Shen, a man of parts, who possessed the gift of drawing and swaying the
multitude. Of agreeable presence, he was resourceful and unscrupulous,
soon became popular, and even captivated the Emperor, Shen Tsung, who
appointed him Minister. He then set about applying his tenets and
realizing his dreams. Wang Ngan Shen began by making commerce and trade
a state monopoly, just as Lenin had done, "in order," he explained, "to
keep the poor from being devoured by the rich." The state was proclaimed
the sole owner of all the wealth of the soil; agricultural overseers
were despatched to each district to distribute the land among the
peasants, each of these receiving as much as he and his family could
cultivate. The peasant obtained also the seed, but this he was obliged
to return to the state after the ingathering of the harvest. The power
of the overseer went farther; it was he who determined what crops the
husbandman might sow and who fixed day by day the price of every salable
commodity in the district. As the state reserved to itself the right to
buy all agricultural produce, it was bound in return to save up a part
of the profits to be used for the benefit of the people in years of
scarcity, and also at other times to be employed in works needed by the
community. Wang Ngan Shen also ordained that only the wealthy should pay
taxes, the proceeds of which were to be employed in relieving the wants
of the poor, the old, and the unemployed. The theory was smooth and
attractive.
For over thirty years those laws are said to have remained in force, at
any rate on paper. To what extent they were carried out is
problematical. Probably a beginning was actually made, for during Wang's
tenure of office confusion was worse confounded than before, and misery
more intense and widespread. The opposition to his régime increased,
spread, and finally got the upper hand. Wang Ngan Shen was banished,
together with those of his partizans who refused to accept the return to
the old system. Such would appear to have been the first appearance of
Bolshevism recorded in history.
Another less complete parallel, not to the Bolshevist theory, but to the
plight of the country which it ruined, may be found in the Chinese
rebellion organized in the year 1850 by a peasant[285] who, having
become a Christian, fancied himself called by God to regenerate his
people. He accordingly got together a band of stout-hearted fellows whom
he fanaticized, disciplined, and transformed into the nucleus of a
strong army to which brigands, outlaws, and malcontents of every social
layer afterward flocked. They overran the Yangtse Valley, invaded twelve
of the richest provinces, seized six hundred cities and towns, and put
an end to twenty million people in the space of twelve years by fire,
sword, and famine.[286] To this bloody expedition Hung Sew Tseuen, a
master of modern euphemism, gave the name of Crusade of the Great Peace.
For twelve years this "Crusade" lasted, and it might have endured much
longer had it not been for the help given by outsiders. It was there
that "Chinese" Gordon won his laurels and accomplished a beneficent
work.
There were politicians at the Conference who argued that Russia, being
in a position analogous to that of China in 1854, ought, like her, to be
helped by the Great Powers. It was, they held, quite as much in the
interests of Europe as in hers. But however forcible their arguments,
they encountered an insurmountable obstacle in the fear entertained by
the chiefs of the leading governments lest the extreme oppositional
parties in their respective countries should make capital out of the
move and turn them out of office. They invoked the interests of the
cause of which they were the champions for declining to expose
themselves to any such risk. It has been contended with warmth, and
possibly with truth, that if at the outset the Great Powers had
intervened they might with a comparatively small army have crushed
Bolshevism and re-established order in Russia. On the other hand, it was
objected that even heavy guns will not destroy ideas, and that the main
ideas which supplied the revolutionary movement with vital force were
too deeply rooted to have been extirpated by the most formidable foreign
army. That is true. But these ideas were not especially characteristic
of Bolshevism. Far from that, they were incompatible with it: the
bestowal of land on the peasants, an equitable reform of the relations
between workmen and employers, and the abolition of the hereditary
principle in the distribution of everything that confers an unfair
advantage on the individual or the class are certainly not postulates of
Lenin's party. It is a tenable proposition that timely military
assistance would have enabled the constructive elements of Russia to
restore conditions of normal life, but the worth of timeliness was never
realized by the heads of the governments who undertook to make laws for
the world. They ignored the maxim that a statesman, when applying
measures, must keep his eye on the clock, inasmuch as the remedy which
would save a nation at one moment may hasten its ruin at another.
The expedients and counter-expedients to which the Conference had
recourse in their fitful struggles with Bolshevism were so many
surprises to every one concerned, and were at times redolent of comedy.
But what was levity and ignorance on the part of the delegates meant
death, and worse than death, to tens of thousands of their protégées. In
Russia their agents zealously egged on the order-loving population to
rise up against the Bolsheviki and attack their strong positions,
promising them immediate military help if they succeeded. But when,
these exploits having been duly achieved, the agents were asked how soon
the foreign reinforcements might be expected, they replied, calling for
patience. After a time the Bolsheviki assailed the temporary victors,
generally defeated them, and then put a multitude of defenseless people
to the sword. Deplorable incidents of this nature, which are said to
have occurred several times during the spring of 1919, shook the credit
of the Allies, and kindled a feeling of just resentment among all
classes of Russians.
