ungodly. Our extremists are also, as the intimate details of
their daily lives should convince us, for the most part quite ordinary
people, with the loves and hatreds, aspirations and doubts, hopes
and fears, of ordinary people. Once the crisis period is over, they
will, save for the few born martyrs, cease to be crusaders, fanatics,
ascetics. Their revolutionary beliefs will be softly cushioned in a
comfortable ritual, will be a consolation and a habit rather than a
constant prick of the ideal. But now, in the crisis period, they are in
what we may call the active phase of a religion. Let us briefly take
up some of the striking characteristics of this phase in our three
societies.
Calvinism, Jacobinism, Marxism, are all rigidly deterministic. All
believe that what happens here below is foreordained, predestined to
follow a course which no mere human being can alter, least of all
those who oppose respectively Calvinism, Jacobinism, or Marxism. In
fact, the more priest and prelate storm and rage, the more certain is
the Calvinists’ victory. The acts of aristocrats, traitors, Pitts and
Cobourgs can but make the triumph of the French Republic greater. The
harder the Rockefellers and the Morgans work, the more capitalistic
their behavior, the sooner will come the inevitable glorious and final
uprising of the proletariat. God for the Calvinist, Nature-Reason for
the Jacobin, Dialectical or Scientific Materialism for the Marxist,
provide comforting assurance that the believer is on the side that
_must_ win. Obviously the belief that you can’t lose will in most--not
all--cases make you a better fighter.
Those whom God, Nature, or Science has chosen are quite willing
to advertise the fact of this choice, and, indeed, display an
inconsistency which is purely logical, and not at all of the emotions,
in that they seem very anxious to help the inevitable come about. Rigid
determinists are also usually ardent proselyters, presumably on the
grounds that they are instruments of the inevitable, the means through
which the inevitable realizes itself. They do not, however, seem to
behave as if they held that resistance to their proselyting, refusal of
unbelievers to accept their message, were also determined, inevitable,
and even pardonable.
At any rate, our revolutionists all sought to spread the gospel of
their revolution. What we now call “nationalism” is certainly present
as an element in all these revolutionary gospels. But at least in the
earlier years, and during the crisis of a revolution, crude notions of
national expansion do not prevail. The lucky people to whom the gospel
has been revealed wish to spread it properly abroad. In the Messianic
fervor of the crisis period, aggressive nationalism is not on the
surface. Underneath it doubtless helps drive the revolutionists on,
and in the period of reaction it emerges into the light, barely if at
all disguised as the “destiny” of a chosen people and its leader. The
Jacobins announced they were bringing the blessings of freedom to all
the people of the earth, and such is the power of imagination that some
men still think of Napoleon as agent of the new freedom. The Bolsheviks
are present to all our generation as great apostles of a world-wide
revolution. Most of us can still remember the days when fearful folk in
conservative lands looked under their beds each night for emissaries of
Moscow.
The Calvinists as Christians, of course, were ardent proselyters. But
the victorious English Independents were also capable of mixing their
religious with political propaganda, were anxious to win the world over
to their superior form of society. Cromwell’s famous collaborator,
Admiral Blake, used to spread the gospel in foreign lands. Thanks to
the example of England, Blake said, “All kingdoms will annihilate
tyranny and become republics.” England had done so already. France was
following in her wake; and as the natural gravity of the Spaniards
rendered them somewhat slower, he gave them ten years. All Europe is
shortly to be republican--and this in the 1650’s! Those who today
boast or bemoan that soon the Western world will be all Communist, or
all Fascist, or all Democratic, might ponder awhile the circumstances
of this remark of Blake’s.
A good deal of ink and oratory has been expended over this effort
of the extremists to propagate their faiths among the nations.
Conservatives in other nations are naturally very suspicious. Moscow
gold must be at the bottom of every liberal or radical movement; there
is an organized international plot to establish the world-rule of
atheistic Jacobinism and destroy Christianity. Probably in most cases
these fears and suspicions are much exaggerated. The revolutionists
are usually too poor, and too occupied at home, to devote more than
a small part of their energies to these foreign missions. There are,
moreover, in the other countries usually enough disgruntled natives
to form a solid nucleus for revolutionary action. The importation
into these countries of English, French, or Russian phrases and other
revolutionary fashions is the most natural thing in the world.
At any rate, there is no doubt about the fact of the uniformity. Even
in the seventeenth century, when the world was so much larger, so
much slower to cross, the English revolution spread itself abroad.
Edward Sexby at Bordeaux proposed to the French radicals a republican
constitution which was to be called _L’Accord du Peuple_--an adaptation
of the English Agreement of the People--and was obliged in consequence
to flee the town. In Holland at the news of trouble in England, “the
people began to take sides for one or the other of the parties and with
such fervor that in many cases they came to blows.” This sounds a lot
like the behavior of Federalists and Republicans in the United States
in the 1790’s, when the French revolution provided most of the dramatic
material of American politics. But the point need not be labored.
