OUR COMMUNISTS
Kerensky’s Revolution did not take the official world by surprise: it
was, in fact, inevitable. The Revolution was hailed by uninstructed
public opinion in England as a fulfilment of long-deferred hope, and
some statesmen who ought to have had more prescience joined in the
acclamation. The worst of revolutions is that they never know where to
stop, and when in the middle of a war they befall one of the Allies
upon whom the rest are counting, they are a disaster of the first
magnitude. Kerensky was not fashioned by nature to ride the whirlwind:
a mountain-top, whence he could indulge his gift of impassioned
oratory, would have been a safer steed for him. His nerveless fingers
never gripped the reins: he could not even bring himself to execute
mutineers and deserters in the field. It was inevitable that a stronger
hand should thrust him aside. Strange that we should ever have talked
of Russia as the ‘Steam Roller!’ All that is left of it now is the red
flag.
Of all the stupidities committed by the Germans during the War I think
that the locked train was the most inexcusable because, as Ludendorff
has since admitted, it was fraught with grave danger primarily for
Germany herself. There had congregated in Switzerland a little band of
revolutionaries who had fled after the disturbances of 1905. There,
year in and year out, they frequented cafés, and smoked and talked as
only Russians can talk until the whole world became unreal and danced
before them through a haze of cigarette smoke. For them revolution
meant no half measures. They had drunk in the fatuities of Karl Marx
until there was no room left in their minds for sober reasoning, and
here in their own country was their opportunity. In Russia a torch was
to be put to dry thatch, and presently the Red conflagration should
spread until it consumed the world. The workers with sickle and hammer
should unite over the whole world to wipe out the _bourgeoisie_. That
was the measure of their intelligence.
All this the Germans knew. They would not have such inflammatory
material loose in their own country, but as a means of paralysing the
army of their ancient Muscovite enemy it should be used at once, for
Kerensky was reported to be preparing a new offensive. It is not quite
clear from whom the proposal first came; whether the Bolsheviks asked
for a ‘safe-conduct’ across Germany, or whether some German diplomatic
agent invited the request; but it is known that the exiles packed
themselves into a train which was sealed at the German frontier, and
kept so until it crossed into Russia. Had Kerensky and his advisers
been wise and strong they would have hitched a locomotive to the
other end of the train and sent it back, but they were neither wise
nor strong. It is said that when Ulianov, otherwise Lenin, was making
inflammatory speeches Kerensky was implored to take action against him,
and that he said, ‘Let him talk: he will talk himself out.’
I remember speaking about this time to a diplomatist with a knowledge
of Russia, and asking him whether he thought that the Czar, who was
then a prisoner in his own palace under Kerensky, was in any personal
danger. He shook his head, and said that he doubted whether the Czar
would come out of the welter alive.
With the second Revolution in November 1917, the Bolsheviks came
into power. They included Nihilists, Anarchists, and extreme Social
Revolutionaries, who were all soon to be enrolled in a single body as
Communists and followers of Karl Marx. Lenin has never swerved from
his plan of making Russia merely the seed-bed for a general revolution
in Europe on a class basis. He hoped for it in Germany, Austria, and
Italy; he was certain of it in the Ukraine and Poland, but he admitted
that his chances of success in England and America were small because
in England he held the working-class to be too ignorant, and in America
there had been no preparation. For the moment the Bolsheviks showed
a frenzied energy in striking terror into their political opponents.
There were mass executions, and the horrors attending some of them,
especially at Kronstadt, were not exaggerated. Even Tchitcherin,
usually the mildest of men, wrote on 11th September 1918 to the head of
the American Red Cross:
‘Our adversaries are not executed, as you affirm, for holding other
political views than ours, but for taking part in the most terrible
battles, in which no weapon is left untouched, against us, no crime
is left aside and no atrocities are considered too great when the
power belongs to them.... 300 have been selected already (for
execution) as belonging to the vanguard of the counter-revolutionary
movement. In the passionate struggle tearing our whole people do you
not see the sufferings, untold during generations, of all the unknown
millions who were dumb during centuries, whose concentrated despair
and rage have at last burst into the passionate longing for a new
life, for the sake of which they have the whole existing fabric to
remove?
‘In the great battles of mankind, hatred and fury are unavoidable as
in every battle and in every struggle.’
