TROTSKY IN EKATERINBURG
I reached Ekaterinburg at an interesting time. Trotsky, the Minister of
War, was expected there to begin the work of turning his Red Armies into
Labour Armies, and making his victorious troops beat their swords into
ploughshares.
It may not be known to some of my readers and may seem hardly credible
to such of them as read the news from Russia and Poland to-day (July
22, 1920), but the abolition of war and militarism is one of the great
objects of the Communists, and was, in fact, the cry which enabled them
to overthrow the Kerensky Government in 1917. They are convinced that
only by the adoption by all nations of the system of government which
they have established will an end be put to land-grabbing by _bourgeois_
Governments manipulated by capitalists eager for new markets and more
supplies of raw material. And land-grabbing, they hold, leads to war.
They have written whole books on this subject, and there is hardly an
issue of their newspapers which does not refer to it, but I need not
say any more about it here. To point out to the Bolsheviks that their
practice belies their theory is futile and even unfair, for they answer
that it was the attacks made on them by Denikin, Kolchak, the Czechs, the
British, the French, the Americans and others which made them take up
arms to defend their existence.
[Illustration: A COPY OF THE RED TOCSIN. _To face p. 88._]
No sooner were Denikin and Kolchak crushed than Trotsky conceived the
great project of turning several of his Red Armies into Labour Armies.
It was just such an idea as would appeal to a clever journalist like
Trotsky, and he carried it out with all the ostentation which the
ex-Kaiser, also a man of an editorial turn of mind, would have shown in
turning workmen into soldiers. In the first place Trotsky determined to
visit Ekaterinburg for the purpose of doing the thing in style in the
very town where he had been himself a political convict in 1905, and
where, in 1918, Nicholas the Second had met with his tragic end.
A daily newspaper called _The Red Tocsin_ was started in connection with
this movement, just as lively, well-written newspapers are started by
the Bolsheviks in connection with all their movements. It was printed
by “the First Revolutionary Army of Labour,” and in stereotype at the
head of the first page was a picture which would seem curious to the
average Englishman, but which is common enough in Soviet Russia. In
the foreground was a workman beating weapons of war into agricultural
implements, but still carrying his rifle slung across his back in order
to show that, if the necessity arose, he was ready to defend himself. In
the middle distance was a Cossack ploughing, his sword by his side; and
in the background rose an enormous factory with smoking chimneys, and a
great crowd of factory-hands hastening joyfully to work. Overhead was the
Red Star of Bolshevism.
All the contents corresponded to this picture. The success of Red workmen
in repairing a bridge or a damaged locomotive was chronicled with the
same enthusiasm as a British newspaper would describe a gallant feat of
arms by British troops. The unit of the Red Labour Army to which these
workmen belonged was given, just as we should give, in small wars, the
unit to which victorious troops belonged. Every kind of achievement
in the realms of industry and education was treated in the same way.
The work of army and village and factory schools and the reduction of
illiteracy were made matters of brisk competition; and, if _The Red
Tocsin_ is to be trusted, the various schools enjoyed this competition
with the same zest as we enjoy cricket matches. Instead of sending news
about husbands who poisoned their wives and ex-officers who murdered
their sweethearts, corespondents in outlying districts sent exclusive
wires about old women of sixty who had been taught to read, and about
butchers’ boys who had qualified for professorships. There was poetry,
too—a great deal of it—but it was not the poetry of war. It celebrated
the work of the turner, the fitter, the ploughman, tinker, the tailor,
the candlestick-maker, and not the exploits of the warrior. One poem
which I saw was addressed by an engine-driver to a “sick” engine, as the
Russian railwayman call a locomotive which is laid up for repair; and
the point of it was that the thousands of “sick” engines with which the
railway lines were covered should be nursed back to health with as much
care as if they were sick children.
There was much inaccuracy and exaggeration in this paper—for example,
I found it guilty of both inaccuracy and exaggeration in the glowing
report which it published about the repair of the Perm Bridge—but it was
certainly run on original lines. Was there any demand for it on the part
of the public at large? The Bolsheviks laugh at such a question, for they
have as little respect for democracy as the late Lord Salisbury had.
They would never even dream of asking the public what it wants any more
than they would dream of asking their horses. They give the public what
they consider good for it, and deprive it of all possibility of getting
anything else. Just as Peter the Great used to have his boyars forcibly
shaved, so the Bolsheviks, when they started their great cleanliness and
anti-typhus campaign in Ekaterinburg, used to seize grown men, shave
them, cut their hair, and then subject them to a compulsory bath. When
the Russian public has been educated on sound Socialist lines and has
grown up, it will be able to look after itself; but at present, say the
Bolsheviks, it is an infant which does not know what is good for it and
cannot stand on its own feet.
