Politically, Russia has reached a state of equilibrium;
internally; for the present at least.
I think the revolution there is ended; that it has run its
course. There will be changes. There may be advances; there
will surely be reactions, but these will be regular, I
think; political and economic, but parliamentary, A new
center of gravity seems to have been found.
Certainly, the destructive phase of the revolution in Russia
is over. Constructive work has begun.
We saw this everywhere. And we saw order, and though we
inquired for them, we heard of no disorders. Prohibition is
universal and absolute. Robberies have been reduced in
Petrograd below normal of large cities. Warned against
danger before we went in, we felt safe. Prostitution has
disappeared with its clientele, who have been driven out by
the "no-work-no-food law," enforced by the general want and
the labor-card system. Loafing on the job by workers and
sabotage by upper-class directors, managers, experts and
clerks have been overcome. Russia has settled down to work.
The soviet form of government, which sprang up so
spontaneously all over Russia, is established.
This is not a paper thing; not an invention. Never planned,
it has not yet been written into the forms of law. It is not
even uniform. It is full of faults and difficulties; clumsy,
and in its final development it is not democratic. The
present Russian Government is the most autocratic government
I have ever seen. Lenin, head of the Soviet Government, is
farther removed from the people than the Tsar was, or than
any actual ruler in Europe is.
The people in a shop or an industry are a soviet. These
little informal Soviets elect a local soviet; which elects
delegates to the city or country (community) soviet; which
elects delegates to the government (State) soviet. The
government Soviets together elect delegates to the
All-Russian Soviet, which elects commissionaires (who
correspond to our Cabinet, or to a European minority). And
these commissionaires finally elect Lenin. He is thus five
or six removes from the people. To form an idea of his
stability, independence, and power, think of the process
that would have to be gone through with by the people to
remove him and elect a successor. A majority of all the
Soviets in all Russia would have to be changed in personnel
or opinion, recalled, or brought somehow to recognize and
represent the altered will of the people.
No student of government likes the soviet as it has
developed. Lenin himself doesn't. He calls it a
dictatorship, and he opposed it at first. When I was in
Russia in the days of Milyoukov and Kerensky, Lenin and the
Bolsheviks were demanding the general election of the
constituent assembly. But the Soviets existed then; they had
the power, and I saw foreign ambassadors blunder, and the
world saw Milyoukov and Kerensky fall, partly because they
would not, or could not, comprehend the nature of the
soviet; as Lenin did finally, when, against his theory, he
joined in and expressed the popular repudiation of the
constituent assembly and went over to work with the soviet,
the actual power in Russia. The constituent assembly,
elected by the people, represented the upper class and the
old system. The soviet was the lower class.
The soviet, at bottom, is a natural gathering of the working
people, of peasants, in their working and accustomed
groupings, instead of, as with us, by artificial
geographical sections.
Labor unions and soldiers' messes made up the Soviets in the
cities; poorer peasants and soldiers at the village inn were
the first Soviets in the country; and in the beginning, two
years ago, these lower class delegates used to explain to me
that the "rich peasants" and the "rich people" had their own
meetings and meeting places. The popular intention then was
not to exclude the upper classes from the government, but
only from the Soviets, which were not yet the same. But the
Soviets, once in existence, absorbed in their own class
tasks and their own problems, which the upper class had
either not understood or solved, ignored--no; they simply
forgot the council of empire and the Duma. And so they
discovered (or, to be more exact, their leaders discovered)
that they had actually all the power. All that Lenin and the
other Socialist leaders had to do to carry through their
class-struggle theory was to recognize this fact of power
and teach the Soviets to continue to ignore the assemblies
and the institutions of the upper classes, which, with their
"governments," ministries, and local assemblies, fell,
powerless from neglect.
The Soviet Government sprouted and grew out of the habits,
the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It
fitted them. They understand it. They find they can work it
and they like it. Every effort to put something else in its
place (including Lenin's) has failed. It will have to be
modified, I think, but not in essentials, and it can not be
utterly set aside. The Tsar himself, if he should come back,
would have to keep the Russian Soviet, and somehow rule over
and through it.
The Communist Party (dubbed "Bolshevik") is in power now in
the Soviet Government.