If he had said simply that they were executing their opponents in order
to save their own skins he would have been nearer the truth, for fear
is always more fertile in violent outrage than the spirit of revenge.
There was something providential in the sequence of events. The
Bolshevik Revolution came at a time when the entire people in England
except a few Defeatists and Pacifists had gritted its teeth, and was
determined to see the War through. If it had come eighteen months
later, when demobilisation was in the air and people were looking for a
new world, it might have gone hardly with us. As it was, the ordinary
Englishman felt that he had been ‘let down’ by the Russian Bolsheviks,
and he resented the treachery.
The second Russian Revolution turned the heads of the Pacifists and
Defeatists in England. They had failed in every enterprise: the country
had declined to endorse their scheme for obtaining peace by negotiation
with the Germans, and here at last was a great people ready to put
the doctrines of Karl Marx into practice. They had a great deal to
explain away: it was impossible altogether to deny the atrocities of
the Bolsheviks, but they could attack their own Government on the score
of the Allied intervention, which they represented as an attempt on
the part of the Capitalists to strangle an infant Socialist State at
birth and to excuse the excesses of the torch-bearers of revolutionary
Socialism. This, they thought, would be a more popular cry than ‘Peace
by Negotiation.’
On 3rd June 1917 they called a National Conference at Leeds, which was
attended by over 1900 people. It was said at the time to have cost
£5000, and to have been held at the expense of the Union of Democratic
Control. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald described this conference as the most
active gathering he had ever attended; Mr. Sexton as ‘the most bogus,
the most dishonest, and the most corrupt conference ever created by
the mind of man.’ It was resolved to divide Great Britain into Soviets
to the ominous number of thirteen, with headquarters in Duke Street,
Adelphi. These Soviets existed for a few weeks, and then expired.
At Tunbridge Wells some attempt was made among soldiers awaiting
demobilisation to organise support for a local Soviet among the troops,
but there was little response. The Provisional Council, nominated
presumably with their own consent, were also to be thirteen--a number
which seemed to exercise a fascination on the Conference. They included
Messrs. Robert Smillie, Philip Snowden, Ramsay Macdonald, Robert
Williams, George Lansbury, and Joseph Fineberg, the Russian-Jewish
secretary to Litvinoff. It is believed that this council never met,
though manifestoes were issued by Mr. Albert Inkpin in its name.
The Russian Revolution dug Karl Marx out of the grave in which he had
been lying uneasily since 1883. Karl Marx was a Prussian Jew born in
1818. He was driven successively from Prussia and from France, and he
found an asylum in London. He was not a working man, nor had he any
business experience, and his theories about Capital and Labour were
purely academic. His philosophy was really an attempt to reconcile the
doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man, expounded by Rousseau, to modern
economic conditions. In his time Rousseau’s theories were a little
fly-blown. Marx attempted to rehabilitate them by pointing out that
the industrial revolution had lowered the status of the workmen while
immensely increasing their economic value; that it had deprived them
of all real interest in their expanding industry, and had converted
them into ‘wage-slaves.’ He called upon them to take arms in the
Class war throughout the industrial world. His manifesto, used by the
Russian Bolsheviks and the British extreme Socialists, was, ‘Workers
of all lands, Unite! You have a world to win; you have nothing to lose
but your chains,’ and in another passage, ‘We make war against all the
prevailing ideals of the State, of country, of patriotism.’ As Burke
once said of the Jacobins:
‘This sort of people are so taken up by their theories of the rights
of man that they have totally forgotten his nature.’
Between 1848 and 1860 the idea of international solidarity of
classes was popular, but after 1860 the lines of cleavage tended to
become vertical rather than horizontal, for from that date Europe
became increasingly Nationalist. Moreover, Marx himself, owing to
his long residence in England, had begun to waver in his opinion.
The mid-Victorian Trade Unionist believed in constitutional action.
Marx, who had formed a Communist League in London in 1847, had seen
it collapse in 1852. It had been reformed in 1862 as a result of the
cosmopolitan feeling created by the Great Exhibition, but after a few
meetings, generally held in Switzerland, it languished and died. The
only power that seemed to be growing was that of the constitutional
Trade Unionist, and before his death Marx was himself inclining in that
direction.
