the Russian welter, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the
other, are unfruitful and often misleading. It is true that at the
outset those spasms of delirium were in both cases violent reactions
against abuses grown well-nigh unbearable. It is also a fact that the
revolutionists derived their preterhuman force from historic events
which had either denuded those abuses of their secular protection or
inspired their victims with wonder-working faith in their power to sweep
them away. But after this initial stage the likeness vanishes. The
French Revolution, which extinguished feudalism as a system and the
nobility as a privileged class, speedily ceased to be a mere dissolvent.
In its latter phases it assumed a constructive character. Incidentally
it created much that was helpful in substance if not beautiful in form,
and from the beginning it adopted a positive doctrine as old as
Christianity, but new in its application to the political sphere. Thus,
although it uprooted quantities of wheat together with the tares, its
general effect was to prepare the ground for a new harvest. It had a
distinctly social purpose, which it partially realized. Nor should it
be forgotten that in the psychological sphere it kindled a transient
outburst of quasi-religious enthusiasm among its partizans, imbued them
with apostolic zeal, inspired them with a marvelous spirit of
self-abnegation, and nerved their arms to far-resonant exploits. And the
forces which the revolution thus set free changed many of the forms of
the European world, but without reshaping it after the image of the
ideal.
Has the withering blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits
to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present
moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every
region over which it swept is blocked with heaps of unsightly ruins, It
has depreciated all moral values. It passed like a tornado, spending its
energies in demolition. Of construction hardly a trace has been
discerned, even by indulgent explorers.[275] One might liken it to a
so-called possession by the spirit of evil, wont of yore to use the
human organs as his own for words of folly and deeds of iniquity.
Bolshevism has operated uniformly as a quick solvent of the social
organism. Doubtless European society in 1917 sorely needed purging by
drastic means, but only a fanatic would say that it deserved
annihilation.
It has been variously affirmed that the political leaven of these
destructive ferments in eastern and central Europe was wholesome. Slavs
and Germans, it is argued, stung by the bankruptcy of their political
systems, resolved to alter them on the lines of universal suffrage and
its corollaries, but were carried farther than they meant to go. This
mild judgment is based on a very partial survey of the phenomena. The
improvement in question was the work, not of the Bolshevists, but of
their adversaries, the moderate reformers. And the political strivings
of these had no organic nexus with the doctrine which emanated from the
nethermost depths in which vengeful pariahs, outlaws, and benighted
nihilists were floundering before suffocating in the ooze of anarchism.
Neither can one discern any degree of kinship between Spartacists like
Eichhorn or Lenin and moderate reformers as represented, say, by Theodor
Wolff and Boris Savinkoff. The two pairs are sundered from each other by
the distance that separates the social and the anti-social instinct.
Those are vulgar iconoclasts, these are would-be world-builders. That
the Russian, or, indeed, the German constitutional reformers should have
hugged the delusion that while thrones were being hurled to the ground,
and an epoch was passing away in violent convulsions, a few alterations
in the electoral law would restore order and bring back normal
conditions to the agonizing nations, is an instructive illustration of
the blurred vision which characterizes contemporary statesmen. The
Anglo-Saxon delegates at the Conference were under a similar delusion
when they undertook to regenerate the world by a series of merely
political changes.
No one who has followed attentively the work of the constitution-makers
in Weimar can have overlooked their readiness to adopt and assimilate
the positive elements of a movement which was essentially destructive.
In this respect they displayed a remarkable degree of open-mindedness
and receptivity. They showed themselves avid of every contribution which
they could glean from any source to the work of national reorganization,
and even in Teutonized Bolshevism they apparently found helpful hints of
timely innovations. One may safely hazard the prediction that these
adaptations, however little they may be relished, are certain to spread
to the Western peoples, who will be constrained to accept them in the
long run, and Germany may end by becoming the economic leader of
democratic Europe. The law of politico-social interchange and
assimilation underlying this phenomenon, had it been understood by the
statesmen of the Entente, might have rendered them less desirous of
seeing the German organism tainted with the germs of dissolution. For
what Germany borrows from Bolshevism to-day western Europe will borrow
from Germany to-morrow. And foremost among the new institutions which
the revolution will impose upon Europe is that of the Soviets,
considerably modified in form and limited in functions.
"In the conception of the Soviet system," writes the most influential
Jewish-German organ in Europe, "there is assuredly something
serviceable, and it behooves us to familiarize ourselves therewith.