I think it will stay there a long time. What I have shown of
the machinery of change is one guaranty of communist
dominance. There are others. All opposition to the communist
government has practically ceased inside of Russia.
There are three organized opposition parties: Mencheviks,
Social Revolutionary Right, and Social Revolutionary Left.
The anarchists are not organized. The Social Revolutionary
Left is a small group of very anarchistic leaders, who have
hardly any following. The Mencheviks and the Social
Revolutionaries Right are said to be strong, but there is no
way of measuring their strength, for a very significant
reason.
These parties have stopped fighting. They are critical, but
they are not revolutionary. They also think the revolution
is over. They proposed, and they still propose eventually,
to challenge and oust the Communist Party by parliamentary
and political methods, not by force. But when intervention
came upon distracted Russia, and the people realized they
were fighting many enemies on many fronts, the two strong
opposing parties expressed their own and the public will to
stand by the party in power until the menace of foreign
invasion was beaten off. These parties announced this in
formal statements, uttered by their regular conventions; you
have confirmation of it in the memoranda written for you by
Martov and Volsky, and you will remember how one of them put
it to us personally:
"There is a fight to be made against the
Bolsheviks, but so long as you foreigners are
making it, we Russians won't. When you quit and
leave us alone, we will take up our burden again,
and we shall deal with the Bolsheviks. And we will
finish them. But we will do it with our people, by
political methods, in the Soviets, and not by
force, not by war or by revolution, and not with
any outside foreign help."
This is the nationalistic spirit, which we call patriotism,
and understand perfectly; it is much stronger in the new
than it was in the old, the Tsar's, Russia. But there is
another force back of this remarkable statement of a
remarkable state of mind.
All Russia has turned to the labor of reconstruction; sees
the idea in the plans proposed for the future; and is
interested--imaginatively.
Destruction was fun for a while and a satisfaction to a
suppressed, betrayed, to an almost destroyed people.
Violence was not in their character, however. The Russian
people, sober, are said to be a gentle people. One of their
poets speaks of them as "that gentle beast, the Russian
people," and I noticed and described in my reports of the
first revolution how patient, peaceable, and "safe" the mobs
of Petrograd were. The violence came later, with Bolshevism,
after the many attempts at counterrevolution, and with
vodka. The Bolshevik leaders regret and are ashamed of their
red terror. They do not excuse it. It was others, you
remember, who traced the worst of the Russian atrocities and
the terror itself to the adoption by the
counter-revolutionists of the method of assassination (of
Lenin and others), and most of all to the discovery by the
mobs of wine cellars and vodka stills. That the Russian
drunk and the Russian sober are two utterly different
animals, is well known to the Jews, to the Reactionaries,
and to the Russians themselves. And that is why this people
lately have not only obeyed; they have themselves ruthlessly
enforced the revolutionary prohibition decrees in every part
of Russia that we would inquire about and hear from.
The destructive spirit, sated, exhausted, or suppressed, has
done its work. The leaders say so--the leaders of all
parties.
There is a close relationship between the Russian people and
the new Russian leaders, in power and out. New men in
politics are commonly fresh, progressive, representative;
it's the later statesmen that damp the enthusiasm and sober
the idealism of legislators. In Russia all legislators, all,
are young or new. It is as if we should elect in the United
States a brand-new set of men to all offices, from the
lowest county to the highest Federal position, and as if the
election should occur in a great crisis, when all men are
full of hope and faith. The new leaders of the local Soviets
of Russia were, and they still are, of the people, really.
That is one reason why their autocratic dictatorship is
acceptable. They have felt, they shared the passion of the
mob to destroy, but they had something in mind to destroy.
The soviet leaders used the revolution to destroy the system
of organized Russian life.
While the mobs broke windows, smashed wine cellars, and
pillaged buildings to express their rage, their leaders
directed their efforts to the annihilation of the system
itself. They pulled down the Tsar and his officers; they
abolished the courts, which had been used to oppress them;
they closed shops, stopped business generally, and
especially all competitive and speculative business; and
they took over all the great industries, monopolies,
concessions, and natural resources. This was their purpose.
This is their religion. This is what the lower-class culture
has been slowly teaching the people of the world for 50
years: that it is not some particular evil, but the whole
system of running business and railroads, shops, banks, and
exchanges, for speculation and profit that must be changed.