Similar examples from the Russian revolution will occur to almost
everyone.
The religious parallel may be pushed a bit further. Our revolutionists
are convinced that they are the elect, destined to carry out the will
of God, Nature, or Science. That feeling was particularly strong
among the Russian Communists, where in pure logic it should be less
strong than among the Calvinists, believers in a personal God. The
opponents of these revolutionists are not just political enemies, not
just mistaken men, grafters, log-rollers, or damned fools; they are
sinners, and must not merely be beaten--they must be wiped out. Hence
the justification of the guillotine and the firing-squad. For our
revolutionists display that vigorous intolerance which in the logic of
the emotions as well as in that of the intellect, follows perfectly
on the conviction of being absolutely, eternally, monopolistically
right. If there is but one truth, and you have that truth completely,
toleration of differences means an encouragement to error, crime, evil,
sin. Indeed, toleration in this sense is harmful to the tolerated,
as well as very trying on the tolerator. As Bellarmine said, it is a
positive benefit to obstinate heretics to kill them because the longer
they live the more damnation they heap upon themselves.
These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies,
their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English
revolution was dominated by some of the wilder as well as by the more
conventional of Christian eschatologies. The Millenarians expected the
second coming year after year. The rule of the Saints was just around
the corner. The Jacobins had a much less concrete notion of heaven, and
this heaven was to be definitely here on earth--the republic of Virtue
which we have seen as Robespierre’s ideal. After the dictatorship of
the revolutionary government, this perfect republic was to appear,
and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would be more than a slogan. To
hardened Americans a republic doesn’t sound at all like a heaven, but
we must believe that it was very different for the earnest Jacobin
of 1794. The Russian heaven is the classless society, to be attained
after the purgatory of the dictatorship of the proletariat has slowly
put an end to the worldly miseries of the class struggle. It seems
that even the Stalinists admit being still in purgatory. The specific
content of life in the classless society is somewhat vaguely described
by most Communists; and Marx himself, unlike Mohammed, went into no
details about his heaven. There will be competition, one gathers, but
no struggle, and certainly no struggle over economic goods. Competition
will be on a lofty plane, as among artists. Perhaps there will be
competition in love? At any rate, as in a more robust heaven, the old
German Valhalla, the heroes will fight all day, but at night their
wounds will heal.
All of these faiths were incorporated in social groups, and hence had
rituals. The present writer has elsewhere described at some length the
Jacobin ritual, a strange hodgepodge of Catholic, Protestant, classical
and other elements, with Republican creeds, Republican baptisms and
prayers, even with a revolutionary sign of the cross in the name of
_Marat, Le Pelletier, la liberté ou la mort_. Communist ritual is
less crudely imitative, and perhaps less rich. But it is just as
definite, as you will find in talking to an initiated Communist. Marx’s
_Das Kapital_, of course, is hardly ever read in orthodox circles
except ritualistically. The French revolutionists had their saints
and martyrs, especially the murdered Marat: the apotheosis of Lenin,
clearly begun in his lifetime, has become a cult centered around his
tomb in Moscow. Lenin is perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham preserved in
University College, London, a purely secularist saint; but a saint he
is. Stalin, we are told, has had to fight very hard the tendency of
simple Russian folk to mix a certain amount of superstition with their
natural devotion to their present great leader. He would not care to be
classed with the old icons. Smaller groups, like the Communist Youth,
are brought up in an atmosphere of ritual, are in this respect more
like some of the social side-shows of our Protestant churches than like
comparatively secular groups such as the Boy Scouts.
Religious symbolism goes along with this ritual, and was especially
developed in France. During the Terror, one met symbolic devices
everywhere: the eye of surveillance, seeking out the enemies of the
Republic; the triangle of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the Phrygian
cap of liberty, the _bonnet rouge_; the carpenter’s level, symbolizing
equality; any kind of mound, which served as symbol for the beneficent
Mountain, the party that had carried out the revolution to its logical
end. Most of these and many other symbols are to be found in the
elaborate pageant of the 20th Prairial at Paris, when Robespierre
personally supervised the festival of the Supreme Being. The Russians,
aided by modern poster technique, have made a similar, if less
pedantic, use of symbols to hold the people together in a Communist
society.
_IV. What Makes the Terror?_
In the crisis periods of all four of our revolutions we may distinguish
the same set of variables, differently combined and mixed with all
sorts of contingent factors to produce the specific situations the
narrative historian of these revolutions tends to regard as unique.
