It has been said of the Bolsheviks that they are more interesting than
Bolshevism. To those who hold to the economic interpretation of
history that may seem a heresy. None the less, I believe that the
personality not merely of the leaders but also of their party goes far
to explain the making and survival of the Russian Revolution. To us in
the West they seem a wholly foreign type. With Socialist leaders and
organizations we and our fathers have been familiar for three-quarters
of a century. There has been no lack of talent and even of genius
among them. The movement has produced its great theorist in Marx, its
orator in Jaures, its powerful tacticians like Bebel, and it has
influenced literature in Morris, Anatole France and Shaw. It bred,
however, no considerable man of action, and it was left for the
Russians to do what generations of Western Socialists had spent their
lives in discussing. There was in this Russian achievement an almost
barbaric simplicity and directness. Here were man who really believed
the formulae of our theorists and the resolutions of our Congresses.
What had become for us a sterilized and almost respectable orthodoxy
rang to their ears as a trumpet call to action. The older generation
has found it difficult to pardon their sincerity. The rest of us want
to understand the miracle.
The real audacity of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that they made a
proletarian revolution precisely in that country which, of all
portions of the civilized world, seemed the least prepared for it by
its economic development. For an agrarian revolt, for the subdivision
of the soil, even for the overthrow of the old governing class, Russia
was certainly ready. But any spontaneous revolution, with its
foundations laid in the masses of the peasantry, would have been
individualistic and not communistic. The daring of the Bolsheviks lay
in their belief that the minute minority of the urban working class
could, by its concentration, its greater intelligence and its relative
capacity for organization, dominate the inert peasant mass, and give
to their outbreak of land-hunger the character and form of a
constructive proletarian revolution. The bitter struggle among Russian
parties which lasted from March, 1917, down to the defeat of Wrangel
in November, 1920, was really an internecine competition among them
for the leadership of the peasants. Which of these several groups
could enlist their confidence, to the extent of inducing them not
merely to fight, but to accept the discipline, military and civilian,
necessary for victory? At the start the Bolsheviks had everything
against them. They are nearly all townsmen. They talked in terms of a
foreign and very German doctrine. Few of them, save Lenin, grasped the
problems of rural life at all. The landed class should at least have
known the peasant better. Their chief rivals were the Social
Revolutionaries, a party which from its first beginnings had made a
cult of the Russian peasant, studied him, idealized him and courted
him, which even seemed in 1917 to have won him. Many circumstances
explain the success of the Bolsheviks, who proved once again in
history the capacity of the town, even when its population is
relatively minute, for swift and concentrated action. They also had
the luck to deal with opponents who committed the supreme mistake of
invoking foreign aid. But none of these advantages would have availed
without an immense superiority of character. The Slav temperament,
dreamy, emotional, undisciplined, showed itself at its worst in the
incorrigible self-indulgence of the more aristocratic "Whites," while
the "intellectuals" of the moderate Socialist and Liberal groups have
been ruined for action by their exclusively literary and aesthetic
education. The Bolsheviks may be a less cultivated group, but, in
their underground life of conspiracy, they had learned sobriety,
discipline, obedience, and mutual confidence. Their rigid dogmatic
Marxist faith gives to them the power of action which belongs only to
those who believe without criticism or question. Their ability to lead
depends much less than most Englishmen suppose, on their ruthlessness
and their readiness to practise the arts of intimidation and
suppression. Their chief asset is their self-confidence. In every
emergency they are always sure that they have the only workable plan.
They stand before the rest of Russia as one man. They never doubt or
despair, and even when they compromise, they do it with an air of
truculence. Their survival amid invasion, famine, blockade, and
economic collapse has been from first to last a triumph of the
unflinching will and the fanatical faith. They have spurred a lazy and
demoralized people to notable feats of arms and to still more
astonishing feats of endurance. To hypnotize a nation in this fashion
is, perhaps, the most remarkable feat of the human will in modern
times.
This book is, so far, by far the most typical expression of the
Bolshevik temperament which the revolution has produced.