Bolshevism is really run to a large extent by a clique of Socialist
journalists. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Lunacharsky, and all the
other leading Communists have been newspaper men, and Trotsky, though he
does not speak English well, acquired in New York something of the vivid
American style of journalism.
Resuscitate the late Mr. W. T. Stead; associate with him Mr. Wells,
Mr. Sydney Webb, Mr. Dickinson, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, Mr. G. K.
Chesterton, Lord Northcliffe, and the editors of the _Nation_, the _New
Statesman_, the _Manchester Guardian_, and the _Daily Herald_; make
them all fervent Bolsheviks; give them supreme power over a people as
plastic and ignorant as the Russians; and they will do something like
what Lenin and Trotsky have done. Mr. Wells will draw up rough scientific
schemes for an entirely original, brand-new, machine-made civilization;
he will get those schemes endorsed and touched up by mad but extremely
learned professors who have been shut up all their lives in their
studies, brooding over the idea of a perfect State; and his colleagues
will instantly put them into execution. Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Shaw will
dash off in their dinner-hour brilliant, paradoxical, and revolutionary
proposals about agriculture, aviation, coal-mining, and education, which
will meet with the same favourable reception; and Lord Northcliffe will
centralize the Press as it has never before been centralized, and employ
in its service telephonic photography, the radio, the wireless telephone,
the aeroplane, and every other modern invention. All this may seem
fantastic, but nothing more fantastic than the reality could be written
about Russia. The development of the Press alone constitutes, as I shall
afterwards show, one of the most marvellous achievements in the history
of journalism. Despite the acute lack of paper, the Soviet Government
is at present publishing Mr. H. G. Wells’ wildest pseudo-scientific
romances, which it evidently regards as far superior to the New Testament
or any of the other great books on which our “effete” civilization has
been founded; but it has, so far, paid no attention to the same author’s
recent incursions into theology. And, despite the extreme paucity of
skilled electricians for the most humdrum work of modern life, it is
spending millions of roubles weekly and employing scores of engineers
on vast schemes for the electrification of Russia, schemes which seem
to have been borrowed from a romance about a future, electrified,
scientifically constructed world, which was written some years before
the war by the well-known novelist Kuprin. The Bolsheviks forget Marx’s
warning: “Wer ein Programm für die Zukunft entwirft, ist ein Reaktionär.”
If the Soviet Government succeeds in getting peace, money, and
unlimited raw material, it will be most interesting to see how it is
going to develop. The development will certainly be on new lines, as the
Bolsheviks have not a particle of reverence for the past. Trotsky thinks
himself a much cleverer man than St. Paul, with equal energy, a sounder
doctrine, and a much firmer grasp on the realities of life. How can it be
otherwise, he asks, seeing that St. Paul lived so long before the age of
the radio, the aeroplane, and all the great scientific discoveries which
have so completely changed our whole outlook on the world?
The scheme of the Labour Army might have come hot from the active brain
of the great journalist who founded the _Review of Reviews_. As a matter
of fact, it came from the brilliant brain of Trotsky. Ten years ago it
would have been hidden away in the columns of some obscure Socialist
newspaper. Now it has behind it all the resources of a great Empire.
Ekaterinburg was gaily decorated in honour of Trotsky’s visit, but
the Bolshevik Minister of War came, unostentatiously enough, in the
night-time, and refused to hold any parades, inspections of troops, or
any other formal functions whatsoever. He even refused to shake hands
with anybody on the ground that this custom is carried to ridiculous
extremes in Russia, is a waste of time, and contributes, moreover, to
the spread of typhus, and he had abolished hand-shaking in his train
by imposing a fine of 100 roubles for each offence on subordinates
found guilty of it. He was certainly right in saying that this mode
of greeting is carried to excessive lengths in Russia. A slight-built
wiry man of medium height, dressed as a private soldier and without any
decoration, he wore on his head a curious cap which has been invented
for the higher officers of the Red Army. It is of khaki cloth, is cut
in the style of the steel helmet worn by the ancient Russian _bogatyrs_
(Knights), and the whole front of it is covered by a huge star, the Red
Star of Bolshevism. His ill-developed calves were encased in a neat pair
of British Army putties, probably one of the many pairs we had sent to
Kolchak.