Some months before the Bolsheviks came into power a curious document
which has since received much attention in England was brought to the
notice of the State Department in Washington. _The Protocols of the
Wise Men of Zion_, first published in Russian in 1897 by a Russian
named Nilus, purported to set forth the details of a secret Jewish
conspiracy for the domination of the world. A committee of Americans
were preparing a report upon the document, and I was asked unofficially
to give my opinion upon its authenticity. Besides the internal evidence
there was very little to go upon, but I reported that the ‘protocols’
were almost certainly fabricated by some anti-Semitic organisation, and
I heard afterwards that the American Committee had reported in the same
sense.
It was quite natural that when the Bolsheviks came into power and
it was seen that nearly all the people’s commissaries were Jews, so
obvious a fulfilment of the _Protocols_ should not pass unnoticed. It
was useless to point out that, ‘protocols or no protocols,’ it was
inevitable in a country like Russia, when the dregs of the population
had boiled up to the top, a preponderance of Jews would be found among
the scum: people would have it that the first part of this sinister
programme had been realised, and that worse was still to come. No
doubt, the famous _Protocols_ did faithfully reflect the kind of
talk that has been current among fanatically Nationalist Jews among
themselves for more than a century.
How the Russians themselves regard their Jewish masters is shown by a
popular story now current in Russia. At a Soviet meeting the list of
elected delegates was read over. The secretary came to the name ‘Ivan
Ivanowitch Petroff.’
‘But what’s his real name?’ asked a delegate.
‘Ivan Ivanowitch Petroff. He has no other name.’
‘Bah!’ said the Jewish delegate; ‘these Russians will push in
everywhere.’
In Bela Kun’s régime in Hungary, as well as in Russia, nearly all the
commissaries, and especially those who were guilty of atrocious acts of
cruelty, were Jews.
There is one and one only virtue in the Russian Bolshevik--that he
knows what he wants and allows no weak scruples or respect for public
opinion to prevent him from getting it. Fancy a Government of this
country that knew its own mind and had no scruples and cared nothing
for public opinion! It is conceivable that it might really bring about
‘a country fit for heroes to live in’ instead of a country in which
only heroes can live.
At this time even the professional moulders of our opinions failed
us. I remember saying to a great newspaper owner in 1917 that he
might devote his papers to a denunciation of Bolshevism, and he
replied, ‘Who’s afraid of Bolshevism? I tell you there will be so much
employment in England after the War, and the people will be earning
such high wages, that they will have no time to think of Bolshevism.’
Well, the truth, as usual, lies midway. We had the fever mildly, and
now our temperature is a little below normal, and so the world will go
on in impulse and reaction to the end, always making a little progress
in the long run unless the great catastrophe that has overtaken
civilisation in Russia should overtake the civilisation of the globe.
There have been Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, Carthage, and Rome, and the
fate that overtook those great empires may overtake empires again, on
so slender a thread hangs all human stability.
The Soviet ideal never got beyond its paper stage in England. Perhaps
the nearest approach to it was the Rank and File Movement, which Lenin
afterwards declared to be the nucleus of an organisation which embodies
his ideas; but by the time the Russians were ready to subsidise the
Rank and File Movement, workmen had realised the advantage of electing
moderate men and women to represent them, and the Rank and File
Movement was dead.
One revolutionary paper, _The Call_, printed an article, ‘Learn to
speak Russian!’ and said that the working-class must ‘assert its will
in Russian accents.... It would be anti-Parliament, as the great
Chartist Conventions were. Then we shall soon see how easily Russian
can be spoken even in these islands without the knowledge of grammar
or vocabulary’; but _The Call_ had few readers at that time, and there
was a general distrust of any one who held up Russian institutions for
imitation.
For some months we were concerned with the antics of Maxim Litvinoff,
whom the Bolsheviks had appointed their representative in England. On
18th February 1918 he addressed a meeting in Westminster at which the
late Mr. Anderson, M.P., presided; two thousand tickets were issued.
Litvinoff’s reception on this occasion seems to have turned his head.
He had taken an office in Victoria Street, at which he received visits
from Russians serving in the British army, from the crews of Russian
ships-of-war lying in British harbours, and from a vast number of
persons of Bolshevik sympathy. Indeed, the number and the quality of
the visitors became so embarrassing to the other tenants that the
landlord evicted him. He had already appointed Mr. John M’Lean, of the
British Socialist Party, to be Bolshevik Consul in Glasgow, and he
himself called at the Russian Embassy and demanded that it should be
handed over to him.