Characteristically it is a polemic, and not a constructive essay. Its
self-confidence, its dash, even its insolence, are a true expression
of the movement. Its author bears a world-famous name. Everyone can
visualize the powerful head, the singularly handsome features, the
athletic figure of the man. He makes in private talk an impression of
decision and definiteness. He is not rapid or expansive in speech, for
everything that he says is calculated and clear cut. One has the sense
that one is in the presence of abounding yet disciplined vitality. The
background is an office which by its military order and punctuality
rebukes the habitual slovenliness of Russia. On the platform his
manner was much quieter than I expected. He spoke rather slowly, in a
pleasant tenor voice, walking to and fro across the stage and choosing
his words, obviously anxious to express his thoughts forcibly but also
exactly. A flash of wit and a striking phrase came frequently, but the
manner was emphatically not that of a demagogue. The man, indeed, is a
natural aristocrat, and his tendency, which Lenin, the aristocrat by
birth, corrects, is towards military discipline and authoritative
regimentation.
There is nothing surprising to-day in the note of authority which one
hears in Trotsky's voice and detects in his writing, for he is the
chief of a considerable army, which owes everything to his talent for
organization. It was at Brest-Litovsk that he displayed the audacity
which is genius. Up to that moment there was little in his career to
distinguish him from his comrades of the revolutionary under-world--a
university course cut short by prison, an apprenticeship to agitation
in Russia, some years of exile spent in Vienna, Paris, and New York,
the distinction which he shares with Tchitcherin of "sitting" in a
British prison, a ready wit, a gift of trenchant speech, but as yet
neither the solid achievement nor the legend which gives confidence.
Yet this obscure agitator, handicapped in such a task by his Jewish
birth, faced the diplomatist and soldiers of the Central Empires,
flushed as they were with victory and the insolence of their kind,
forced them into public debate, staggered them by talking of first
principles as though the defeat and impotence of Russia counted for
nothing, and actually used the negotiations to shout across their
heads his summons to their own subjects to revolt. He showed in this
astonishing performance the grace and audacity of a "matador." This
unique bit of drama revealed the persistent belief of the Bolsheviks
in the power of the defiant challenge, the magnetic effect of sheer
will. Since this episode his services to the revolution have been more
solid but not less brilliant. He had no military knowledge or
experience, yet he took in hand the almost desperate task of creating
an army. He has often been compared to Carnot. But, save that both had
lost officers, there was little in common between the French and the
Russian armies in the early stages of the two revolutions. The French
army had not been demoralized by defeat, or wearied by long inaction,
or sapped by destructive propaganda. Trotsky had to create his Red
Army from the foundations. He imposed firm discipline, and yet
contrived to preserve the elan of the revolutionary spirit. Hampered
by the inconceivable difficulties that arose from ruined railways and
decayed industries, he none the less contrived to make a military
machine which overthrew the armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel,
with the flower of the old professional officers at their head. As a
feat of organization under inordinate difficulties, his work ranks as
the most remarkable performance of the revolution.
It is not the business of a preface to anticipate the argument of a
book, still less to obtrude personal opinions. Kautsky's labored
essay, to which this book is the brilliant reply, has been translated
into English, and is widely known. The case against the possibility of
political democracy in a capitalist society could hardly be better put
than in these pages, and the polemic against purely evolutionary
methods is formidable. The English reader of to-day is aware, however,
that the Russian revolution has not stood still since Trotsky wrote.
We have to realize that, even in the view of the Bolsheviks
themselves, the evolution towards Communism is in Russia only in its
early stages. The recent compromises imply, at the best, a very long
period of transition, through controlled capitalist production, to
Socialism. Experience has proved that catastrophic revolution and the
seizure of political power do not in themselves avail to make a
Socialist society. The economic development in that direction has
actually been retarded, and Russia, under the stress of civil war, has
retrograded into a primitive village system of production and
exchange. To every reader's mind the question will be present whether
the peculiar temperament of the Bolsheviks has led them to
over-estimate the importance of political power, to underestimate the
inert resistance of the majority, and to risk too much for the
illusion of dictating. To that question history has not yet given the
decisive answer. The daemonic will that made the revolution and
defended it by achieving the impossible, may yet vindicate itself
against the dull trend of impersonal forces.