He wore no belt and carried no weapon; his face is sallow,
Mephistophelean, and distinctly Jewish; his eyes dark and bright;
his beard and moustache scanty. His movements are quick and animated,
and his capacity for work superhuman. The employees on his train told
me that they led a dog’s life of it. The typewriting girls were kept
working all day and far into the night. His numerous secretaries were
glued to their desks all day. His telephonists were speaking into the
receivers or taking down telephone messages for twenty hours out of the
twenty-four. Moreover, he published on the train a newspaper called _En
Route_, in which he had articles every day, and he dictated, besides,
numerous contributions for the local papers in the towns through which he
passed. He delivered long public speeches several times a week, and spent
at least six hours every day presiding over conferences of Commissars,
railway officials, and factory men. He even dared once to do a thing
which Marshal Foch, Sir Douglas Haig, and even Mr. Bottomley might have
shrunk from—he questioned the infallibility of doctors!
As if all the above work were not enough, Trotsky devoted himself at
Ekaterinburg to transport reorganization, a task which would alone
absorb the energies of a dozen Sir Eric Geddeses; and when Krassin went
to England the Leader of the Red Army calmly took over the Commissariat
of Ways of Communication on the ground that, as railways played such a
great part in military operations, he had better take charge of them
as well as of the Army. All this testifies to Trotsky’s audacity and
indefatigability, but it also betrays a fatal lack of organizers in the
ranks of the Reds. And, it is almost unnecessary to add, Government work
is not well done. Despite the electric thrill which the presence of the
Red Army Commissar communicates to every Government department which he
enters, there is a glut of work which clogs the whole machinery, and
there are not enough experts to deal with that work. The offices are in
a chaotic state, filled with visitors who cannot be attended to, and
with incompetent clerks rushing hither and thither. Many of the old
bureaucrats are, it is true, dribbling back from Paris with their tails
between their legs, but as they are distrusted and are always placed
under incompetent Reds, no really good work can be expected of them.
The Bolshevik War Minister had fitted to his train a wireless apparatus
which kept him in constant touch with Moscow, and he received daily
interminable messages about the Eastern Front, the Southern Front, the
Polish Front, the North-Western and Finnish Front, as well as copies
of all the communications received from the British and other foreign
Governments, not to speak of a vast amount of technical material sent by
his own War Office. He employed about a dozen secretaries, a tame editor
to run his paper, a number of tame diplomatists to look after diplomatic
affairs, and several domesticated Tsarist officers to deal with purely
military matters. He put the fear of Trotsky, if not the fear of God,
into all these subordinates; but they rather gloried than otherwise in
their servitude.
Most Russians like to serve a relentless master who knows his own mind,
and I am not sure but that the same can be said of many Englishmen too.
I was once attached to a British Battalion which was composed mostly of
Labour men, and in which the discipline was very slack. When the weak
and benignant C.O. was replaced by a ruthless man of purely Prussian
mentality, the discipline became perfect, and the soldiers not only
became proud of their iron-minded Colonel, but finally died almost to a
man in carrying out his orders.
The stories told of Trotsky’s revels and dissipation are obvious
nonsense. The only dissipation the Bolshevik War Lord allowed himself
in Ekaterinburg was a short walk every day in a beautiful pine-grove
where I used to walk myself, and an hour’s hard physical exercise daily
shovelling snow from the railway track. In this physical exercise he made
every man, woman, and child in his train take part; and the example he
thus set was good, for, as I think I have already remarked, the educated
Russian has the same contempt for manual labour as the White Sahib has
in India. Even Mrs. Trotsky, Master Trotsky (a boy of eleven or twelve),
and Master Trotsky’s governess, a young Jewess of twenty or twenty-five,
had to shovel snow like the rest; and this craze for manual work
remained even when Trotsky was not looking on, for, when I afterwards
travelled to Moscow with the above-mentioned governess, I noticed that
she sometimes got out at the wayside stations, took the pickaxe from the
_muzhiks_ who were breaking up the thick layer of ice that had formed on
the station platform, and set to work herself with an enthusiasm which
was, however, very much greater than her skill.
No sooner had he arrived in Ekaterinburg than Trotsky plunged straight
into work, and I marvelled at the audacity with which he tackled matters
which ought, one would think, to have been left entirely to experts. I
shall give one example, the typhus question, for I know something about
it, having had, a year earlier, to visit all the typhus hospitals in the
Urals to interpret for Colonel Clarke, the head of the Canadian Medical
Service, whom General Sir Alfred Knox had sent to the Front with the
object of doing something to stop the terrible wastage of men caused by
typhus among Kolchak’s troops. Dr. Clarke found that a good deal of the
responsibility for this state of things was due to the apathy of the
Russian doctors, who would do nothing unless they were given unlimited
quantities of unprocurable insecticides, though, as Dr. Clarke told them
until he was hoarse and exhausted and finally caught the disease himself,
heat would have served their purpose equally well.
