UNCHANGING RUSSIA
By W. H. CHAMBERLIN
WITH nations, as with individuals, the past casts long shadows. There is so much that is strikingly, obviously, flamboyantly new in the Soviet system that the foreigner who spends a short time in Russia may quite naturally come to the conclusion that there has been a. complete break with everything that antedates the Bolshevik Revolution.
But the longer I have lived in Russia the more I have been impressed by the tremendous grip which former administrative ideas and practices still maintain, by the numerous links and parallels, some curious, some hu- morous, some sinister, which unmistakably bind the autocracy of the Romanovs, and of still earlier Tsars, with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I am convinced that one can learn more about the spirit and the realities of the Soviet Union by reading a few good histories of Russia than by poring over innumerable speeches of Soviet leaders, with their stereotyped phrases and endless statistics.
The strongest link between old and new Russia is the absolutist character of the State, with its inevitable corollary : utter contempt and disregard for the rights and interests of the individual when these come into conflict with the supposed interests of the State. The Tsars ruled for their own glory and that of God ; Stalin rules in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the future world revolution. The masks are new; but the technique of government is strikingly similar ; both the crowned autocrats of the past and the uncrowned autocrat of the present find it necessary to put to death and to hold in unpleasant places of exile what would seem in a Western country an abnormally large number of people. To make the parallel more complete let us turn to Kluchevsky's description of the state of affairs under the Empress Anne, in the first half of the eighteenth century : " Espionage became the most encouraged State service ; everyone who seemed dangerous or incon- venient was eliminated from society. Masses were banished ; altogether under Anne more than 20,000 were banished :to Siberia ; and it is impossible to find a trace of where 5,000 of these were sent:" This was Russia in 1730. It would hold just as good for Russia in 1930, except that the number of persons banished would have increased more or less in proportion to the growth of the population.
In reading Russia's classical economic history, M. Tugan-Baranovsky's The Russian Factory in Past and Present, I was surprised to find how many concrete pro- blems of economic development in the time of Peter the Great and his successors were similar to those which confront Stalin and his associates at the present time. " Throughout the whole first half of the eighteenth century," writes Tugan-Baranovsky, " complaints of factory owners about the lack of workers do not cease." Throughout the Five Year Plan Soviet factory managers, especially in new construction sites, were continually voicing the same complaint. The remedies which were found for the situation were not dissimilar. In Peter's time workers were " attached " to factories for a period of ten years ; now excessive mobility among workers and slacking on the job are attacked by such methods as the widespread use of forced labour, the taking away of food cards from persistent " fliers," or persons who " fly " from one job to another, the exaction of pledges from workers to remain at their posts for fixed periods, &c. And there is a distinctly modern ring about Tugan- Baranovsky's statement, which refers to Russia in the eighteenth century, that " it was difficult to hold foreign experts, because they demanded much money and seldom adjusted themselves to Russian conditions." More than one American engineer or mechanic who left the Soviet Union in a huff because of red tape or hard living conditions or a dispute with the authorities as to whether his contract called for payment in Soviet roubles or in some more solid currency medium was unconsciously following in the footsteps of his British, Flemish and German predecessors of two centuries ago.
Perhaps as a result of its vast bulk, and of its special geographical position, linking up Europe and Asia, Russia has always felt a vague conviction that it had a Messianic mission to perform for the whole world. Nicholas I, who was in some respects the most perfect type of autocrat among the Romano Tsars, was not content to be an unlimited ruler in his own country. He wished to make absolutism the dominant principle • of government throughout. Europe. When the Austrian Empire, after 1848, was rocked with national and social unrest, Nicholas dispatched Russian troops to help the Austrian Emperor maintain conservative " law and order." Obsessed with this same conception of an international mission, the Bolshevik leaders at the present time, despite many dis- illusioning disappointments, are still not ready to admit that the Bolshevik Revolution was a national Russian upheaval and not a prelude to world revolution on the same model.
Extreme secretiveness is another of the many adminis- trative practices which the Bolslieviki have taken over, in somewhat intensified form, from their Tsarist pre- decessors. Just at the time when the Soviet Government was prohibiting foreign journalists from travelling in the famine regions I happened to read a biography of Tsar Boris Godunov, by Stephen Graham, and was naturally struck by the following passage : " He believed he could overcome rumour by silence. He believed he could hide self-evident truths by national pretence. The famine brought beggary and misery upon his reign, and the injury to his good name as sovereign mortified him much more than the famine itself. He feared lest the catastrophe be noised abroad. So he organized prosperity parades before the foreign ambassadors in Moscow to make them think things were not nearly so bad as they had been told. At the beginning of 1603 it was forbidden for anyone to appear in rags in the streets. Conversation with foreigners was forbidden, lest someone should tell them of the ruin that had befallen Russia."
This passage described a Tsar's efforts to suppress news of a famine that occurred in 1602-1608. It could serve almost equally well as a description of the Soviet Govern- ment's effort to hide from the outside world the famine of 1932-1933.
One could go on multiplying curious and ironical parallels between personalities and events in Old and in New Russia indefinitely. The similarities of adminis- trative method between Tsarist and Soviet Russia are even more striking and more significant than the persist- ence of certain traits of Russian character : incurable unpunetuality, for instance, or keen popular enjoyment of music and drama. Even non-Communist Russians are sometimes inclined to admire the tremendous scope of their country's revolution, to feel that, whatever its cruelties and blunders, it did create something new under the sun. In many respects, of course, this is true. But at the same time I seriously doubt whether the estab- lishment in Russia of some form of liberal democracy, under which no citizen could have been herded into a freight-car and shipped off to forced labour without open trial, would not have been a greater revolution, a greater breach with all the traditions of the Russian past than the substitution of the Soviet dictatorship, with its recently renamed Ogpu, for the Tsarist autocracy, with its Okhrana (secret political police).
Perhaps the strongest reason for disappointment with the final outcome of generations of Russia's revolutionary struggle, which had so many heroes and martyrs, is not that so much has been transformed and destroyed, but that so much of the Tsarist technique of government, stifling of free criticism, all-pervading espionage, arbitrary arrest and banishment of political suspects, has been taken over unchanged or preserved in aggravated form.
It is part of the tremendous fascination of the Soviet Union that it offers so much that is new and untried in economic and social fields, that it has changed the ideas and living habits of the people, especially of the younger generation, so greatly: But on the numerous occasions when one can see Old Russia peeping out behind the transparent new Soviet masks, when one can see the mentality of a mediaeval autocracy curiously repro- ducing itself as part of the ideological armour of the dictatorship of the proletariat, one senses very strongly the profound sceptical wisdom involved in the French proverb : " The more it changes, the more it remains the same."
Previous page