This is what causes poverty and riches, they teach, misery,
corruption, vice, and war. The people, the workers, or their
State, must own and run these things "for service."
Not political democracy, as with us; economic democracy is
the idea; democracy in the shop, factory, business.
Bolshevism is a literal interpretation, the actual
application of this theory, policy, or program. And so, in
the destructive period of the Russian revolution, the
Bolshevik leaders led the people to destroy the old system,
root and branch, fruit and blossom, too. And apparently this
was done. The blocks we saw in Petrograd and Moscow of
retail shops nailed up were but one sign of it. When we
looked back of these dismal fronts and inquired more deeply
into the work of the revolution we were convinced that the
Russians have literally and completely done their job. And
it was this that shocked us. It is this that has startled
the world; not the atrocities of the revolution, but the
revolution itself.
The organization of life as we know it in America, in the
rest of Europe, in the rest of the world, is wrecked and
abolished in Russia.
The revolution didn't do it. The Tsar's Government had
rotted it. The war broke down the worn-out machinery of it;
the revolution has merely scrapped it finally.
The effect is hunger, cold, misery, anguish, disease--death
to millions. But worse than these--I mean this--was the
confusion of mind among the well and the strong. We do not
realize, any of us--even those of us who have
imagination--how fixed our minds and habits are by the ways
of living that we know. So with the Russians. They
understood how to work and live under their old system; it
was not a pretty one; it was dark, crooked, and dangerous,
but they had groped around in it all their lives from
childhood up. They could find their way in it. And now they
can remember how it was, and they sigh for the old ways. The
rich emigres knew whom to see to bribe for a verdict, a
safe-conduct, or a concession; and the poor, in their
hunger, think now how it would be to go down to the market
and haggle, and bargain, from one booth to another, making
their daily purchases, reckoning up their defeats and
victories over the traders. And they did get food then. And
now--it is all gone. They have destroyed all this, and
having destroyed it they were lost, strangers in their own
land.
This tragedy of transition was anticipated by the leaders of
the revolution, and the present needs were prepared for in
the plans laid for reconstruction.
Lenin has imagination. He is an idealist, but he is a
scholar, too, and a very grim realist. Lenin was a
statistician by profession. He had long been trying to
foresee the future of society under socialism, and he had
marked down definitely the resources, the machinery, and the
institutions existing under the old order, which could be
used in the new. There was the old Russian communal land
system, passing, but standing in spots with its peasants
accustomed to it. That was to be revived; it is his solution
of the problem of the great estates. They are not to be
broken up, but worked by the peasants in common. Then there
was the great Russian Cooperative (trading) Society, with
its 11,000,000 families before the war; now with 17,000,000
members. He kept that. There was a conflict; it was in
bourgeoise hands but it was an essential part of the
projected system of distribution, so Lenin compromised and
communist Russia has it. He had the railroads, telegraph,
telephone already; the workers seized the factories, the
local Soviets the mines; the All-Russian Soviet, the banks.
The new government set up shops--one in each
neighborhood--to dole out not for money, but on work
tickets, whatever food, fuel, and clothing this complete
government monopoly had to distribute. No bargaining, no
display, no advertising, and no speculation. Everything one
has earned by labor the right to buy at the cooperative and
soviet shops is at a fixed, low price, at the established
(too small.) profit--to the government or to the members of
the cooperative.
Money is to be abolished gradually. It does not count much
now. Private capital has been confiscated, most of the rich
have left Russia, but there are still many people there who
have hidden away money or valuables, and live on them
without working. They can buy food and even luxuries, but
only illegally from peasants and speculators at the risk of
punishment and very high prices. They can buy, also, at the
government stores, at the low prices, but they can get only
their share there, and only on their class or work tickets.
The class arrangement, though transitory and temporary--the
aim is to have but one class--is the key to the idea of the
whole new system.
There are three classes. The first can buy, for example,
1-1/2 pounds of bread a day; the second, three-quarters of a
pound; the third, only one-quarter of a pound; no matter how
much money they may have. The first class includes soldiers,
workers in war, and other essential industries, actors,
teachers, writers, experts, and Government workers of all
sorts. The second class is of all other sorts of workers.
The third is of people who do not work--the leisure class.
