ANARCHY AND PEACE. T HE conclusion of a separate peace between
the Ukraine Republic and the enemy and the withdrawal of Northern Russia from the war are formidable events in a strictly military sense, but their true and full significance for Europe and for Russia cannot be estimated for a long time to come. What we are witnessing in Russia is a tremendous natural con- vulsion, as little subject to law or reason as an eruption of Etna. Slumbering forces have been roused and set in violent activity, and no man can guide or control them. The belief cherished by some people that a friendly word at the right moment from Downing Street, or the opportune appearance of a British Labour delegation in some wayside inn at Stock- holm, would have instantly stilled the tempest and calmed the seething passions in Russia, is of course a delusion. An attempt to guide the Russian Revolution into safe channels by official despatches, Parliamentary speeches, and the reso- lutions of Socialist Conferences would have been as futile as it would be to try to pacify a charging bison by offering him a tract. The Tsardom, based on an Army, a State Church, and an official class, had for generations held the many races of Russia in subjection, giving them comparative order and security at the price of liberty. When the Army revolted and the Tsardom collapsed a year ago, the artificial unity of Russia disappeared also. The Socialists, who were quick to profit by a revolution in which all classes had participated, made it their first care to destroy the discipline of the Army and to break down the bureaucratic machine. But the soldiers and the officials were the cement which had held the many peoples in Russia together. When their unifying influence was removed, the imposing edifice crumbled into fragments. The formation of Workmen's and Soldiers' Councils in all the great towns rapidly developed racial ambitions that had long been dormant and almost extinct. The process had gone far under the relatively moderate dictatorship of M. Kerenaky, but when he was overthrown by M. Lenin at the beginning of last November, the separatist movement made rapid strides. The Ukraine, the border provinces of South-Western Russia, is only one out of many Republics that have constituted themselves amid the rums of the Russian Empire. The Cossacks of the Don, the tribes of the Caucasus, the Armenians, the Tartars of the Lower Volga, the Russian Siberians, and the native peoples of Central Asia, to say nothing of Finland, have all declared themselves autonomous, and the problem for Russia is to devise some means of reuniting these diverse nationalities, perhaps in a Federal Republic. For the moment the effect of this " self-determination of peoples " has been to remove Russia from the war-map. A bundle of infant Russian States, each jealous of the others, could not conduct a cam- paign against enemies like Germany and Austria, even if the Russian peoples were not all weary of fighting in a cause the importance of which they do not understand. That Revo- lutionary Russia would retire from the battlefield has long been inevitable, because she could no longer achieve any military success with a mutinous and disorganized. Army deprived of all proper support from the rear. The Anarchists have merely hastened the end by their calculated frightfulness, whioh has driven the Ukraine into a separate peace as a possible means of escape from the Red Terror directed from Petrograd. If the other infant Republics were accessible to the enemy, they too would probably prefer a German peace to Bolshevik tyranny, just as during the French Revolution the Bretons and the Provencals sought alliance with us rather than yield to the dictation of Paris. The Anarchist leaders, in announcing that they too will withdraw from the war, have made a virtue of necessity. They have not made peace, as they promised their credulous followers they would do, but they will not fight except against their fellow-Russians.
M. Ulyanov, who calls himself Lenin, has made no secret of his determination to have peace at any price since he returned to Russia last spring, travelling through Germany by favour of the Emperor, his pockets well lined with German gold. But we need not set him down as a German agent of the familiar type. The leader of the advanced section of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which, because it obtained a majority in the Party Congress of 1903, has since been known as the Maximalist or Bolshevik section, Lenin is a fanatic for whom all roads lead to the goal. He made himself notorious long ago by his relentless hostility to all, even among ardent Socialists, who did not favour his particular methods of establishing a Socialist Utopia. He rejected all the arts of compromise. He abused the moderate Socialists who wished to proceed step by step, or to co=operate with other parties, as if they were rank reactionaries. His policy was to root out the upper and middle classes by sheer force, and to transfer all power and property to the masses. But it would be a profound mistake to suppose that he is a democrat in any true sense. M. Ulyanov, who, like his master Karl Marx, comes of good middle-class stock, resembles Marx also in his autocratic tendencies. Like Marx, he has a profound contempt for the masses. " Every kind of admiration for the elementary power of the Labour movement," he wrote, " every kind of minimizing the role of conscious elements, means a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology over the workmen." In other words, the workman in the Socialist State must submit himself patiently to the rule of " the conscious elements," lest by developing his faculties too freely he should become a bourgeois. Lenin's ideal State was to be controlled by a small self-elected junta exercising despotic authority over the ignorant masses in whose name it acted. Since November we have seen him putting this theory into practice at Petrograd. The credulous folk m the West who