FOOTNOTES:
[273] In the _Biessy_ (Devils).
[274] _Russian Characteristics_, by E.B. Lanin (Eblanin, a Russian word
which means native of Dublin, Eblana).
[275] Educational reforms have been mentioned among its achievements and
attributed to Lunatcharsky. That he exerted himself to spread elementary
instruction must be admitted. But this progress and the effective
protection and encouragement which he has undoubtedly extended to arts
and sciences would seem to exhaust the list of items in the credit
account of the Bolshevist régime.
[276] _Frankfurter Zeitung_, February 28, 1919.
[277] A succinct but interesting study of this question appeared in the
_Handels-Zeitung_ of the _Berliner Tageblatt_, over the signature of Dr.
Felix Pinner, July 20, 1918.
[278] Cf. _Bonsoir_, July 29, 1919. The price was not fixed, but the
minimum was specified. It was one hundred thousand kronen.
[279] Cf. _Der Tag_, Vienna, August 13, 1919. _L'Echo de Paris_, August
15, 1919.
[280] By Dr. F. Pinner, H. Vorst, and others.
[281] The condemned man is tied to a post or a cross, his mouth gagged,
and the execution is made to last several hours. It usually begins with
a slit on the forehead and the pulling down of the skin toward the chin.
After the lapse of a certain time the nose is severed from the face. An
interval follows, then an ear is lopped off, and so the devilish work
goes on with long pauses. The skill of the executioner is displayed in
the length of time during which the victim remains conscious.
[282] Cf. _Le Figaro_, February 18, 1919.
[283] I do not suggest that these crimes were ordered by Lenin. But it
will not be gainsaid that neither he nor his colleagues punished the
mass murderers or even protested against their crimes. Neither can it be
maintained that massacres were confined to any one party.
[284] This pre-Bolshevist movement is described in an interesting study
on the socialist movement and systems, down to the year 1848, by El.
Luzatto. Cf. _Der Bund_, August 16, 1918.
[285] Hung Sew Tseuen. The rebellion lasted from 1850 to 1864.
[286] The superb city of Nankin, with its temples and porcelain towers,
was destroyed.
XII
HOW BOLSHEVISM WAS FOSTERED
The Allies, then, might have solved the Bolshevist problem by making up
their minds which of the two alternative politics--war against, or
tolerance of, Bolshevism--they preferred, and by taking suitable action
in good time. If they had handled the Russian tangle with skill and
repaid a great sacrifice with a small one before it was yet too late,
they might have hoped to harvest in abundant fruits in the fullness of
time. But they belonged to the class of the undecided, whose members
continually suffer from the absence of a middle word between yes and no,
connoting what is neither positive nor negative. They let the
opportunity slip. Not only did they withhold timely succor to either
side, but they visited some of the most loyal Russians in western Europe
with the utmost rigor of coercion laws. They hounded them down as
enemies. They cooped them up in cages as though they were Teuton
enemies. They encircled them with barbed wire. They kept many of them
hungry and thirsty, deprived them of life's necessaries for days, and in
some cases reduced the discontented--and who in their place would not be
discontented?--to pick their food in dustbins among garbage and refuse.
I have seen officers and men in France who had shed their blood joyfully
for the Entente cause gradually converted to Bolshevism by the misdeeds
of the Allied authorities. In whose interests? With what helpful
results?
I watched the development of anti-Ententism among those Russians with
painful interest, and in favorable conditions for observation, and I say
without hesitation that rancor against the Allies burns as vehemently
and intensely among the anti-Bolshevists as among their adversaries. "My
country as a whole is bitterly hostile to her former allies," exclaimed
an eminent Russian, "for as soon as she had rendered them inestimable
services, at the cost of her political existence, they turned their
backs upon her as though her agony were no affair of theirs. To-day the
nation is divided on many issues. Dissensions and quarrels have riven
and shattered it into shreds. But in one respect Russia is still
united--in the vehemence of her sentiment toward the Allies, who first
drained her life-blood and then abandoned her prostrate body to beasts
of prey. Some part of the hatred engendered might have been mitigated if
representatives of the provisional Russian government had been admitted
to the Conference. A statesman would have insisted upon opening at least
this little safety-valve. It would have helped and could not have harmed
the Allies. It would have bound the Russians to them. For Russia's
delegates, the men sent or empowered by Kolchak and his colleagues to
represent them, would have been the exponents of a helpless community
hovering between life and death. They could and would have gone far
toward conciliating the world-dictators, to whose least palatable
decisions they might have hesitated to offer unbending opposition. And
this acquiescence, however provisional, would have tended to relieve the
Allies of a sensible part of their load of responsibility. It would also
have linked the Russians, loosely, perhaps, but perceptibly, to the
Western Powers. It would have imparted a settled Ententophil direction
to Kolchak's policy, and communicated it to the nation. In short, it
might have dispelled some of the storm-clouds that are gathering in the
east of Europe."