On February 19 Trotsky summoned the D.M.S., listened with unusual
and ominous calm to his statement that there was no chance of typhus
decreasing, in any case, till the month of April, and then attacked
him with a violence which nearly frightened that worthy functionary
out of his wits. “I am no doctor,” said the Bolshevik War Lord, “but I
understand from you that typhus is communicated by lice. Now it must be
possible to destroy these lice by delousing apparatus and by a certain
degree of heat, which could, if necessary, be produced in some of our
public baths. Several of the baths are very nearly hot enough for the
purpose as it is; and, even if the soldiers have not got a change of
clothes, they might wash in one part of the bath-house while their
clothes are being disinfected in another part. I am not a believer in
this doctrine of fatalism that you preach. I will immediately appoint
a committee to investigate this question; and if I find that you do
not at once take some steps in the matter, I will hand you over to the
Extraordinary Commission. Good-day.”
Next day an excellent bath-house was opened free at the railway station,
and I myself enjoyed the first bath that I had had for three months.
The Committee was nevertheless appointed, and I have given its findings
in Chapter IV. It published everything, even details of hospital
mismanagement that were enough to make one’s hair stand on end, for the
Bolsheviks, when it suits their purpose, allow the fullest liberty to the
Press.
The great propaganda engine which had raised the Red Army and smashed
Kolchak and Denikin was then turned on to the typhus question; and all
Ekaterinburg was soon placarded with posters preaching cleanliness and
denouncing dirt. Some of them contained representations of a louse
magnified to the size of a small cow, and pointed out in the accompanying
letterpress as a worse enemy than the “Supreme Ruler.” “Kill it,” yelled
the posters, “as you would kill Kolchak. It is a far more dangerous
enemy. Kolchak has put to death thousands of Communists. IT puts to death
tens of thousands.” The number and the variety of these warnings were
very great; and there was every kind of striking lifesize picture in
glaring colours to attract the attention of the illiterate, as well as
good medical hints to impress those who could read. There were pictures
of washerwomen killing enormous lice with the smoothing iron. There were
horrible pictures of death seizing on the young unwashed. Communists were
told that it was their duty to the Republic to keep themselves and their
clothes clean, and that they were traitors if they did not. One of the
commonest posters showed incidentally the nomadic condition of life which
hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians are now leading.
It was generally to be found at railway stations, where crowds of people
habitually cuddle down on the floor in their sheepskins at night-time and
go to sleep without undressing, and it ran as follows: “Don’t lie down
wherever you happen to find yourself at nightfall until you first make
sure that the place is free from lice.”
This propaganda resembled in some respects the old frescoes we sometimes
find in ancient English churches where the fear of sin is taught by means
of devils and fearsome representations of hell, but it resembled, far
more, the most up-to-date American advertising. Every device known to the
patent-medicine quack was made use of—suggestion, fear of sickness and
death, party feeling, and hatred of enemies.
I shall afterwards show that the same all-powerful engine of propaganda
is employed for other purposes, to teach Communism, to enlist support
for the Red Army, to foster a hatred of England, to excite a craze for
education, and to produce a contempt for priests and Christianity. The
science of advertising is now taught in American Universities, and though
contemptible in its way, it is a “science” which presupposes an intimate
knowledge of mass-psychology, and which is capable of being used to
produce the most amazing effects on the minds of a whole people. When we
go deeply into the matter, indeed, we find that the whole modern world
is tending more and more to be “run” by propaganda and advertisement—an
inevitable outcome, it seems to me, of the system which makes public
opinion rule, and which naturally leads therefore to the manufacture and
the influencing of public opinion. Propaganda popularizes not only pills
but also Premiers, and “floats” not only commercial companies but also
creeds and kings. None of the old-established monarchies advertise, but
the Soviet Government certainly means to do so, and no Government in the
world is so alive to the possibilities of advertisement. Fortunately the
Soviet Government is short of paper.