judge foreign movements by their own parochial standards thought that M. Ulyanov and M. Trotsky had seized the reins of power in order to ensure a fair field for the Constituent Assembly, to whose decisions they would grace- fully assent. But the Leninite theory discarded elected Assemblies as outworn bourgeois devices. If the Russian peoples had returned a large majority of Bolsheviks, M. Ulyanov would probably have allowed the Constituent Assembly to meet and register his decrees. As the Assembly promised to be hostile to him, he forbade it to meet and then dissolved it. To the democratic peoples of the West this seemed a crime, but M. Ulyanov was simply carrying out his autocratic principles. Any one who opposes him or criticizes his actions is a traitor who must be punished in the interests of the Socialist State. We shall probably never know the full details of the methods by which Petrograd has been subjected to Bolshevik rule, but it is clear that Paris under the first or the last Commune was a peaceful city compared. to the Russian capital to-day. The Leninites have achieved power, and mean to retain it if they can, by any and every means. The dissolution of the old Army and the formation of a new and well-paid force of selected Red Guards, the confiscation of all property except that of the workmen and peasants, and the destruction of the Church seem to have cleared away the established interests that might menace the new despotism. Having brought Northern Russia under control, the Leninites have tried to extend-their rule to the other regions, reconstituting the old Empire under a Socialist Tsar. But the existence of a state of war was fatal to their plans. The Ukraine Socialists, whose programme seems to us as wildly absurd as that of Lenin though their methods are less violent, could appeal to the enemy against Petrograd with the certainty that the enemy would welcome the chance of fomenting the disunion in Russia. It may or may not be true, as M. Trotsky says, that the Minimalists of the Ukraine Rada have lost control of Kieff, and that the Ukraine delegates who signed a separate peace at Brest- Litovsk will not find their Government in power when they return home. If indeed the Rada has been dispersed, it has only yielded to the brute force of a Bolshevik army riding roughshod, like Prussians, over the Little Russians' right of self-determination. The civil war raging to the south of Moscow between the Red Guards and the Cossacks, and the still more discreditable attempt of the Bolshevik forces in Rumania to lay waste the remnant of that unhappy country which is still clear of the enemy, are further illustrations of the Leninite policy. It was only the continuance of nominal hostilities with the Central Powers that prevented M. Ulyanov from trying to destroy all his opponents throughout Russia by fire and sword, before they had time to organize themselves for the fray.
If we keep steadily in mind the Bolsheviks' desire to gain absolute authority in Russia by any means and at all costs, we shall understand. their readiness to accept German pay at the outset, to repudiate Old Russia's Allies, to meet the enemy in conference, and to make what seems to the ordinary mind the most abject and pitiful surrender to German and Austrian militarism. M. Ulyanov and M. Trotsky had, of course, to give their followers the external peace for which they craved, but they theinselves have sought peace abroad in order to effect their ends by violence at home. As these men are the victims of " the fixed idea," which is not com- patible with true sanity, it is impossible to say how far they were sincere in their dealings with the enemy at Brest-Litovsk. They may perhaps have believed that the German • and Austrian peoples were only waiting for a -call froni Petrograd to depose their rulers and make a Socialist peace. They may even have supposed that the Allied peoples would do the same, though M. Trotsky, who has lived in Western Europe and in America, ought to know us better than that. They may have thought, absurd as it seems, that by appealing to the public at large, and to the enemy public in particular, they could persuade the German military party to remove their greedy hands from the Baltic Provinces and Poland, fulfilling Count Czernin's empty pledge to respect those countries' right of self-determination. But the outcome of it all has been, as every sane man has long expected, that the Petrograd phrase-makers, whether honest or dishonest, have been as babes in the hands of the German and Austrian diplomatists, backed by their armies. Baron von Kuhlmann and Count Czernin have fooled M. Trotsky to the top of his bent, and, by making a private and separate peace with the Ukraine while he blustered and threatened, have left him impotent either to make a tolerable peace or to continue the war. The only good that has come of the Brest-Litovsk negotiations has been to prove once more for the few who were yet unconvinced or doubtful that the enemy is still as unscrupulous as ever, and still as determined to annex as much territory as he can by this war. But this hardly needed proof. In other respects the Conference has been disastrous to Russia, and to the unhappy little peoples on her Western frontier, who now see themselves deserted by their natural protectors and delivered to the tender mercies of the Prussian. The Allies can and will win the war without any more help from Russia, though her defection will lengthen the struggle.- The loss of an Ally never troubled us much in the days of Napoleon, and need not alarm us now. But the Bolshevik manoeuvres have inflicted grave injury on Russia's international reputation, and have left her utterly defenceless against her cruel neighbours. If Germany were not so fully occupied on the Western Front, she would be strongly tempted to occupy Petrograd forthwith, and it is by no means certain that she will even now forgo such an attractive prize.
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