Their allowance is, under present circumstances, not enough
to live on, but they are allowed to buy surreptitiously from
speculators on the theory that the principal of their
capital will soon be exhausted, and, since interest, rent,
and profits--all forms of unearned money--are abolished,
they will soon be forced to go to work.
The shock of this, and the confusion due to the strange
details of it, were, and they still are, painful to many
minds, and not only to the rich. For a long time there was
widespread discontent with this new system. The peasants
rebelled, and the workers were suspicious. They blamed the
new system for the food shortage, the fuel shortage, the
lack of raw materials for the factories. But this also was
anticipated by that very remarkable mind and will--Lenin. He
used the State monopoly and control of the press, and the
old army of revolutionary propagandists to shift the blame
for the sufferings of Russia from the revolutionary
government to the war, the blockade, and the lack of
transportation. Also, he and his executive organization were
careful to see that, when the government did get hold of a
supply of anything, its arrival was heralded, and the next
day it appeared at the community shops, where everybody
(that worked) got his share at the low government price. The
two American prisoners we saw had noticed this, you
remember. "We don't get much to eat," they said, "but
neither do our guards or the other Russians. We all get the
same. And when they get more, we get our share."
The fairness of the new system, as it works so far, has won
over to it the working class and the poorer peasants. The
well-to-do still complain, and very bitterly sometimes.
Their hoardings are broken into by the government and by the
poverty committees, and they are severely punished for
speculative trading. But even these classes are moved
somewhat by the treatment of children. They are in a class
by themselves: class A,--I. They get all the few
delicacies--milk, eggs, fruit, game, that come to the
government monopoly--at school, where they all are fed,
regardless of class. "Even the rich children," they told us,
"they have as much as the poor children." And the children,
like the workers, now see the operas, too, the plays, the
ballets, the art galleries--all with instructors.
The Bolsheviks--all the Russian parties--regard the
communists' attitude toward children as the symbol of their
new civilization.
"It is to be for the good of humanity, not business," one of
them, an American, said, "and the kids represent the future.
Our generation is to have only the labor, the joy, and the
misery of the struggle. We will get none of the material
benefits of the new system, and we will probably never all
understand and like it. But the children--it is for them and
their children that we are fighting, so we are giving them
the best of it from the start, and teaching them to take it
all naturally. They are getting the idea. They are to be our
new propagandists."
The idea is that everybody is to work for the common good,
and so, as the children and the American prisoners note,
when they all produce more, they all get more. They are
starving now, but they are sharing their poverty. And they
really are sharing it. Lenin eats, like everybody else--only
one meal a day--soup, fish, bread, and tea. He has to save
out of that a bit for breakfast and another bit for supper.
The people, the peasants, send him more, but he puts it in
the common mess. So the heads of this government do not have
to imagine the privations of the people; they feel them. And
so the people and the government realize that, if ever
Russia becomes prosperous, all will share in the wealth,
exactly as they share in the poverty now. In a word, rich
Russia expects to become a rich Russian people.
This, then, is the idea which has begun to catch the
imagination of the Russian people. This it is that is making
men and women work with a new interest, and a new incentive,
not to earn high wages and short hours, but to produce an
abundance for all. This is what is making a people, sick of
war, send their ablest and strongest men into the new,
high-spirited, hard-drilled army to defend, not their
borders, but their new working system of common living.
And this is what is making Lenin and his sobered communist
government ask for peace. They think they have carried a
revolution through for once to the logical conclusion. All
other revolutions have stopped when they had revolved
through the political phase to political democracy. This one
has turned once more clear through the economic phase to
economic democracy, to self-government in the factory, shop,
and on the land, and has laid a foundation for universal
profit sharing, for the universal division of food, clothes,
and all goods, equally among all. And they think their
civilization is working on this foundation. They want time
to go on and build it higher and better. They want to spread
it all over the world, but only as it works, As they told us
when we reminded them that the world dreaded their
propaganda:
"We are through with the old propaganda of
argument. All we ask now is to be allowed to prove
by the examples of things well done here in
Russia, that the new system is good. We are so
sure we shall make good, that we are willing to
stop saying so, to stop reasoning, stop the
haranguing, and all that old stuff. And especially
are we sick of the propaganda by the sword. We
want to stop fighting. We know that each country
must evolve its own revolution out of its own
conditions and in its own imagination. To force it
by war is not scientific, not democratic, not
socialistic. And we are fighting now only in
self-defense. We will stop fighting, if you will
let us stop. We will call back our troops, if you
will withdraw yours. We will demobilize. We need
the picked organizers and the skilled workers now
in the army for our shops, factories, and farms.