On the day after his arrival Trotsky addressed a large Communist meeting;
and here I might remark that no such thing as a public meeting in our
sense of the word is ever held in Red Russia. The Bolshevik leaders only
address meetings which have been carefully packed with their supporters,
and I only know of one case in which it was announced beforehand that
they were going to speak. It is impossible for anyone who is not a
Bolshevik to find out when Lenin is going to speak in Moscow, the reason
being simply fear of assassination, and it is next to impossible for a
non-Bolshevik to hear him. Trotsky, who is a consummate orator, made
a very able speech, of which the keynote was briefly this: “We have
defeated Kolchak, but a much more serious enemy remains—namely, the
ruined economic system of the country. To put that right we must work
harder than men ever worked before since history began. Sixty per cent.
of our railway locomotives are out of action, and if they continue
breaking down at the same rate, we shall have 99 per cent. out of action
within three months, which means a total breakdown of our transport
system, and therefore of our system of Government. These engines must be
repaired. The men who repair them must have food and fuel. The railway
lines must be cleared of snow. Wood must be cut and brought to the
railways. The Ural factories must be started. This means that all must
work, work, work.”
He certainly painted a picture gloomy enough to warm the heart of Mr.
Winston Churchill, but he did it with a purpose; he wanted to alarm his
followers thoroughly, and to make them see that the economic situation
was extremely serious. He did not go so far, however, as to make them
despair, and I afterwards discovered that he deliberately understated
the actual extent of the economic breakdown, and omitted altogether to
touch on many very disquieting features. He ended on a note of robust
confidence and caused a sensation by announcing that 600 million roubles
in gold had been captured with Kolchak, although he must have known
that the amount was only 300 million. This news, by the way, had been
carefully withheld from the public until the head of the Red Army could
use it, as he did, in an effective peroration.
I was surprised at the rapidity with which this speech was, by previous
arrangement, echoed and re-echoed all over the country. “The Fight
against Economic Ruin” became a catchword like “Wait and See,” or “We
want eight and we won’t wait,” or any of the other famous catch-phrases
of British politics. It became a stereotyped newspaper headline. It
stared at one from placards on all the walls. To judge from the reports
in the Press, it was repeated by every village orator throughout the
Urals. At a meeting of the Ekaterinburg Soviet which I attended, it was
the principal subject of discussion, and at a meeting of the Communist
“League of Youth” which Trotsky attended, Miss Yurovskaya, daughter of
the Tsar’s murderer and President of that League, delivered a good speech
on the same lines. Trotsky must have smiled his Mephistophelean smile
when he heard all this parrot outcry, most of it almost a repetition of
what he had said himself. No wonder he has a profound and undisguised
contempt for democracy. The same absolute unanimity prevails whenever
the Bolshevik leaders raise any cry whatever, and a Britisher misses
painfully the healthy controversial spirit and dogged individualism of
his own people.
Trotsky’s treatment of the working-classes was marked not only by an
absence of flattery, but even by an autocratic touch which one would
never have expected. Finding on his way from Moscow to Ekaterinburg that
the workmen in a certain Ural factory were not working hard enough, he
had fifteen of the worst “slackers” arrested and placed on their trial
before a workmen’s tribunal in Ekaterinburg. At one point on the line his
train was stopped by snow, whereupon he had the whole of the local Soviet
taken into custody for disobedience to the order for removing snow from
the track. They also were tried before a jury of their peers; and, while
the case was still _sub judice_, Trotsky wrote, over his own name in the
newspapers, a ferocious onslaught on the accused, whose condemnation was
thus made certain. He did not say anything about their delaying him, but
he inveighed against them for delaying the trains which brought bread to
the women and children of Moscow and to the Red workmen who had hurled
the tyrant from his throne and stood in the breach against Denikin and
Yudenich.
Trotsky’s train was not one of the old Imperial trains, and could not be
described as sumptuous; it consisted of about a dozen carriages, mostly
_wagons-lits_, and all of them save Trotsky’s own car were very much
overcrowded with _personnel_, typewriters, desks, writing-tables, and
documents. All the _personnel_ ate together in a large dining-car. The
Minister of War had, I believe, a small dining compartment, where he had
his meals with his wife and family and a few of his principal assistants.
The dining-car was used most of the time as an office, for conferences,
for socialistic lectures, and for educational purposes. There was also
a library car packed with Propaganda literature, and a printing office
on wheels for the production of the newspaper to which I have already
referred.
All the outside of Trotsky’s train was covered with advertisements of
Bolshevism and incitements to class hatred. Imagine our Secretary of
State for War touring the country (except at election time) in a train
plastered all over with posters like that of a travelling circus. Such
a thing would not be done even by a President of the United States. And
yet, side by side with this ultra-Americanism and ultra-modernism (the
ultra-modern side being represented by Cubist and Futurist productions
that looked like nothing on earth), was a good deal of hoary old Tsarism.