Litvinoff is said to be a native of Baisk, a town in the Baltic
Provinces. Both his parents were Jewish, and his father’s name was
Mordecai Finkelstein, a shopkeeper who used to give private lessons in
Russian and Hebrew. Having associated himself with the revolutionary
movement he left Russia, and after some vicissitudes he came to
London and obtained work at a stationer’s shop under the name of
David Finkelstein. Later he changed his name to Harrison, and became
secretary to a Russian group of political refugees. He married a lady
of Jewish descent, a British subject, though of foreign extraction.
When the Russian Government Committee was formed for the purchase
of war supplies he obtained work in the Agricultural Department,
and he kept his post for some months after the second Revolution,
and left it only in July 1917. He took this post under the name of
Maxim Maximovitch Litvinoff. While Kerensky was in power he showed no
Bolshevik leanings, but these appeared very soon after the subsidy
from the Russian Provisional Government was stopped. He then left the
committee and joined the Russian Delegates Committee with Tchitcherin
at Finsbury House.
Soon after his appointment as Bolshevik representative he began to
associate with English Pacifists. He wrote and circulated a manifesto
which appeared in the _Woolwich Pioneer_, and he was accused of urging
the soldiers who visited his offices to engage in propaganda in their
regiments. As soon as the deputation from the Russian patrol vessel
_Poryv_ returned from seeing him a mutiny broke out on that vessel and
on her sister ship, the _Razsvet_, both lying in Liverpool, and voices
were heard crying, ‘Shoot the Officers!’ A British naval officer came
on board and saved their lives. The crews were taken on shore to the
police cells, and some of them made statements affecting Litvinoff.
Deportation orders were made against them, and they were sent back to
Russia.
Litvinoff’s cup was full. It was decided, none too soon, that he should
leave the country and not return to it. For a man of so humble a
position and so lofty an ambition it was a severe blow. No doubt he had
lain awake at nights dreaming of himself in uniform and decorations
among the Corps Diplomatique at St. James’s, and it was not surprising
that his disappointment should vent itself in bitter antagonism to this
country. We had not quite done with him. The Russians had taken many
British prisoners of war, and they nominated Litvinoff to represent
them in the negotiations for their release.
The high cost of living had provoked an outcry against profiteering,
and was causing very serious unrest. The London docks were choked with
frozen meat that nobody wanted, but flour and other food-stuffs were
deficient. A number of ill-informed people believed that there were
large stores of corn in the granaries of South Russia, and that if the
cost of living was to be reduced in England this corn ought to be got
out even at the cost of entering into quasi-diplomatic relations with
the oligarchy in power in Moscow. An officer of the Ministry of Food
made himself a laughing-stock by writing a grave essay to that effect,
but it was no laughing matter, for there ensued from it the phrase,
‘The bulging corn-bins,’ though it was well known at the time that
if the corn-bins bulged it was because there was nothing in them to
support the walls.
At the beginning of 1920 the Soviet Government was holding a number
of British officers and soldiers as prisoners of war, although we
were not at war with Russia, nor at the time were there any military
preparations against her.
The pressing need was to rescue these prisoners, and Mr. O’Grady, M.P.,
was sent to Reval to confer with Litvinoff, as representative of the
Soviet Government. Now Litvinoff had never concealed his strong desire
to return to England in any capacity which might result eventually in
his recognition as Russian Ambassador. These negotiations were dilatory
and ambiguous, being designed to bring the maximum of pressure to bear
on the British Government through the unfortunate prisoners.
Out of this conference, which did at last result in the release of
the prisoners, grew the Russian Trade Agreement with England. The
trade that has resulted is negligible. We have sold the Russians very
little, we have got from them practically nothing that we wanted, but
a great deal that we did not want at all. In May 1920 MM. Kameneff and
Krassin arrived in London to arrange the Agreement. A Jewish journalist
of ability and experience named Theodore Rothstein at once attached
himself to their delegation. During the War he had been employed in
the Press section of one of the Government Departments, where his
known Communist sympathies were thought unlikely to be dangerous to
the country. He had never lost his Russian nationality, though his
son, who shared his father’s views, having been born in England, was
a British subject. Mr. Rothstein immediately threw all his energies
into a campaign in favour of Communism in this country. He was the
intermediary for subsidies to revolutionary organisations, and his
secret activities were far-reaching. Fortunately, in August 1920,
he was selected to accompany Monsieur Miliutin to Russia, and from
that country he was not allowed to return. A year later he became the
Bolshevik representative in Teheran.
