complete disorder. He described hold-ups in open daylight in busy
streets, dead bodies lying for hours in the gutter—as a dead kitten
might do in a western town—while crowds went about their business along
the sidewalk.
Through this fevered and confused country went the representatives of
Britain and France, blind to the quality of the immense and tragic
disaster about them, intent only upon _the_ war, badgering the Russians
to keep on fighting and make a fresh offensive against Germany. But when
the Germans made a strong thrust towards Petersburg through the Baltic
provinces and by sea, the British Admiralty, either through sheer
cowardice or through Royalist intrigues, failed to give any effectual
help to Russia. Upon this matter the evidence of the late Lord Fisher is
plain. And so this unhappy country, mortally sick and, as it were,
delirious, staggered towards a further stage of collapse.
From end to end of Russia, and in the Russian-speaking community
throughout the world, there existed only one sort of people who had
common general ideas upon which to work, a common faith and a common
will, and that was the Communist party. While all the rest of Russia was
either apathetic like the peasantry or garrulously at sixes and sevens
or given over to violence or fear, the Communists believed and were
prepared to act. Numerically they were and are a very small part of the
Russian population. At the present time not one per cent. of the people
in Russia are Communists; the organised party certainly does not number
more than 600,000 and has probably not much more than 150,000 active
members. Nevertheless, because it was in those terrible days the only
organisation which gave men a common idea of action, common formulæ, and
mutual confidence, it was able to seize and retain control of the
smashed empire. It was and it is the only sort of administrative
solidarity possible in Russia. These ambiguous adventurers who have been
and are afflicting Russia, with the support of the Western Powers,
Deniken, Kolchak, Wrangel and the like, stand for no guiding principle
and offer no security of any sort upon which men’s confidence can
crystallise. They are essentially brigands. The Communist party, however
one may criticise it, does embody an idea and can be relied upon to
stand by its idea. So far it is a thing morally higher than anything
that has yet come against it. It at once secured the passive support of
the peasant mass by permitting them to take land from the estates and by
making peace with Germany. It restored order—after a frightful lot of
shooting—in the great towns. For a time everybody found carrying arms
without authority was shot. This action was clumsy and bloody but
effective. To retain its power this Communist Government organised
Extraordinary Commissions, with practically unlimited powers, and
crushed out all opposition by a Red Terror. Much that that Red Terror
did was cruel and frightful, it was largely controlled by narrow-minded
men, and many of its officials were inspired by social hatred and the
fear of counter-revolution, but if it was fanatical it was honest. Apart
from individual atrocities it did on the whole kill for a reason and to
an end. Its bloodshed was not like the silly aimless butcheries of the
Deniken _régime_, which would not even recognise, I was told, the
Bolshevik Red Cross. And to-day the Bolshevik Government sits, I
believe, in Moscow as securely established as any Government in Europe,
and the streets of the Russian towns are as safe as any streets in
Europe.
It not only established itself and restored order, but—thanks largely to
the genius of that ex-pacifist Trotsky—it re-created the Russian army as
a fighting force. That we must recognise as a very remarkable
achievement. I saw little of the Russian army myself, it was not what I
went to Russia to see, but Mr. Vanderlip, the distinguished American
financier, whom I found in Moscow engaged in some financial negotiations
with the Soviet Government, had been treated to a review of several
thousand troops, and was very enthusiastic about their spirit and
equipment. My son and I saw a number of drafts going to the front, and
also bodies of recruits joining up, and our impression is that the
spirit of the men was quite as good as that of similar bodies of British
recruits in London in 1917–18.