Close to the Futurist posters stood Lettish guards, who were as merciless
as the janissaries of an Ottoman Sultan. About a dozen of them travelled
on Trotsky’s train, and kept unostentatious but careful watch on everyone
who approached or entered it. The police precautions taken to protect
Lenin and Trotsky are as minute though not as evident as those formerly
taken to protect Nicholas the Second. Thus, the more Russia changes the
more it is the same thing. It has had a tyrant who dragged it savagely—by
the hair of the head, so to speak—abreast of contemporary civilization.
It has now a tyrant who thinks that he is driving it far ahead of
all modern civilization. But it always has a tyrant. Feminine races
invariably have tyrants, just as wives who are too feminine invariably
convert the best-intentioned husbands into bullies.
It was forbidden for any outsider to enter Trotsky’s train without
permission, and the names of all persons who had the _entrée_ were pasted
up inside the doors. Few of those who are entitled to enter the office
car of a National Commissar can go right through the train. The nearer
they approach the Presence, the shorter grows the list of names, until
finally at the Commissar’s car they find only three or four names, one
being that of the Private Secretary, the sole link between the Holy of
Holies and the common herd. And these arrangements were not lightly to
be put aside by anyone. An official of Sverdlov’s train who boarded
Trotsky’s train at Ekaterinburg without permission was promptly arrested,
and had such difficulty in getting released that he is not likely to do
so again. A lesser person might very easily have been shot.
Trotsky, to do him justice, is an extraordinary man, and is idolized by
the Bolsheviks, who say, not without some truth, that he is the most
remarkable Minister of War that Europe has produced during the last six
years of Armageddon. He formed a numerous and well-disciplined army
out of men who were sick and tired of warfare, and who only supported
the Bolsheviks originally because the Bolsheviks promised them peace.
He did this despite the fact that he himself had never been in the
Army or studied warfare, except as an extremely anti-militarist war
correspondent during the first Balkan War. He had been all his life an
obscure journalist, and, if he had joined the British Army in 1914, would
never have risen above the rank of lieutenant, would have been used
exclusively as an interpreter, and would have had for his main occupation
the buying of eggs for some Brigadier-General’s breakfast-table. But if,
on the other hand, he had entered British politics, he might have been
as great a success as Disraeli was; and it would not matter which party
he joined, for he has Jewish adaptability, has no very fixed principles,
and possesses the gift, invaluable to a political adventurer, of throwing
himself heart and soul into any cause he takes up. He could denounce
South African Concentration Camps or defend the Black-and-Tans with the
same burning eloquence, exactly as he denounced the Black Hundred pogroms
in 1905 and defended Red pogroms in 1918, or as he thundered against
war in 1914 and beat the jingo drum in 1919. Or he might have been
very useful in Russian politics. If, when he summoned the First Duma,
Nicholas the Second had become a genuinely constitutional monarch and
abolished all Jewish disabilities, he might still be on the throne, with
Trotsky as the brilliant head of a Coalition Government.
Trotsky’s Jewish adaptability, to which I have referred above, was
strikingly illustrated one day when he unexpectedly found himself seated
next a Court lady at table. His rough comrades expected to find some
occasion for mirth in their leader’s behaviour on this occasion, but he
acquitted himself with perfect propriety, conversed pleasantly in French
on eminently suitable subjects, and at the end of dinner kissed the
lady’s hand, as the Russian custom is, with all the finished grace of an
old French aristocrat.
The War Minister of the Reds possesses a very exceptional power of
organization, an extraordinarily quick brain, and a marvellous faculty
for mastering in a short time the most difficult and complicated
subjects. Most men find it hard enough to deal with one engrossing
subject at a time, but he switches from one important matter to another
a dozen times in the course of a single day, and comes to a rapid and
generally a right decision each time. Leroy-Beaulieu says that “the
Jewish mind is an instrument of precision; it has the exactness of a pair
of scales”; and Trotsky has all the mental precision and the extreme
intellectuality of his race. Owing to this fact, and to the fact that
he is very ambitious and is endowed with a ruthless physical energy and
a personal bravery which one does not always expect to find in a Jew, I
am doubtful if he will always remain a Bolshevik or will always submit
to the deeper but less agile Lenin. Trotsky in many respects resembles
Lloyd George, whose brilliant work in the Ministry of Munitions is quite
on a par with Trotsky’s brilliant work in the Ministry of War; and I
should not be surprised if, like Lloyd George, he becomes practically a
dictator. He could do so to-morrow if he liked, for he has the Red Army
with him, and his War Office in Moscow is a veritable fortress bristling
with machine-guns and filled with troops who are devoted to him. It must
be remembered that Trotsky never, until 1917, saw eye to eye with Lenin,
who, in 1915, publicly denounced the present head of the Red Army,
on more than one occasion, as a “_bourgeois_ opportunist.” In the 2nd
Social-Democrat Congress, held in 1903, Trotsky opposed Lenin.
