February 17th.
My general impression that the Soviet revolution has passed
through its period of internal struggle and is concentrating
upon constructive work so far as that is allowed by war on
all its frontiers, and that the population is settling down
under the new regime, was confirmed by the meeting of the
Executive Committee which definitely limited the powers of
the Extraordinary Commission. Before the sitting was
opened I had a few words with Peters and with Krylenko.
The excitement of the internal struggle was over. It had
been bitterly fought within the party, and both Krylenko of
the Revolutionary Tribunal and Peters of the Extraordinary
Commission were there merely to witness the official act that
would define their new position. Peters talked of his failure
to get away for some shooting; Krylenko jeered at me
for having refused to believe in the Lockhart conspiracy.
Neither showed any traces of the bitter struggle waged
within the party for and against the almost dictatorial powers
of the Extraordinary Commission for dealing with counter-revolution.
The sitting opened with a report by Dserzhinsky, that strange
ascetic who, when in prison in Warsaw, insisted on doing
the dirty work of emptying the slops and cleaning other
people's cells besides his own, on a theory that one man
should where possible take upon himself the evil which
would otherwise have to be shared by all; and in the
dangerous beginning of the revolution had taken upon
himself the most unpopular of all posts, that of President of
the Extraordinary Commission. His personal uprightness is
the complement of an absolute personal courage, shown
again and again during the last eighteen months. At the time
of the Left Social Revolutionary mutiny he went without a
guard to the headquarters of the mutineers, believing that he
could bring them to reason, and when arrested by them
dared them to shoot him and showed so bold a front that in
the end the soldiers set to watch him set him free and
returned to their allegiance. This thin, tallish man, with a
fanatic face not unlike some of the traditional portraits of St.
Francis, the terror of counter-revolutionaries and criminals
alike, is a very bad speaker. He looks into the air over the
heads of his audience and talks as if he were not addressing
them at all but some one else unseen. He talks even of a
subject which he knows perfectly with curious inability to
form his sentences; stops, changes words, and often,
recognizing that he cannot finish his sentence, ends where
he is, in the middle of it, with a little odd, deprecating
emphasis, as if to say: "At this point there is a full stop. At
least so it seems."
He gave a short colourless sketch of the history of the
Extraordinary Commission. He referred to the various crises
with which it had had to deal, beginning with the drunken
pogroms in Petrograd, the suppression of the combined
anarchists and criminals in Moscow (he mentioned that after
that four hours' struggle which ended in the clearing out of
the anarchists' strongholds, criminality in Moscow
decreased by 80 per cent.), to the days of the Terror when,
now here, now there, armed risings against the Soviet were
engineered by foreigners and by counter-revolutionaries
working with them. He then made the point that
throughout all this time the revolution had
been threatened by large-scale revolts. Now the revolution
was safe from such things and was threatened only by
individual treacheries of various kinds, not by things which
needed action on a large scale. They had traitors, no doubt,
in the Soviet institutions who were waiting for the day
(which would never come) to join with their enemies, and
meanwhile were secretly hampering their work. They did
not need on that account to destroy their institutions as a
whole. The struggle with counter-revolution had passed to
a new stage. They no longer had to do open battle with
open enemies; they had merely to guard themselves against
individuals. The laws of war by which, meeting him on the
field of battle, the soldier had a right to kill his enemy
without trial, no longer held good. The situation was now
that of peace, where each offender must have his guilt
proved before a court. Therefore the right of
sentencing was removed from the Extraordinary
Commission; but if, through unforeseen circumstances, the
old conditions should return, they intended that the
dictatorial powers of the Commission should be restored to it
until those conditions had ceased. Thus if, in case of armed
counter-revolution, a district were declared to be in a state
of war, the Extraordinary Commission would resume its old
powers. Otherwise its business would be to hand offenders,
such as Soviet officials who were habitually late (here there
was a laugh, the only sign throughout his speech that
Dserzhinsky was holding the attention of his audience), over
to the Revolutionary Tribunal, which would try them and,
should their guilt be proved, put them in concentration
camps to learn to work. He read point by point the
resolutions establishing these, changes and providing for the
formation of Revolutionary Tribunals. Trial to take place
within forty-eight hours after the conclusion of the
investigation, and the investigation to take not longer than a
month. He ended as he ended his sentences, as if by
accident, and people scarcely realized he had finished
before Sverdlov announced the next speaker.
Krylenko proposed an amendment to ensure that no member
of the Revolutionary Tribunal could be also a member of the
Extraordinary Commission which had taken up and
investigated a case. His speech was very disappointing. He
is not at his best when addressing a serious meeting like that
of the Executive Committee. The Krylenko who spoke
to-night, fluently, clearly, but without particular art, is a very
different Krylenko from the virtuoso in mob oratory, the
little, dangerous, elderly man in ensign's uniform who
swayed the soldiers' mass meetings in Petrograd a year and a
half ago. I remember hearing him speak in barracks soon
after the murder of Shingarev and Kokoshkin, urging class
struggle and at the same time explaining the difference
between that and the murder of sick men in bed. He
referred to the murder and, while continuing his speech,
talking already of another subject, be went through the
actions of a man approaching a bed and killing a sleeper
with a pistol. It was a trick, of course, but the thrilling,
horrible effect of it moved the whole audience with a
shudder of disgust. There was nothing of this kind in his
short lecture on jurisprudence
to-night.
Avanesov, the tall, dark secretary of the Executive
Committee, with the face of a big, benevolent hawk hooded
in long black hair, opposed Krylenko on the ground that
there were not enough trustworthy workers to ensure that in
country districts such a provision could be carried out.
Finally the resolution was passed as a whole and the
amendment was referred to the judgment of the presidium.
The Committee next passed to the consideration of the
Extraordinary Tax levied on the propertied classes.
Krestinsky, Commissary of Finance, made his report to a
grim audience, many of whom quite frankly regarded the tax
as a political mistake. Krestinsky is a short, humorous man,
in dark spectacles, dressed more like a banker than like a
Bolshevik. It was clear that the collection of the tax had not
been as successful as he had previously suggested. I was
interested in his reference to the double purpose of the tax
and in the reasons he gave for its comparative failure.
The tax had a fiscal purpose, partly to cover deficit,
partly by drawing in paper money to raise the value of the
rouble. It had also a political purpose. It was intended to
affect the propertied classes only, and thus to weaken the
Kulaks (hard-fists, rich peasants) in the villages and to teach the
poorer peasants the meaning of the revolution.
Unfortunately some Soviets, where the minority of the
Kulaks had retained the unfair domination given it by its
economic strength, had distributed the tax-paying equally
over the whole population, thus very naturally raising the
resentment of the poor who found themselves taxed to the
same amount as those who could afford to pay. It had been
necessary to send circular telegrams emphasizing the terms
of the decree. In cases where the taxation had been carried
out as intended there had been no difficulty. The most
significant reason for the partial unsuccess was that the
propertied class, as such, had already diminished to a greater
extent than had been supposed, and many of those taxed, for
example, as factory owners were already working, not as
factory owners, but as paid directors in nationalized
factories, and were therefore no longer subject to the
tax. In other words, the partial failure of the tax was a proof
of the successful development of the revolution. (This is
illustrated by the concrete case of "Uncle"
recorded on p. 73.) Krestinsky believed that the revolution
had gone so far that no further tax of , this kind would be
either possible or necessary.