This was not Kameneff’s first visit to England. Not very long after
the Armistice he arrived in this country with another Communist on his
way to Paris and Berne, where they were respectively to become the
permanent Bolshevik representatives. They brought with them a cheque
for a large sum of money and a mass of propaganda literature in leather
trunks, rove with steel chains, which they said had been used by the
Imperial Russian couriers for conveying documents of a specially secret
nature: they chuckled over the manifest impossibility of the British
police examining the contents without leaving their mark behind them.
It was tempting Providence! As it was clear that the French Government
would not admit them and that they could not stay in this country they
were both sent back to Russia with all their luggage, and the cheque
was handed to them on embarkation. There was a good deal of difficulty
in inducing them to go, for one of them declined to get out of bed,
and a gigantic Cossack in physical charge of the party could speak no
language but his own. But a display of tactful firmness by the Special
Branch inspectors got them to King’s Cross just in time to catch the
boat-train.
Under these circumstances it was scarcely to be expected that Kameneff
would be friendly to this country, and he soon began to show his hand.
There were several counts against him. He had deliberately falsified a
despatch on the question of the Polish War at a time when the Councils
of Action were ready to swallow any false information if it came from a
Russian source, and he had been foremost in arranging a Russian subsidy
for the Revolutionary Press in England. He was plainly informed that
the British Government was aware what he had done, and that they did
not regard him as a proper representative of the Russian Government. He
departed to Moscow on the understanding that he would not return.
He was succeeded by Krassin as the head of the present Russian Trade
Delegation. Every member of it gave an undertaking in writing not to
interfere in the internal affairs of this country, or to be interviewed
by representatives of the press: Monsieur Krassin gave a verbal
undertaking to the same effect. While he tried loyally to carry out
this undertaking and to confine himself to the non-political business
for which he was admitted to this country, it was not so with many
members of his staff, and, as propaganda is considered to be the first
duty of every Communist, it was scarcely to be expected that they would
keep any such promise. They had private conferences with members of the
Council of Action, and they supplied the _Daily Herald_ regularly with
‘news’ from Russia.
Bolshevism has been described as an infectious disease rather than
a political creed--a disease which spreads like a cancer, eating
away the tissue of society until the whole mass disintegrates and
falls into corruption. It has other attributes of disease. Captain
McCullough has given an excellent description of its first febrile
stage, when a young Russian bluejacket named Mekarov, who was certified
to be Bolshevik-proof, returned from a Bolshevik meeting mad drunk on
Bolshevik oratory and bad alcohol, and went roaring up and down the
corridor with a revolver threatening to murder the British officers.[4]
It is not recorded whether the same symptoms were observed in Paris
during the Terror, but a German who had been through the recent
revolution in Germany told me that he had noticed the eyes lighted by
dull fire from within. I noticed the same symptoms in a young policeman
who was shouting, ‘Let’s have a revolution!’ during the police strike.
The Russians, the most amiable and the most docile of people, took the
malady in its severest form; but while there were outbursts unknown to
Western Europe all over the country, the propagandist was displaying
almost superhuman industry in Petrograd and Moscow. Leaflets were
poured out from the press by the ton, and the Russian revolutionaries
living in foreign countries were at once mobilised to preach the Red
doctrine.
[4] _A Prisoner of the Reds_, by Francis McCullough, p. 25.
In July 1918 Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who had long been working on
revolutionary lines in opposition to the rest of her family, joined
with Mr. W. F. Watson, of the Rank and File Movement, to found the
People’s Russian Information Bureau on funds provided by the Russians
for the dissemination of Bolshevik literature and the preaching of
revolution.
