Liberals and Bolsheviks
I rs and buts are a fascinating, if unrewarding, intellectual exercise, and occasionally one wonders what the subsequent history of Russia might have been if popular political activities had been legitimate under the Czars. In the absence of genuine political liberty the sort of men and womsn Who are regarded in Britain as 'staunch pillars' of Conservative and Labour Parties, the Church, Welsh nationalism, or even the Spinsters' League, were being sen- tenced to forced labour in Siberia as dangerous rebels. It is some- times forgotten that the Czar was overthrown by a popular coali- tion in which liberals predominated: that, indeed, within a few days of his dethronement the leader of the liberal Kadet Party, at a mass meeting in Petrograd, actually called for the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Grand Duke Alexei.
But the price paid by Russia for its lack of political experience only became fully apparent when the overthrow of the Kerensky government eight months later, in October, 1917, placed the fate of Russia's millions in the hands of the numerically weak Marxist Bolshevik Party, the only group sufficiently organised to seize power. They shared it briefly with the populist Left Social- Revolutionaries, a party of romantic idealists whose object was the moral and spiritual liberation of mankind through Socialism. Its leader was that remarkable woman Maria Spiridinova, and I. N. Steinberg represented the party in Lenin's first government as Commissar for Justice. He was in office briefly. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries bitterly opposed Germany's dictated peace of Brest-Litovsk and walked out of the government into political oblivion. Its members, including Steinberg and Spiridinova, were rounded up by the Cheka and imprisoned. Since then Steinberg, who escaped abroad in 1923, has seen the men in Lenin's first government—Trotsky, Karl Radek, Felix Dzerjinsky, etc.—die one by one or disappear. Today he is its only survivor.
An exceptional interest resides in this inevitably tragic book. The number of men who can describe the Russian Revolution from the inside grows fewer and fewer, and in the meantime the record has been systematically rewritten by hungry propagandists of the Left and the Right. And although this book, too, is an interpretation rather than an objective record, it serves to expose one of the costliest fallacies of our time—the popular belief that. despite its excesses, the Communist revolution was intrinsically just and humane, and that mass coercion was first introduced into the Soviet Union as a deliberate policy by Stalin.
Behind the sloganising that marked the first weeks of the October Revolution, the proclamations of liberation and justice that had not yet become mechanical, the Cheka's machine-guns were already operating Steinberg's own party believed in the assassination of selected individuals as a political necessity, but they drew the line at mass terror. He could not, at that stage, believe that he was witnessing anything but a panic reaction by Communist authorities in the face of the growing economic and social chaos that followed the Revolution and Imperial Germany's occupation of the Ukraine, the Donetz basin and the Caucasus. But when Lenin turned his industrial proletarians loose on the peasants, who became enemies of the revolution and victims of Cheka brutality overnight when they resisted the seizure of their bread; when almost a thousand people were indiscriminately rounded up and shot as a.reprisal for an attempt on the life of Lenin; when the category of 'class enemies' was extended to cover anyone who opposed the ruling Communist party, it began to dawn on Steinberg and his friends that the shootings were not merely revolutionary exuberance. As early as August 9, 1918. Lenin dispatched a telegram to the Soviet of Nijni-Novgorod advising that 'an open uprising of White Guardists is clearly in preparation. You must mobilise all forces, establish a triumvirate of dictators, introduce mass terror, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who ply soldiers and officers with vodka. Do not hesitate for a moment. .
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