Now who are these Bolsheviki who have taken such an effectual hold upon
Russia? According to the crazier section of the British Press they are
the agents of a mysterious racial plot, a secret society, in which Jews,
Jesuits, Freemasons, and Germans are all jumbled together in the maddest
fashion. As a matter of fact, nothing was ever quite less secret than
the ideas and aims and methods of the Bolsheviks, nor anything quite
less like a secret society than their organization. But in England we
cultivate a peculiar style of thinking, so impervious to any general
ideas that it must needs fall back upon the notion of a conspiracy to
explain the simplest reactions of the human mind. If, for instance, a
day labourer in Essex makes a fuss because he finds that the price of
his children’s boots has risen out of all proportion to the increase in
his weekly wages, and declares that he and his fellow-workers are being
cheated and underpaid, the editors of _The Times_ and of the _Morning
Post_ will trace his resentment to the insidious propaganda of some
mysterious society at Königsberg or Pekin. They cannot conceive how
otherwise he should get such ideas into his head. Conspiracy mania of
this kind is so prevalent that I feel constrained to apologise for my
own immunity. I find the Bolsheviks very much what they profess to be. I
find myself obliged to treat them as fairly straightforward people. I do
not agree with either their views or their methods, but that is another
question.
The Bolsheviks are Marxists Socialists. Marx died in London nearly forty
years ago; the propaganda of his views has been going on for over half a
century. It has spread over the whole earth and finds in nearly every
country a small but enthusiastic following. It is a natural result of
world-wide economic conditions. Everywhere it expresses the same limited
ideas in the same distinctive phrasing. It is a cult, a world-wide
international brotherhood. No one need learn Russian to study the ideas
of Bolshevism. The enquirer will find them all in the London _Plebs_ or
the New York _Liberator_ in exactly the same phrases as in the Russian
_Pravda_. They hide nothing. They say everything. And just precisely
what these Marxists write and say, so they attempt to do.
It will be best if I write about Marx without any hypocritical
deference. I have always regarded him as a Bore of the extremest sort.
His vast unfinished work, _Das Kapital_, a cadence of wearisome volumes
about such phantom unrealities as the _bourgeoisie_ and the
_proletariat_, a book for ever maundering away into tedious secondary
discussions, impresses me as a monument of pretentious pedantry. But
before I went to Russia on this last occasion I had no active hostility
to Marx. I avoided his works, and when I encountered Marxists I disposed
of them by asking them to tell me exactly what people constituted the
proletariat. None of them knew. No Marxist knows. In Gorky’s flat I
listened with attention while Bokaiev discussed with Shalyapin the fine
question of whether in Russia there was a proletariat at all,
distinguishable from the peasants. As Bokaiev has been head of the
Extraordinary Commission of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in
Petersburg, it was interesting to note the fine difficulties of the
argument. The “proletarian” in the Marxist jargon is like the “producer”
in the jargon of some political economists, who is supposed to be a
creature absolutely distinct and different from the “consumer.” So the
proletarian is a figure put into flat opposition to something called
capital. I find in large type outside the current number of the _Plebs_,
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.”
Apply this to a works foreman who is being taken in a train by an
engine-driver to see how the house he is having built for him by a
building society is getting on. To which of these immiscibles does he
belong, employer or employed? The stuff is sheer nonsense.
In Russia I must confess my passive objection to Marx has changed to a
very active hostility. Wherever we went we encountered busts, portraits,
and statues of Marx. About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a
vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal
exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man,
it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the
world. It is exactly like _Das Kapital_ in its inane abundance, and the
human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how
the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that
beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see
Karl Marx shaved. Some day, if I am spared, I will take up shears and a
razor against _Das Kapital_; I will write _The Shaving of Karl Marx_.
But Marx is for the Marxists merely an image and a symbol, and it is
with the Marxist and not with Marx that we are now dealing. Few Marxists
have read much of _Das Kapital_. The Marxist is very much the same sort
of person in all modern communities, and I will confess that by my
temperament and circumstances I have the very warmest sympathy for him.