There are no doubt a very great number of these variables, but for the
purposes of a first approximation we may here distinguish seven. These
seem not to be related one to another in any important one-way causal
relationship. They seem, indeed, more or less like the independent
variables of the mathematician, though it is inconceivable that they
should be strictly independent. The temptation to single out one of
them as the “cause” of the Terror is, like the temptation to find a
hero or a villain in any situation, hard to resist. And each one of
them has a history, goes back at least to the last generation or two of
the old regime.
They are all woven together in a complicated pattern of reality; but
without all of them--and this is the important point--you would not
have a Reign of Terror, would not have a full crisis in the revolution.
The problem of their possible independence need not worry us.
Temperature and pressure are independent variables in the mathematical
formulation of the laws of thermodynamics; but ice can form at 0°
centigrade only if the pressure is negligibly small. We have already
stressed this point, perhaps beyond the bounds of good writing. But
the old notion of simple, linear, one-way causation is so rooted in
our habits of thought, is indeed so useful to us in daily life, that
we almost instinctively demand an explanation of a complex situation
like the Terror which will enable us to isolate a villain-cause--or a
hero-cause.
First, there is what we may call the habit of violence, the paradoxical
situation of a people conditioned to expect the unexpected. The more
violent and terroristic periods of our revolutions come only after a
series of troubles have prepared the way. Not until after several years
of civil war in England did the Independents carry out their rigorous
measures against the habitual ways of “Merrie England.” The Terror in
France in a formal sense does not begin until late in 1793; sporadic
outbreaks like the Great Fear of 1789 and the September Massacres of
1792 simply help to establish the mood necessary for a Terror. Even in
Russia, where events were telescoped together in a shorter period than
in any of our other revolutions, organized violence under the patronage
of the government does not clearly appear until the autumn of 1918, a
year and a half after the outbreak against the Czar. A telegram from
Petrovsky to all soviets is quoted by Mr. Chamberlin, who sees in this
the signal for organized Terror. “Last of all, the rear of our armies
must be finally cleared of all White Guardism and all scoundrelly
conspirators against the power of the working class and the poorest
peasants. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the
application of mass terror.”
This telegram brings forward a second and most important variable--the
pressure of a foreign and civil war. War necessities help explain the
rapid centralization of the government of the Terror, the hostility to
dissenters within the group--they now seem deserters--the widespread
excitement which our generation knows well enough by the cant term “war
psychosis.” Both in France and in Russia there is a rough correlation
between the military situation of the revolutionary armies and the
violence of the Terror; as the danger of defeat grows, so does the
number of victims of revolutionary tribunals. There is, however, a
certain lag, and the Terror continues after the worst of the military
danger is over. We may again recall that in England the Irish and the
Scotch fulfilled the function of the foreign enemy, even though Great
Britain kept free of the continent during the whole period. And both in
America and in England the crisis period was accompanied by a formal
war, largely a civil war. No sensible person would wish to deny the
important place these wars have in the total situation we have called
the crisis period.
Third, there is the newness of the machinery of this centralized
government. The extremists are certainly not--and we have already
emphasized this point--altogether without experience in handling men,
though they have dealt with _revolutionists_, not with _all men_.
Their long apprenticeship in the cause of the revolution has been
a political training of a sort. And in many ways their new network
of institutions is able to use some of the routine channels used by
the old government. This is especially true in local government.
Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the institutions of the
Terror are in a sense new, that they do not work smoothly, that those
charged with administering them, even if they are not politically
inexperienced, are administratively inexperienced. The machinery of the
Terror works in fits and starts, and frequently jams badly. Conflicts
between administrators arise, and are settled in no routine manner, but
by violence. Each failure of the machine annoys those who are trying to
run it, and impels them to a new and sudden decision, to another act of
violence. This in turn further jams the machinery. It is our old friend
the vicious circle.
Fourth, this is also a time of acute economic crisis--not merely what
we now call a depression, but a definite shortage of the necessities of
life. Again it must be recalled that the Terror does not come at once,
in the very beginning of the revolution, but is preceded by a time
of troubles very disrupting to the ordinary processes of production.
Capital gets frightened and begins to leave the country. Business
men hesitate to undertake new enterprises or to continue on the same
basis with the old. Peasant risings lessen agricultural production.
Then comes the war with its demand for men and munitions. The ensuing
dictatorship of the victorious extremists is in part an economic
dictatorship, a supervision of the whole economic life of the country,
controlled currency, price-fixing, food-rationing, a socialism of the
fact long before Marx. The difficulty of distributing inadequate
supplies further tries the temper of administrators, adds to the
opportunities of denunciators and spies, serves to maintain and sharpen
the peculiar excitement, the universal jumpiness of the Terror. It adds
to the tenseness of the class struggles which we have already discerned
in our study of the old regimes.