On 30th August the Police Strike filled the extremists with renewed
hope. For the Londoner the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the
world. That a body so trusted and so patriotic should refuse duty
in the last stages of a war in which so many of their comrades were
fighting, implied that there was none of our settled institutions in
which one could trust any more. There was no real cause for anxiety:
the strike was economic, not revolutionary. For many months an
agitation fostered by an ex-inspector who had left the Metropolitan
Police with a grievance had been carried on, and a Police and Prison
Officers’ Union had secretly been formed. It had gained few adherents
until the rise in the cost of living without a corresponding rise in
pay swelled the membership to several hundreds. The Commissioner, Sir
Edward Henry, was fully alive to this just grievance, and had put
forward proposals which had been approved. If the approval had been
made public perhaps there would have been no strike, but unfortunately
part of the scheme was an endowment for the widows of policemen,
and the actuarial calculations that were involved were holding up
the whole scheme. For some days before the strike there had been a
vigorous campaign of recruiting for the Union, and word had secretly
been passed round that all members were to be ready. The great mass
of the older men knew nothing of these plans. When they came on duty
on the morning of 30th August a strong picket ordered them back, and
as they encountered the picket singly most of them obeyed. A number,
however, refused to be intimidated, and some of these were made
afterwards to pay for their loyalty. Sir Edward Henry was on leave;
Scotland Yard was filled with excited demonstrators in plain clothes.
There were marches to Tower Hill, where the extremist members of the
London Trades Council addressed the men. Special Constables were
hustled and abused, but as might have been expected of the London
driver, the traffic managed itself with surprisingly few accidents.
As soon as their grievances were remedied the great body of the men
returned to duty. Sir Edward Henry retired, receiving a baronetcy
for his services, and Sir Nevil Macready, the Adjutant-General, was
appointed in his place. The Police Union, with the support of many
Labour leaders, was now pressing for recognition, and as a Union
in a disciplined force would have been unworkable, representative
boards forming a direct channel from the men to the Commissioner were
instituted and accepted by the Force. All this was skilfully managed by
Sir Nevil Macready.
The officials of the Police Union, encouraged by revolutionary Labour,
now began to organise a second Police Strike for the ‘full and frank
recognition’ of the Police Union. The authorities were aware of
their plans, and were also aware that the higher pay granted on the
recommendation of Lord Desborough’s Committee had satisfied the
great majority of the men. In August 1919 when the strike was called,
barely one thousand men responded in London. At Liverpool the number
was much larger, and many of the warders at Wormwood Scrubs Prison
also came out. All were dismissed. Among them, no doubt, were many
thoughtless men who had done good service in the War, but had lacked
the backbone to stand out against the revolutionary agitator. Their
places were filled by demobilised soldiers, among whom were a few
demobilised officers. Many of the police-strikers joined the extremists
in a campaign for reinstatement, but on this point the Government has
remained firm.
At this time the great body of Englishmen had only one
preoccupation--the last phases of the War. There were distractions
abroad as well as at home. In Finland the Red Terror had broken out,
and the Finnish Right, for self-defence as they said, called in German
troops for their protection. Many of the outrages during the Red
Terror were committed not by Finns but by the Russian Bolsheviks who
had poured into the country. There followed a reaction, which Finnish
Socialists describe as a White Terror, though in fact it seems to have
been greatly exaggerated.
While the whole world was watching Marshal Foch’s counter-strokes with
bated breath it had no time to think of revolution, and even now it
is not generally known that revolutions on the Russian plan actually
broke out on Armistice Day, 1918, in Switzerland and Holland. They
failed because the Swiss and the Dutch are not Russians. Immediately,
the stable populations of these countries determined to take no further
risk. In Switzerland military motor-lorries drove up to the door of
the Soviet representatives, and the whole gang, men and women, with
their belongings were packed into the vehicles and conducted to the
frontier under a military escort. In Holland the orderly people formed
a Burgerwacht, a sort of volunteer special constabulary recruited
from all classes down to the humblest workman, and for the moment the
revolutionary movement was stifled. In Hungary Bela Kun, acting under
the orders of Lenin, produced a revolution on the Russian model, and
that unspeakable ruffian, Szamueli, who ‘committed suicide’ and so
escaped the penalty for his crimes, ravaged the country for five months
and brought it to ruin.