He adopts Marx as his prophet simply because he believes that Marx wrote
of the class war, an implacable war of the employed against the
employer, and that he prophesied a triumph for the employed person, a
dictatorship of the world by the leaders of these liberated employed
persons (dictatorship of the proletariat), and a Communist millennium
arising out of that dictatorship. Now this doctrine and this prophecy
have appealed in every country with extraordinary power to young
persons, and particularly to young men of energy and imagination who
have found themselves at the outset of life imperfectly educated,
ill-equipped, and caught into hopeless wages slavery in our existing
economic system. They realise in their own persons the social injustice,
the stupid negligence, the colossal incivility of our system; they
realise that they are insulted and sacrificed by it; and they devote
themselves to break it and emancipate themselves from it. No insidious
propaganda is needed to make such rebels; it is the faults of a system
that half-educates and then enslaves them which have created the
Communist movement wherever industrialism has developed. There would
have been Marxists if Marx had never lived. When I was a boy of fourteen
I was a complete Marxist, long before I had heard the name of Marx. I
had been cut off abruptly from education, caught in a detestable shop,
and I was being broken in to a life of mean and dreary toil. I was
worked too hard and for such long hours that all thoughts of
self-improvement seemed hopeless. I would have set fire to that place if
I had not been convinced it was over-insured. I revived the spirit of
those bitter days in a conversation I had with Zorin, one of the leaders
of the Commune of the North. He is a young man who has come back from
unskilled work in America, a very likable human being and a humorous and
very popular speaker in the Petersburg Soviet. He and I exchanged
experiences, and I found that the thing that rankled most in his mind
about America was the brutal incivility he had encountered when applying
for a job as packer in a big dry goods store in New York. We told each
other stories of the way our social system wastes and breaks and maddens
decent and willing men. Between us was the freemasonry of a common
indignation.
It is that indignation of youth and energy, thwarted and misused, it is
that and no mere economic theorising, which is the living and linking
inspiration of the Marxist movement throughout the world. It is not that
Marx was profoundly wise, but that our economic system has been stupid,
selfish, wasteful, and anarchistic. The Communistic organisation has
provided for this angry recalcitrance certain shibboleths and passwords:
“Workers of the World unite,” and so forth. It has suggested to them an
idea of a great conspiracy against human happiness concocted by a
mysterious body of wicked men called capitalists. For in this mentally
enfeebled world in which we live to-day conspiracy mania on one side
finds its echo on the other, and it is hard to persuade a Marxist that
capitalists are in their totality no more than a scrambling disorder of
mean-spirited and short-sighted men. And the Communist propaganda has
knitted all these angry and disinherited spirits together into a
world-wide organisation of revolt—and hope—formless though that hope
proves to be on examination. It has chosen Marx for its prophet and red
for its colour.... And so when the crash came in Russia, when there
remained no other solidarity of men who could work together upon any but
immediate selfish ends, there came flowing back from America and the
West to rejoin their comrades a considerable number of keen and
enthusiastic young and youngish men, who had in that more bracing
Western world lost something of the habitual impracticability of the
Russian and acquired a certain habit of getting things done, who all
thought in the same phrases and had the courage of the same ideas, and
who were all inspired by the dream of a revolution that should bring
human life to a new level of justice and happiness. It is these young
men who constitute the living force of Bolshevism. Many of them are
Jews, because most of the Russian emigrants to America were Jews; but
few of them have any strong racial Jewish feeling. They are not out for
Jewry but for a new world. So far from being in continuation of the
Jewish tradition the Bolsheviks have put most of the Zionist leaders in
Russia in prison, and they have prescribed the teaching of Hebrew as a
“reactionary” language. Several of the most interesting Bolsheviks I met
were not Jews at all, but blonde Nordic men. Lenin, the beloved leader
of all that is energetic in Russia to-day, has a Tartar type of face and
is certainly no Jew.
This Bolshevik Government is at once the most temerarious and the least
experienced governing body in the world. In some directions its
incompetence is amazing. In most its ignorance is profound. Of the
diabolical cunning of “capitalism” and of the subtleties of reaction it
is ridiculously suspicious, and sometimes it takes fright and is cruel.
But essentially it is honest. It is the most simple-minded Government
that exists in the world to-day.