If to be a great orator is to have an extraordinary command of language
and gesture, a facility for finding the right word and coining the
perfect phrase, a capacity for leading up to a climax where the audience
holds its breath and you could hear a pin drop, before the roar of
delirious applause greets the last master touch, then Trotsky is a great
orator. His style is necessarily that of Limehouse; and he certainly
finds plenty of material in the capitalist system and in the diplomacy of
Europe for the last two years.
In one of the many speeches he delivered in Ekaterinburg he quoted a
despatch of Lord Curzon in which that statesman considered the question
of acknowledging for a moment not the Government but the existence of the
Bolsheviks, in case the latter mended their manners and respected the
ordinary conventions of international intercourse.
“Ordinary conventions of international intercourse!” quoth Trotsky,
with grim and deliberate emphasis; and then he went on to describe the
troubled period of July, 1918, when the foreign Ambassadors left Moscow.
He said that Mr. Lockhart, then our Consul-General in Moscow, used often
to call on him at that time, and to show great sympathy with him in his
difficulties, but that Captain Sadul of the French Mission warned him
that Lockhart was all this time engaged, with his English and French
colleagues, in a plot to murder Lenin and Trotsky, to blow up railway
bridges which would have meant the starvation of thousands in Petrograd,
to dynamite trains full of soldiers, and to bribe many leaders and
soldiers of the Red Army to desert. “And these are the people,” thundered
Trotsky in conclusion, “who complain that _we_ do not observe all the
niceties of diplomatic etiquette!”
I quote this merely as an example of his style of oratory, which is
logical and adroit, crushing and vitriolic.
I might add that, untrue as the charge against Mr. Lockhart and his
colleagues clearly is, a mass of documents which were afterwards
submitted to me by the Extraordinary Commission in Moscow seemed to
prove that, at various times during the last two years, and especially
on the occasion of Yudenich’s advance on Petrograd, the most widespread
anti-Bolshevik plots were hatched in Russia with the object of bringing
about insurrections and a _coup d’état_, and that the means which some of
the plotters proposed to make use of were as abhorrent to English ideas
as are the means employed at present, according to the Sinn Feiners, by
the English military command in Ireland. But I am sure that if there is
any truth at all in these accusations, which is doubtful, the authors of
these murderous plans drew them up in both cases without the knowledge of
any responsible British authorities. The more desperate of the Russian
Reactionaries are as little scrupulous about their choice of means as
are the Bolsheviks themselves, and others may have been cognizant of
conspiracies whereof we knew nothing.
People so tired of oratory as we are in England can form no conception
of the delight which the Siberian workmen take in hearing plain speaking
about capitalists and kings. They themselves are often political convicts
or the sons of political convicts, and for hundreds of years their
country has been a vast prison where the word “freedom” dare not be
breathed. Nor dare be breathed now, but the yokel does not notice this
in his delight at hearing the volcanic eloquence of the Bolshevik War
Lord, and at seeing the red-capped ex-convict, who makes kings tremble
on their thrones, standing with his foot on the neck of a dead Tsardom
and his hand pointing to the Revolutionary banner overhead. I think that
perhaps Trotsky’s eloquence gained in effectiveness from being addressed
to a simple people extremely fond of the spoken word, and unaccustomed
to such oratorical fireworks as Trotsky treated them to; and perhaps the
phrases which told most were those which they understood least. In all
lands, indeed, it is not the clear and perfectly understood battle-cry,
but the large, vague, beautiful, suggestive phrase which unlooses the
most formidable tempests in the hearts of men. The cries which have
stirred up the most furious storms in Red Russia are as little understood
by the bulk of those who utter them as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwock” is
understood by a child of ten.
Before I leave Trotsky, I might say something about the great object of
his visit to Ekaterinburg, the launching of the grandiose Labour Army
scheme. He launched this scheme in the speech I have already referred to,
and he made it look splendid, the realization of the dreams of mankind
for a thousand years. Soldiers would fight no more. They would work for
the common good. Owing to their discipline and their union, they could
quickly carry out vast enterprises that ordinary workmen would take a
long time to accomplish. But Trotsky had overlooked insuperable practical
difficulties that any Clydeside fitter could have pointed out to him.