Psychologically, it rests upon the need felt by the working-man to be
something more than a mere cog in the industrial mechanism. The first
step would consist in conferring upon labor committees juridical
functions consonant with latter-day requirements. These functions would
extend beyond those exercised by the labor committees hitherto. How far
they could go without rendering the industrial enterprise impossible is
a matter for investigation.... This is not merely a wish of the
extremists; it is a psychological requirement, and therefore it
necessitates the establishment of a closer nexus between legislation and
practical life which unhappily is become so complicated. And this need
is not confined to the laboring class. It is universal. Therefore, what
is good for the one is meet for the other."[276]
The Soviet system adapted to modern existence is one--and probably the
sole--legacy of Bolshevism to the new age.
During the Peace Conference Bolshevism played a large part in the
world's affairs. By some of the eminent lawgivers there it was feared as
a scourge; by others it was wielded as a weapon, and by a third set it
was employed as a threat. Whenever a delegate of one of the lesser
states felt that he was losing ground at the Peace Table, and that his
country's demands were about to be whittled down as extravagant, he
would point significantly to certain "foretokens" of an outbreak of
Bolshevism in his country and class them as an inevitable consequence of
the nation's disappointment. Thus the representative of nearly every
state which had a territorial program declared that that program must be
carried out if Bolshevism was to be averted there. "This or else
Bolshevism" was the peroration of many a delegate's _exposé_. More
redoubtable than political discontent was the proselytizing activity of
the leaders of the movement in Russia.
Of the two pillars of Bolshevism one is a Russian, the other a Jew, the
former, Ulianoff (better known as Lenin), the brain; the other,
Braunstein (called Trotzky), the arm of the sect. Trotzky is an
unscrupulous despot, in whose veins flows the poison of malignity. His
element is cruelty, his special gift is organizing capacity. Lenin is a
Utopian, whose fanaticism, although extensive, has well-defined limits.
In certain things he disagrees profoundly with Trotzky. He resembles a
religious preacher in this, that he created a body of veritable
disciples around himself. He might be likened to a pope with a college
of international cardinals. Thus he has French, British, German,
Austrian, Czech, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese,
Buryat, and many other followers, who are chiefs of proselytizing
sections charged with the work of spreading the Bolshevik evangel
throughout the globe, and are working hard to discharge their duties.
Lenin, however, dissatisfied with the measures of success already
attained, is constantly stimulating his disciples to more strenuous
exertions. He shares with other sectarian chiefs who have played a
prominent part in the world's history that indefinable quality which
stirs emotional susceptibility and renders those who approach him more
easily accessible to ideas toward which they began by manifesting
repugnance. Lenin is credibly reported to have made several converts
among his Western opponents.
The plenipotentiaries, during the first four months, approached
Bolshevism from a single direction, unvaried by the events which it
generated or the modifications which it underwent. They tested it solely
by its accidental bearings on the one aim which they were intent on
securing--a formal and provisional resettlement of Europe capable of
being presented to their respective parliaments as a fair achievement.
With its real character, its manifold corollaries, its innovating
tendencies over the social, political, and ethnical domain, they were
for the time being unconcerned. Without the slightest reference to any
of these considerations they were ready to find a place for it in the
new state system with which they hoped to endow the world. More than
once they were on the point of giving it official recognition. There was
no preliminary testing, sifting, or examining by these empiricists, who,
finding Bolshevism on their way, and discerning no facile means of
dislodging or transforming it, signified their willingness under easy
conditions to hallmark and incorporate it as one of the elements of the
new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to
make abstraction. The barbarous methods to which it owed its very
existence they were willing to consign to oblivion. And it was only a
freak of circumstance that hindered this embodiment of despotism from
beginning one of their accepted means of rendering the world safe for
democracy.
Political students outside the Conference, going farther into the
matter, inquired whether there was any kernel of truth in the doctrines
of Lenin, any social or political advantage in the practices of
Braunstein (Trotzky), and the conclusions which they reached were
negative.[277] But inquiries of this theoretical nature awakened no
interest among the empiricists of the Supreme Council. For them
Bolshevism meant nothing more than a group of politicians, who directed,
or misdirected, but certainly represented the bulk of the Russian
people, and who, if won over and gathered under the cloak of the
Conference, would facilitate its task and bear witness to its triumph.
This inference, drawn by keen observers from many countries and parties,
is borne out by the curious admissions and abortive acts of the
principal plenipotentiaries themselves.
In its milder manifestations on the social side Russian Bolshevism
resembles communism, and may be described as a social revolution
effected by depriving one set of people--the ruling and intelligent
class--of power, property, and civil rights, putting another and less
qualified section in their place, and maintaining the top-heavy
structure by force ruthlessly employed. Far-reaching though this change
undoubtedly is, it has no nexus with Marxism or kindred theories. Its
proximate causes were many: such, for example, as the breakdown of a
tyrannical system of government, state indebtedness so vast that it
swallowed up private capital, the depreciation of money, and the
corresponding appreciation of labor. It is fair, therefore, to say that
a rise in the cost of production and the temporary substitution of one
class for another mark the extent to which political forces
revolutionized the social fabric. Beyond these limits they did not go.