We would love to recall them to all this needed
work, and use their troop trains to distribute our
goods and our harvests, if only you will call off
your soldiers and your moral, financial, and
material support from our enemies, and the enemies
of our ideals. Let every country in dispute on our
borders self-determine its own form of government
and its own allegiance.
"But you must not treat us as a conquered nation.
We are not conquered. We are prepared to join in a
revolutionary, civil war all over all of Europe
and the world, if this good thing has to be done
in this bad way of force. But we would prefer to
have our time and our energy to work to make sure
that our young, good thing is good. We have proved
that we can share misery, and sickness, and
poverty; it has helped us to have these things to
share, and we think we shall be able to share the
wealth of Russia as we gradually develop it. But
we are not sure of that; the world is not sure.
Let us Russians pay the price of the experiment;
do the hard, hard work of it; make the
sacrifice--then your people can follow us, slowly,
as they decide for themselves that what we have is
worth having."
That is the message you bring back, Mr. Bullitt. It is your
duty to deliver it. It is mine to enforce it by my
conception of the situation as it stands in Russia and
Europe to-day.
It seems to me that we are on the verge of war, a new war, a
terrible war--the long-predicted class war--all over Europe.
The peace commission, busy with the settlement of the old
war, may not see the new one, or may not measure aright the
imminent danger of it. Germany is going over, Hungary has
gone, Austria is coming into the economic revolutionary
stage. The propaganda for it is old and strong in all
countries: Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway,
Sweden--you know. All men know this propaganda. But that is
in the rear. Look at the front.
Russia is the center of it. Germany, Austria, Hungary are
the wings of the potential war front of--Bolshevism.
And Russia, the center, has made a proposition to you for
peace, for a separate peace; made it officially; made it
after thought; made it proudly, not in fear, but in pitiful
sympathy with its suffering people and for the sake of a
vision of the future in which it verily believes. They are
practical men--those that made it. You met them. We talked
with them. We measured their power. They are all idealists,
but they are idealists sobered by the responsibility of
power. Sentiment has passed out of them into work--hard
work. They said they could give one year more of starvation
to the revolution, but they said it practically, and they
prefer to compromise and make peace. I believe that, if we
take their offer, there will be such an outcry of rage and
disappointment from the Left Socialists of Germany, Italy,
France, and the world, that Lenin and Trotsky will be
astonished. The Red Revolution--the class war--will be
broken, and evolution will have its chance once more in the
rest of Europe. And you and I know that the men we met in
Moscow see this thus, and that they believe the peace
conference will not, can not, see it, but will go on to make
war and so bring on the European revolution.
But your duty, our duty, is to point out this opportunity,
and to vouch for the strength and the will and the character
of Lenin and the commissaires of Russia to make and keep the
compact they have outlined to you. Well, this is the
briefest way in which I can express my full faith:
Kautsky has gone to Moscow. He has gone late; he has gone
after we were there. He will find, as we found, a careful,
thoughtful, deliberate group of men in power; in too much
power; unremovable and controlling a state of monopoly,
which is political, social, economic, financial; which
controls or directs all the activities, all the fears, all
the hopes, all the aspirations of a great people. Kautsky
will speak to revolutionary Russia for revolutionary
Germany, and for a revolutionary Europe. There will be an
appeal in that; there will be a strong appeal in that to the
revolutionary Russian commissaires. But, if I am any judge
of character, Lenin and his commissaires will stand by their
offer to us until Paris has answered, or until the time set
for the answer--April 10--shall have passed. Then, and not
until then, will Kautsky receive an answer to his appeal
for--whatever it is the Germans are asking.
It is not enough that you have delivered your message and
made it a part of the record of the peace conference. I
think it is your duty to ask the fixed attention of your
chiefs upon it for a moment, and to get from them the
courtesy of a clear, direct reply to Russia before April 10.