But the Allies, true to their wont of drifting, put off all decisive
action, and let things slip and slide, for the Germans to put in order.
There were no Russians, therefore, at the Conference, and there lies no
obligation on any political group or party in the anarchist Slav state
to hold to the Allies. But it would be an error to imagine that they
have a white sheet of paper on which to trace their line of action and
write the names of France and Britain as their future friends. They are
filled with angry disgust against these two ex-Allies, and of the two
the feeling against France is especially intense.[287]
It is a truism to repeat in a different form what Messrs. Lloyd George
and Wilson repeatedly affirmed, but apparently without realizing what
they said: that the peace which they regard as the crowning work of
their lives deserves such value as it may possess from the assumption
that Russia, when she recovers from her cataleptic fit, will be the ally
of the Powers that have dismembered her. If this postulate should prove
erroneous, Germany may form an anti-Allied league of a large number of
nations which it would be invidious to enumerate here. But it is
manifest that this consummation would imperil Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and Jugoslavia, and sweep away the last vestiges of the peace
settlement. And although it would be rash to make a forecast of the
policy which new Russia will strike out, it would be impolitic to blink
the conclusions toward which recent events significantly point.
In April a Russian statesman said to me: "The Allied delegates are
unconsciously thrusting from them the only means by which they can still
render peace durable and a fellowship of the nations possible.
Unwittingly they are augmenting the forces of Bolshevism and raising
political enemies against themselves. Consider how they are behaving
toward us. Recently a number of Russian prisoners escaped from Germany
to Holland, whereupon the Allied representatives packed them off by
force and against their will to Dantzig, to be conveyed thence to Libau,
where they have become recruits of the Bolshevist Red Guards. Those men
might have been usefully employed in the Allied countries, to whose
cause they were devoted, but so exasperated were they at their forcible
removal to Libau that many of them declared that they would join the
Bolshevist forces.
"Even our official representatives are seemingly included in the
category of suspects. Our Minister in Peking was refused the right of
sending ciphered telegrams and our chargé d'affaires in a European
capital suffered the same deprivation, while the Bolshevist envoy
enjoyed this diplomatic privilege. A councilor of embassy in one Allied
country was refused a passport visa for another until he declared that
if the refusal were upheld he would return a high order which for
extraordinary services he had received from the government whose embassy
was vetoing his visa. On the national festival of a certain Allied
country the chargé d'affaires of Russia was the only member of the
diplomatic corps who received no official invitation."
One day in January, when a crowd had gathered on the Quai d'Orsay,
watching the delegates from the various countries--British, American,
Italian, Japanese, Rumanian, etc.--enter the stately palace to safeguard
the interests of their respective countries and legislate for the human
race, a Russian officer passed, accompanied by an illiterate soldier who
had seen hard service first under the Grand Duke Nicholas, and then in a
Russian brigade in France. The soldier gazed wistfully at the palace,
then, turning to the officer, asked, "Are they letting any of our people
in there?" The officer answered, evasively: "They are thinking it over.
Perhaps they will." Whereupon his attendant blurted out: "Thinking it
over! What thinking is wanted? Did we not fight for them till we were
mowed down like grass? Did not millions of Russian bodies cover the
fields, the roads, and the camps? Did we not face the German great guns
with only bayonets and sticks? Have we done too little for them? What
more could we have done to be allowed in there with the others? I fought
since the war began, and was twice wounded. My five brothers were called
up at the same time as myself, and all five have been killed, and now
the Russians are not wanted! The door is shut in our faces...."
Sooner or later Russian anarchy, like that of China, will come to an
end, and the leaders charged with the reconstitution of the country, if
men of knowledge, patriotism, and character, will adopt a program
conducive to the well-being of the nation. To what extent, one may ask,
is its welfare compatible with the _status quo_ in eastern Europe, which
the Allies, distracted by conflicting principles and fitful impulse,
left or created and hope to perpetuate by means of a parchment
instrument?