How could all the soldiers work together if some were spinners and
others boiler-makers and others belonged to various other trades? It was
proposed that the skilled workmen should be sent each to the particular
factory where his services would be most useful, and that the unskilled
labourers should work all together at shovelling snow and carting
timber. Trotsky would not have this, for it would mean that the skilled
mechanics, who are the backbone of the Red Army and of Bolshevism, would
be separated from the other soldiers, with the result that the Army would
cease to exist as a potential striking force. And he must, he said, have
a potential striking force, for the Japanese might advance from the east
or the English from the south-west. He therefore kept all the troops
together, with the result that, while all the Ural factories were idle,
the men who could have set them going were carting snow and wood. And
they carted snow and wood badly. One of the overseers of the work, a man
who had had great experience in the employment of labour, told me that
it took twenty soldiers to perform a task which three men accustomed to
the work could do better. And, knowing something of how the military life
unsuits one for civilian work, I could quite believe him. Besides, my own
eyes showed me that the whole thing was a farce.
Then, again, Trotsky had declared that the man who deserted from the
Red Labour Army would be treated as a soldier who deserted in front
of the enemy. Did this mean that he was to be shot? The “professional
Unions,” as they are called, also had a word to say about the War Office
monopolizing skilled mechanics who had “done their bit,” and consequently
ceased to be soldiers. To cut a long story short the whole great project
came in the end to nothing, and when I talked to Trotsky about it in
the Kremlin a month afterwards he was rather snappy. By that time he
had given way to the “professional Unions,” had been frightened by the
dissatisfaction of Labour, and disturbed by the criticisms of his grand
idea, which came from England. As far as I know, the whole Labour Army
scheme has now melted away as completely as last winter’s Siberian snows,
amid which it was hatched. All the waste of time and energy which it
involved might have been prevented if Russia had had a free Parliament
and a free Press to discuss it before it had been put into operation.
Trotsky tried to make an army that could both fight and work, but only
succeeded in making for a time an army that could do neither.
I have borne frank testimony in this chapter to Trotsky’s energy,
brilliancy, and tirelessness, but now I hear the rasping voice of the
blunt, matter-of-fact, English critic saying: “This is all very well.
You have given Trotsky a fine character. But what right has he to be
autocratic? What right has he to go rushing about like a Tsar, arresting
workmen without a warrant, suppressing democratic newspapers which
criticize him, and treating people generally as if they were children?”
My reply is: “No right at all.” He belongs to a party which numbers,
according to his own account, 604,000 men, but which has, by a _coup
d’état_, imposed its rule on 125,000,000 Russians. It is carrying out
a policy which 124,396,000 Russians do not believe in and which most
foreign Socialists dislike, and which more than 99 per cent. of the
Russian workmen detest.
That policy has not even the name of Karl Marx to recommend it, for it
is not Marxism. It is the invention of the two men, Lenin and Trotsky,
who issue on their own authority pontifical decrees on the most difficult
questions of government and of social science, and enforce these decrees
by violence and terror. The entire Bolshevik party is fast becoming a
bureaucracy. Only 70,000 of that party are genuine workmen; 36,000 are
party officials; 12,000 are Trade Union and Co-operative officials;
162,000 are military officials and soldiers; 318,000 are officials of
the State and the Municipalities; 6,000 are shopmen. In Moscow there are
100,000 workmen and 230,000 Bolshevik officials, male and female.
The irony of Trotsky’s position is that he leads now the same kind of
life which he denounced others for leading. He is a superman who spends
his day signing papers, presiding over committees, receiving deputations,
just as Stolypin did. His boy is getting a far better education than
any of the common herd, and will, if he and Bolshevism survive, stand
a much better chance of obtaining a good Governmental position when he
comes of age than any of the Bolshevik rank and file, or even than any
scion of our great governing families in this country. Like all the other
Commissars, Trotsky is surrounded by swarms of toadies and place-hunters
for whom he must find “jobs” irrespective of their merit. I found the
keenest competition for the spoils of office going on among the smaller
fry, and several candidates confessed to me that nobody but friends and
relations of the great Commissars stand any chance. About a year ago
Sverdlov, a powerful Commissar, died; and his brother succeeded him
simply because he was his brother: a thing which could hardly happen in
English Cabinet politics.
No, Trotsky has no right at all to dragoon the people of Russia; and
he realizes perfectly well his lack of credentials and the extreme
instability of his position.