The notion had been widespread in most countries, and deep-rooted in
Russia, that a political upheaval would effect a root-reaching and
lasting alteration in the forces of social development. It was adopted
by Lenin, a fanatic of the Robespierre type, but far superior to
Robespierre in will-power, insight, resourcefulness, and sincerity, who,
having seized the reins of power, made the experiment.
It is no easy matter to analyze Lenin's economic policy, because of the
veil of mist that conceals so much of Russian contemporary history. Our
sources are confined to the untrustworthy statements of a censored press
and travelers' tales.
But it is common knowledge that the Bolshevist dictator requisitioned
and "nationalized" the banks, took factories, workshops, and plants from
their owners and handed them over to the workmen, deprived landed
proprietors of their estates, and allowed peasants to appropriate them.
It is in the matter of industry, however, that his experiment is most
interesting as showing the practical value of Marxism as a policy and
the ability of the Bolsheviki to deal with delicate social problems. The
historic decree issued by the Moscow government on the nationalization
of industry after the opening experiment had broken down contains data
enough to enable one to affirm that Lenin himself judged Marxism
inapplicable even to Russia, and left it where he had found it--among
the ideals of a millennial future. That ukase ordered the gradual
nationalization of all private industries with a capital of not less
than one million rubles, but allowed the owners to enjoy the gratuitous
usufruct of the concern, provided that they financed and carried it on
as before. Consequently, although in theory the business was transferred
to the state, in reality the capitalist retained his place and his
profits as under the old system. Consequently, the principal aims of
socialism, which are the distribution of the proceeds of industry among
the community and the retention of a certain surplus by the state, were
missed. In the Bolshevist procedure the state is wholly eliminated
except for the purpose of upholding a fiction. It receives nothing from
the capitalist, not even a royalty.
The Slav is a dreamer whose sense of the real is often defective. He
loses himself in vague generalities and pithless abstractions. Thus,
before opening a school he will spin out a theory of universal
education, and then bemoan his lack of resources to realize it. True,
many of the chiefs of the sect--for it is undoubtedly a sect when it is
not a criminal conspiracy, and very often it is both--were not Slavs,
but Jews, who, for the behoof of their kindred, dropped their Semitic
names and adopted sonorous Slav substitutes. But they were most
unscrupulous peculators, incapable of taking an interest in the
scientific aspect of such matters, and hypnotized by the dreams of lucre
which the opportunity evoked. One has only to call to mind some of the
shabby transactions in which the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, Kuhn, or
Cohen, and Braunstein (Trotzky) of Petrograd, took an active part. The
former is said to have offered for sale the historic crown of St.
Stephen of Hungary--which to him was but a plain gold headgear adorned
with precious stones and a jeweled cross--to an old curiosity dealer of
Munich,[278] and when solemnly protesting that he was living only for
the Soviet Republic and was ready to die for it, he was actively
engaged in smuggling out of Hungary into Switzerland fifty million
kronen bonds, thirty-five kilograms of gold, and thirty chests filled
with objects of value.[279] His colleague Szamuelly's plunder is a
matter of history.
To such adventurers as those science is a drug. They are primitive
beings impressible mainly to concrete motives of the barest kind. The
dupes of Lenin were people of a different type. Many of them fancied
that the great political clash must inevitably result in an equally
great and salutary social upheaval. This assumption has not been borne
out by events.
Those fanatics fell into another error; they were in a hurry, and would
fain have effected their great transformation as by the waving of a
magician's wand. Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the
distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way
of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away
all hindrances regardless of consequences. In this spirit of absolutism
they abolished the services of the national debt, struck out the claims
of Russia's creditors to their capital or interest, and turned the shops
and factories over to labor boards. That was the initial blunder which
the ukase alluded to was subsequently issued to rectify. But it was too
late. The equilibrium of the forces of production had been definitely
upset and could no longer be righted.
One of the basic postulates of profitable production is the equilibrium
of all its essential factors--such as the laborer's wages, the cost of
the machinery and the material, the administration. Bring discord into
the harmony and the entire mechanism is out of gear.