Its simple-mindedness is shown by one question that I was asked again
and again during this Russian visit. “When is the social revolution
going to happen in England?” Lenin asked me that, Zenovieff, who is the
head of the Commune of the North, Zorin, and many others.
Because it is by the Marxist theory all wrong that the social revolution
should happen first in Russia. That fact is bothering every intelligent
man in the movement. According to the Marxist theory the social
revolution should have happened first in the country with the oldest and
most highly developed industrialism, with a large, definite, mainly
propertyless, mainly wages-earning working class (proletariat). It
should have begun in Britain, and spread to France and Germany, then
should have come America’s turn and so on. Instead they find Communism
in power in Russia, which really possesses no specialised labouring
class at all, which has worked its factories with peasant labourers who
come and go from the villages, and so has scarcely any “proletariat”—to
unite with the workers of the world and so forth—at all. Behind the
minds of many of these Bolsheviks with whom I talked I saw clearly that
there dawns now a chill suspicion of the reality of the case, a
realisation that what they have got in Russia is not truly the promised
Marxist social revolution at all, that in truth they have not captured a
State but got aboard a derelict. I tried to assist the development of
this novel and disconcerting discovery. And also I indulged in a little
lecture on the absence of a large “class-conscious proletariat” in the
Western communities. I explained that in England there were two hundred
different classes at least, and that the only “class-conscious
proletarians” known to me in the land were a small band of mainly Scotch
workers kept together by the vigorous leadership of a gentleman named
MacManus. Their dearest convictions struggled against my manifest
candour. They are clinging desperately to the belief that there are
hundreds of thousands of convinced Communists in Britain, versed in the
whole gospel of Marx, a proletarian solidarity, on the eve of seizing
power and proclaiming a British Soviet Republic. They hold obstinately
to that after three years of waiting—but their hold weakens.
[Illustration:
THE BAKU CONFERENCE SWEARS UNDYING HOSTILITY TO CAPITALISM AND BRITISH
IMPERIALISM.
Zenovieff (_by the bell_); to the right of him (_i.e._ on his left)
are Radek (_spectacles_) and Bela Kun (_rather foggy_).
]
[Illustration:
THE BAKU CONFERENCE SWEARS UNDYING HOSTILITY TO CAPITALISM AND BRITISH
IMPERIALISM:
The Body of the Hall.
]
Among the most amusing things in this queer intellectual situation are
the repeated scoldings that come by wireless from Moscow to Western
Labour because it does not behave as Marx said it would behave. It isn’t
red—and it ought to be. It is just yellow.
My conversation with Zenovieff was particularly curious. He is a man
with the voice and animation of Hilaire Belloc, and a lot of curly
coal-black hair. “You have civil war in Ireland,” he said.
“Practically,” said I. “Which do you consider are the proletarians, the
Sinn Feiners or the Ulstermen?” We spent some time while Zenovieff
worked like a man with a jigsaw puzzle trying to get the Irish situation
into the class war formula. That jigsaw puzzle remained unsolved, and we
then shifted our attention to Asia. Impatient at the long delay of the
Western proletarians to emerge and declare themselves, Zenovieff,
assisted by Bela Kun, our Mr. Jack Quelch, and a number of other leading
Communists, has recently gone on a pilgrimage to Baku to raise the
Asiatic proletariat. They went to beat up the class-conscious wages
slaves of Persia and Turkestan. They sought out factory workers and slum
dwellers in the tents of the steppes. They held a congress at Baku, at
which they gathered together a quite wonderful accumulation of white,
black, brown, and yellow people, Asiatic costumes and astonishing
weapons. They had a great assembly in which they swore undying hatred of
Capitalism and British imperialism; they had a great procession in which
I regret to say certain batteries of British guns, which some careless,
hasty empire-builder had left behind him, figured; they disinterred and
buried again thirteen people whom this British empire-builder seems to
have shot without trial, and they burnt Mr. Lloyd George, M. Millerand,
and President Wilson in effigy. I not only saw a five-part film of this
remarkable festival when I visited the Petersburg Soviet, but, thanks to
Zorin, I have brought the film back with me. It is to be administered
with caution and to adults only. There are parts of it that would make
Mr. Gwynne of the _Morning Post_ or Mr. Rudyard Kipling scream in their
sleep. If so be they ever slept again after seeing it.