The zeal with which the French authorities went to work to prevent the
growth of Bolshevism in their country, especially among the Russians
there, is beyond dispute. Unhappily it proved inefficacious. Indeed, it
is no exaggeration to say that it defeated its object and produced the
contrary effect. For attention was so completely absorbed by the aim
that no consideration remained over for the means of attaining it. A few
concrete examples will bring this home to the reader. The following
narratives emanate from an eminent Russian, who is devoted to the
Allies.
There were scores of thousands of Russian troops in France. Most of them
fought valiantly, others half-heartedly, and a few refused to fight at
all. But instead of making distinctions the French authorities, moved by
the instinct of self-preservation, and preferring prevention to cure,
tarred them all with the same brush. "Give a dog a bad name and hang
him," says the proverb, and it was exemplified in the case of the
Russians, who soon came to be regarded as a _tertium quid_ between
enemies of public order and suspicious neutrals. They were profoundly
mistrusted. Their officers were deprived of their authority over their
own men and placed under the command of excellent French officers, who
cannot be blamed for not understanding the temper of the Slavs nor for
rubbing them against the grain. The privates, seeing their superiors
virtually degraded, concluded that they had forfeited their claim to
respect, and treated them accordingly. That gave the death-blow to
discipline. The officers, most of whom were devoted heart and soul to
the cause of the Allies, with which they had fondly identified their
own, lost heart. After various attempts to get themselves reinstated,
their feelings toward the nation, which was nowise to blame for the
excessive zeal of its public servants, underwent a radical change.
Blazing indignation consumed whatever affection they had originally
nurtured for the French, and in many cases also for the other Allies,
and they went home to communicate their animus to their countrymen. The
soldiers, who now began to be taunted and vilipended as Boches, threw
all discipline to the winds and, feeling every hand raised against them,
resolved to raise their hands against every man. These were the
beginnings of the process of "bolshevization."
This anti-Russian spirit grew intenser as time lapsed. Thousands of
Russian soldiers were sent out to work for private employers, not by the
War Ministry, but by the Ministry of Agriculture, under whom they were
placed. They were fed and paid a wage which under normal circumstances
should have contented them, for it was more than they used to receive in
pre-war days in their own country. But the circumstances were not
normal. Side by side with them worked Frenchmen, many of whom were
unable physically to compete with the sturdy peasants from Perm and
Vyatka. And when propagandists pointed out to them that the French
worker was paid 100 per cent. more, they brooded over the inequality and
labeled it as they were told. For overwork, too, the rate of pay was
still more unequal. One result of this differential treatment was the
estrangement of the two races as represented by the two classes of
workmen, and the growth of mutual dislike. But there was another. When
they learned, as they did in time, that the employer was selling the
produce of their labor at a profit of 400 and 500 per cent., they had no
hesitation about repeating the formulas suggested to them by socialist
propagandists: "We are working for bloodsuckers. The bourgeois must be
exterminated." In this way bitterness against the Allies and hatred of
the capitalists were inculcated in tens of thousands of Russians who a
few months before were honest, simple-minded peasants and
well-disciplined soldiers. Many of these men, when they returned to
their country, joined the Red Guards of Bolshevism with spontaneous
ardor. They needed no pressing.
There was one young officer of the Guards, in particular, named G----,
who belonged to a very good family and was an exceptionally cultured
gentleman. Music was his recreation, and he was a virtuoso on the
violin. In the war he had distinguished himself first on the Russian
front and then on the French. He had given of his best, for he was
grievously wounded, had his left hand paralyzed, and lost his power of
playing the violin forever. He received a high decoration from the
French government. For the English nation he professed and displayed
great affection, and in particular he revered King George, perhaps
because of his physical resemblance to the Tsar. And when King George
was to visit Paris he rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect of seeing
him. Orders were issued for the troops to come out and line the
principal routes along which the monarch would pass. The French
naturally had the best places, but the Place de l'Étoile was reserved
for the Allied forces. G----, delighted, went to his superior officer
and inquired where the Russians were to stand. The general did not know,
but promised to ascertain. Accordingly he put the question to the French
commander, who replied: "Russian troops? There is no place for any
Russian troops." With tears in his eyes G---- recounted this episode,
adding: "We, who fought and bled, and lost our lives or were crippled,
had to swallow this humiliation, while Poles and Czechoslovaks, who had
only just arrived from America in their brand-new uniforms, and had
never been under fire, had places allotted to them in the pageant. Is
that fair to the troops without whose exploits there would have been no
Polish or Czechoslovak officers, no French victory, no triumphal entry
of King George V into Paris?"
FOOTNOTE:
[287] It is right to say that during the summer months a considerable
section of the anti-Bolshevists modified their view of Britain's policy,
and expressed gratitude for the aid bestowed on Kolchak, Denikin, and
Yudenitch, without which their armies would have collapsed.
XIII
SIDELIGHTS ON THE TREATY