The Russian workman, who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old
roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his
neighbor and none at all for his employer. "God Himself commands us to
despoil such gentry," is one of his sayings. He is in a hurry to enrich
himself, and he cares about nothing else. Nor can he realize that to
beggar his neighbors is to impoverish himself. Hence he always takes and
never gives; as a peasant he destroys the forests, hewing trees and
planting none, and robs the soil of its fertility. On analogous lines he
would fain deal with the factories, exacting exorbitant wages that eat
up all profit, and naïvely expecting the owner to go on paying them as
though he were the trustee of a fund for enriching the greedy. The only
people to profit by the system, and even they only transiently, were the
manual laborers. The bulk of the skilled, intelligent, and educated
artisans were held up to contempt and ostracized, or killed as an odious
aristocracy. That, it has been aptly pointed out,[280] is far removed
from Marxism. The Marxist doctrine postulates the adhesion of
intelligent workers to the social revolution, whereas the Russian
experimenters placed them in the same category as the capitalists, the
aristocrats, and treated them accordingly. Another Marxist postulate not
realized in Russia was that before the state could profitably proceed to
nationalization the country must have been in possession of a
well-organized, smooth-running industrial mechanism. And this was
possible only in those lands in which capitalism had had a long and
successful innings, not in the great Slav country of husbandmen.
By way of glozing over these incongruities Lenin's ukase proclaimed that
the measures enacted were only provisional, and aimed at enabling Russia
to realize the great transformation by degrees. But the impression
conveyed by the history of the social side of Lenin's activity is that
Marxism, whether as understood by its author or as interpreted and
twisted by its Russian adherents, has been tried and found
impracticable. One is further warranted in saying that neither the
visionary workers who are moved by misdirected zeal for social
improvement nor the theorists who are constantly on the lookout for new
and stimulating ideas are likely to discover in Russian Bolshevism any
aspect but the one alluded to above worthy of their serious
consideration.
A much deeper mark was made on the history of the century by its
methods.
Compared with the soul-searing horrors let loose during the Bolshevist
fit of frenzy, the worst atrocities recorded of Deputy Carrier and his
noyades during the French Revolution were but the freaks of
compassionate human beings. In Bolshevist Russia brutality assumed forms
so monstrous that the modern man of the West shrinks from conjuring up a
faint picture of them in imagination. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of
thousands were done to death in hellish ways by the orders of men and of
women. Eyes were gouged out, ears hacked off, arms and legs torn from
the body in presence of the victims' children or wives, whose agony was
thus begun before their own turn came. Men and women and infants were
burned alive. Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the
awful torture of the "thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs
broken and were left for hours in agonies. Many victims are credibly
reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down
to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the
nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome
picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a
level with the _noyades_ of Nantes. I have seen several moving
descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from
the pen of a French marine officer:
"We have two armed cruisers outside Odessa. A few weeks ago one of them,
having an investigation to make, sent a diver down to the bottom. A few
minutes passed and the alarm signal was heard. He was hauled up and
quickly relieved of his accoutrements. He had fainted away. When he came
to, his teeth were chattering and the only articulate sounds that could
be got from him were the words: 'It is horrible! It is awful!' A second
diver was then lowered, with the same procedure and a like result.
Finally a third was chosen, this time a sturdy lad of iron nerves, and
sent down to the bottom of the sea. After the lapse of a few minutes the
same thing happened as before, and the man was brought up. This time,
however, there was no fainting fit to record. On the contrary, although
pale with terror, he was able to state that he had beheld the sea-bed
peopled with human bodies standing upright, which the swaying of the
water, still sensible at this shallow depth, softly rocked as though
they were monstrous algæ, their hair on end bristling vertically, and
their arms raised toward the surface.... All these corpses, anchored to
the bottom by the weight of stones, took on an appearance of eerie life
resembling, one might say, a forest of trees moved from side to side by
the wind and eager to welcome the diver come down among them.... There
were, he added, old men, children numerous beyond count, so that one
could but compare them to the trees of a forest."[282]
From published records it is known that the Bolshevist thugs, when
tired of using the rifle, the machine-gun, the cord, and the bayonet,
expedited matters by drowning their victims by hundreds in the Black
Sea, in the Gulf of Finland, and in the great rivers. Submarine
cemeteries was the name given to these last resting-places of some of
Russia's most high-minded sons and daughters.[283] It is not in the
French Revolution that those deeds of wanton destruction and revolting
cruelty which are indissolubly associated with Bolshevism find a
parallel, but in Chinese history, which offers a striking and curious
prefiguration of the Leninist structure.[284] Toward the middle of the
tenth century, when the empire was plunged in dire confusion, a mystical
sect was formed there for the purpose of destroying by force every
vestige of the traditional social fabric, and establishing a system of
complete equality without any state organization whatever, after the
manner advocated by Leo Tolstoy. Some of the dicta of these sectarians
have a decidedly Bolshevist flavor. This, for example: "Society rests
upon law, property, religion, and force. But law is injustice and
chicane; property is robbery and extortion; religion is untruth, and
force is iniquity." In those days Chinese political parties were at
strife with each other, and none of them scorned any means, however
brutal, to worst its adversaries, but for a long while they were divided
among themselves and without a capable chief.