Our first troubles in England arose out of demobilisation. As long
as hostilities continued no soldier minded going back to France, but
men did not at all see the necessity of going back when there was no
more fighting to do. On 10th January 1919 there were military riots at
Folkestone, and shortly afterwards at Calais, and there was a feeling
throughout the army that the system of demobilisation in liberating
first the key industry men, irrespective of their length of service,
was an injustice.
During the first month of 1919 there were minor disturbances at several
of the camps, chiefly among the technical services, in which a large
proportion of the men belonged to Trade Unions.
In the months following the Armistice some of the societies of
ex-servicemen began to give anxiety. The most dangerous at the moment
seemed to be the Sailors’, Soldiers’, and Airmen’s Union, which had
whole-heartedly accepted the Soviet idea and was in touch with the
police-strikers who had been dismissed, with the more revolutionary
members of the London Trades Councils, and with the Herald League. The
‘Comrades of the Great War’ never gave any cause for anxiety, nor, on
the whole, did the National Federation of Ex-Servicemen, though some
of its branches were swayed by a few of the more extreme members.
During February 1919 a young Russian Bolshevik violinist was touring
the country and drawing large audiences of working men and women not
so much to listen to his playing as to the revolutionary speeches with
which he interspersed his performances. His was a typical case of the
epidemic in its febrile stage, a stage from which the British appear
to be immune. In the disturbed state of the public mind it was decided
that Soermus would be better in his own country, and his triumphant
tour was interrupted in order that he might be put on board a boat
which was about to sail for Norway. This happened to be fixed for the
day before the ‘Hands off Russia’ meeting at the Albert Hall, at which
every section of the revolutionary movement was represented on the
platform. Soermus was to have been on the platform at this meeting.
There was a large strike on the Clyde at the moment, and many of the
speakers really believed that it was the beginning of the General
Strike which was to merge into Revolution. At that moment we were
probably nearer to very serious disturbances than we have been at any
time since the Bristol Riots of 1831. A few days later the reaction
began. On 12th February the Clyde strikers resumed work, and on the
27th the National Industrial Conference met.
In March the storm centre moved from the engineering industries to
the Triple Alliance, and there were signs of co-operation between
ex-servicemen and the extreme Labour organisations. The Sailors’,
Soldiers’, and Airmen’s Union exacted a pledge from its members that
they would take no part against strikers, and certain branches of the
National Federation of Ex-Servicemen were for supporting the miners on
strike in South Wales. This attitude was perfectly natural. The men
had been led by public speeches to imagine that they were coming home
to find things much easier for them than they had been before the War:
they found a shortage not only of houses but of many other comforts,
such as beer. But there were hopeful signs: the Workers’ Committees
were losing power; the propaganda in favour of shorter hours had
failed; the ballot of the Electrical Trade Union on the question of
striking to secure a forty-four-hour week had left the extremists in
the minority, and the report of the Joint Committee on the Industrial
Conference was a step towards a better understanding between Capital
and Labour. All this illustrated a fact too little realised in
England--namely, that the great body of Labour opinion is not and never
has been in favour of violence. Unfortunately, the older men prefer
the quiet of their homes in the evening to attending stormy branch
meetings at which a number of hot-headed youths make speeches about the
class-war without knowing about the interests of their trade, and howl
down any moderate speaker who talks common sense. Consequently, the
extremists have things entirely their own way. They pass resolutions
which are sent to headquarters as representing the real views of the
branch, and it is not until the time comes for a ballot that the real
weakness of their position is made evident.
During April there was a wide extension of craft Unionism.
Agricultural labourers, shop assistants, policemen, and actors became
Trade Unionists. Ex-servicemen had become persuaded that employers
were attempting to re-engage men on pre-war rates, and there were
frequent demonstrations. As long as the international movement was
concerned only with the general interests of Labour it was a more or
less academic matter, but now for the first time we had in Europe
a revolutionary Government amply supplied with funds, which was
prepared to finance and instruct the revolutionary agitators in every
civilised country in the hope of producing a World Revolution, without
which its own tenure of office was recognised to be precarious.
For the first time in history, the revolutionary agitator need not
be a fanatic, for his profession had now become lucrative, and a
loud voice and a glib tongue became worth anything from £6 to £10
a week. The Soviet Government, or rather, the Council of the Third
International, under which it chose to screen its activities, had been
told by its representative in England that a revolution was certain
within six months. In France and Italy it was to come even sooner,
and in Germany the pressure of the extreme Left would soon force the
majority Socialists out of power. Then the effigy of Karl Marx would be
worshipped in every capital, and the world would have entered into the
Millennium.