I did my best to find out from Zenovieff and Zorin what they thought
they were doing in the Baku Conference. And frankly I do not think they
know. I doubt if they have anything clearer in their minds than a vague
idea of hitting back at the British Government through Mesopotamia and
India, because it has been hitting them through Kolchak, Deniken,
Wrangel, and the Poles. It is a counter-offensive almost as clumsy and
stupid as the offensives it would counter. It is inconceivable that they
can hope for any social solidarity with the miscellaneous discontents
their congress assembled. One item “featured” on this Baku film is a
dance by a gentleman from the neighbourhood of Baku. He is in fact one
of the main features of this remarkable film. He wears a fur-trimmed
jacket, high boots, and a high cap, and his dancing is a very rapid and
dexterous step dancing. He produces two knives and puts them between his
teeth, and then two others which he balances perilously with the blades
dangerously close to his nose on either side of it. Finally he poises a
fifth knife on his forehead, still stepping it featly to the distinctly
Oriental music. He stoops and squats, arms akimbo, sending his nimble
boots flying out and back like the Cossacks in the Russian ballet. He
circles slowly as he does this, clapping his hands. He is now rolled up
in my keeping, ready to dance again when opportunity offers. I tried to
find out whether he was a specimen Asiatic proletarian or just what he
symbolised, but I could get no light on him. But there are yards and
yards of film of him. I wish I could have resuscitated Karl Marx, just
to watch that solemn stare over the beard, regarding him. The film gives
no indication of his reception by Mr. Jack Quelch.
I hope I shall not offend Comrade Zorin, for whom I have a real
friendship, if I thus confess to him that I cannot take his Baku
Conference very seriously. It was an excursion, a pageant, a Beano. As a
meeting of Asiatic proletarians it was preposterous. But if it was not
very much in itself, it was something very important in its revelation
of shifting intentions. Its chief significance to me is this, that it
shows a new orientation of the Bolshevik mind as it is embodied in
Zenovieff. So long as the Bolsheviki held firmly with unshaken
conviction to the Marxist formula they looked westward, a little
surprised that the “social revolution” should have begun so far to the
east of its indicated centre. Now as they begin to realise that it is
not that prescribed social revolution at all but something quite
different which has brought them into power, they are naturally enough
casting about for a new system of relationships. The ideal figure of the
Russian republic is still a huge western “Worker,” with a vast hammer or
a sickle. A time may come, if we maintain the European blockade with
sufficient stringency and make any industrial recuperation impossible,
when that ideal may give place altogether to a nomadic-looking gentleman
from Turkestan with a number of knives. We may drive what will remain of
Bolshevik Russia to the steppes and the knife. If we help Baron Wrangel
to pull down the by no means firmly established Government in Moscow,
under the delusion that thereby we shall bring about “representative
institutions” and a “limited monarchy,” we may find ourselves very much
out in our calculations. Any one who destroys the present law and order
of Moscow will, I believe, destroy what is left of law and order in
Russia. A brigand monarchist government will leave a trail of fresh
blood across the Russian scene, show what gentlemen can do when they are
roused in a tremendous pogrom and White Terror, flourish horribly for a
time, break up and vanish. Asia will resume. The simple ancient rhythm
of the horseman plundering the peasant and the peasant waylaying the
horseman will creep back across the plains to the Niemen and the
Dniester. The cities will become clusters of ruins in the waste; the
roads and railroads will rot and rust; the river traffic will decay....
This Baku Conference has depressed Gorky profoundly. He is obsessed by a
nightmare of Russia going east. Perhaps I have caught a little of his
depression.
IV
THE CREATIVE EFFORT IN RUSSIA