One result of all this was to augment the little band of intellectual
revolutionaries who have always bloomed among us modest and unseen.
Most of these are men who see in a future Labour Government a short cut
to power. They think that it is easy to be a Triton among minnows. Not
a few of them are ex-officers in the navy and army; and even among the
undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, and in one or two of the public
schools, there are little cliques of ‘Parlour Bolsheviks.’
At the Municipal Elections in November 1919 the Labour candidates had
a sweeping victory. Many had declared themselves revolutionary, and
were determined to convert the municipal organisations into municipal
Soviets, but responsibility soon began to dim these fiery spirits, and
it was maliciously reported that many of them were more concerned with
the social status of their wives and with the question of payment for
their municipal work than they were with revolution.
Then began the great propaganda campaign for nationalisation of the
mines. More than a million leaflets were printed, countless speeches
were delivered, and for a moment it seemed as if a passion for
nationalisation was to sweep the country. Soon, however, it became
evident that nobody quite knew what nationalisation meant. Many miners
thought they were to own the mines themselves and work the number
of hours that happened to suit them at a scale of pay laid down by
themselves. When these were told that the Government was to own the
mines and that they were to have civil servants as their bosses they
became grave. The moulders’ strike was gradually paralysing many
industries and swelling the ranks of the unemployed. In December there
were rumours of lightning strikes among the dockers, as well as the
railwaymen, and the abolition of the unemployment donation was causing
widespread discontent. Ex-soldiers began to claim that the National
Relief and the Canteen Funds should be used for their benefit. The
year 1919 closed with the uneasy feeling that, though we might be
readjusting ourselves more smoothly than any other nation, we must be
prepared for serious disturbances.
Forecasts in political matters are proverbially wrong. By the end
of the year the great question of nationalisation was in a state of
suspended animation, scarcely to be distinguished from dissolution.
The Councils of Action which in August had almost threatened to become
Soviets were now derisively termed in Labour circles ‘Councils of
Inaction,’ and little more was to be heard of them. Of the really great
menace to civilisation that was so soon to fall upon the world nobody
seemed to be thinking at all.
About this time I remember having a long conversation with the late Dr.
Rathenau before he accepted office in Germany. He said: ‘Hitherto we
have always considered the consumer as a constant factor, and concerned
ourselves with over and under-production. Before the War we never
thought that the consumer could cease to consume. That is the real
cause of the trade depression and unemployment.’
The trade depression, dark as it is, has had a sobering effect on the
wilder spirits in revolutionary labour. Trade Unions had blundered
into the political field, and had tried to coerce the Government on
matters of foreign policy which they did not understand. Many working
men were under the delusion that the Councils of Action had prevented
the Government from going to war with Russia, and they were considering
what they should do about the Irish, the Japanese, and the Indian
questions. The effect of all this had been temporarily to impair the
influence of Parliament, but the British working man never really takes
much interest in foreign affairs, and this insular tendency has been
the great stumbling-block of revolutionary agitation.
It was possible about this time to make an estimate of the number of
class-conscious Communists who would be prepared to lay down their
lives for their ideals. The membership of the Communist parties was
then put at 20,000, but after a close study of individuals, extended
over many months, I was inclined to put the number of would be martyrs
at well under twenty. The Communists were quite aware that, though
minorities could make revolutions, when one embarks upon revolution
by bloodshed it is well to have the support of numbers. Otherwise,
martyrdom may loom a little too near. It was all very well for Mr. Tom
Mann to boast that in Russia 60,000 Communists were in control of more
than 80,000,000 Russians, but where would 20,000 British Communists,
largely diluted with aliens and Jews, be when they tried to hold down
45,000,000 in this country? The Russians had devised a recruiting
system of their own. In every Union a ‘cell’ was to be established
which would grow unseen, as in the incipient stage of cancer, until the
heart of the Union was eaten out. They counted upon the behaviour of
some of the leaders of British Trade Unionism, who seemed to favour the
dictatorship of the Proletariat, not knowing that the more sober had
been driven into the Councils of Action by the fear of being left out
in the cold.