Bolshevism After Ten Years
THE Bolshevists are as safely as ever enthroned in the high places of oligarchs, but Bolshevism—if Bolshevism means Communism—is dead. On Monday ten years ago Lenin and his Bolshevists triumphed over the Menshevists, and this ideologue, who was redeemed from pure ruthlessness only by a humorous realism, immediately began to set up the Bolshevistic State of his visions. Kerensky had already fled. On Monday of this week the Russian proletariat in great demonstrations celebrated its tenth birthday.
The demonstrations are said to have been very imposing and enthusiastic. If they were—and we have no reason to think that they were not—we are at once brought up against a strange paradox. Under Bolshevism, Russia has suffered famines which can fairly be compared with famines in India before relief was yet organized as it is now ; she has suffered massacres and proscriptions of every kind ; she has suffered from petty tyranny and spying to such an extent that no man—unless he has enough political backing to frighten the rulers— dares allow himself a syllable of free speech ; and she has suffered from low wages which were rlicgraceful under the Emperors, but are still more disgraceful now that we are told that Russia is the true home of humane political ideas.
The quick and rather too easy explanation of the huge demonstrations in Russia is that they were ordered by authority and that the people did not dare to disobey. It is almost certain that this explanation, though it contains some truth, is inadequate. Whatever may be said about the political thoughts of the inscrutable peasants, the town workers in Russia have already made a habit of Bolshevist ideas ; they see that there is no prospective alternative to Bolshevism and they therefore give an allegiance to the existing Government, which is at all events preferable to chaos. Again, propaganda about the nobility of Communism—though Communism never really existed—has been drummed into their ears for ten years, and the result is a sort of mass-suggestion. Probably most of those people in the towns who were not dispossessed of property by the revolution, in other words the majority, do believe that Bolshevism somehow or other, and in spite of the repeated disappointments, is going to redeem its promises some day.
The Trotsky faction may form an Opposition—as it has done—and may denounce the ruling Stalin faction for yielding to base expediency ; it may shout " Back to the true doctrines of Marx and Lenin ! Be loyal to the origins of the Revolution !•" but these internal struggles do not indicate the downfall of the Bolshevists. One sort of Bolshevist or another will be in power so far as we can see ahead. The town-workers are securely in the grip of the Stalin group or the Trotsky group. As for the innumerable peasants, though they have an immense power of resistance they have no capacity whatever to rule. They are helpless before a superior intelligence or cunning.
Bradlaugh, who combined much penetration with a lack of the imagination that is derived from sympathy, used to say that religions did not die but changed. So far as this is true of religions, it is also true of political philosophies. The quarrels of the Jacobins left one mark after another on the French Revolution and prepared the way for the much greater and decisive change of Thermidor. Lenin undoubtedly believed that power could be vested in the proletariat, and that as nobody who was not a proletarian ought to be allowed an inde- pendent existence there would actually be equality. He took the first step towards this majestic and universal equality by establishing a Dictatorship of the Proletariat which was presumably to act as a kind of trust till the wards of the Dictatorship were trained to exercise their rights. These poor wards in Chancery have had their heads in Chancery ever since. Nothing has counted but the Dictatorship, which has never extended its borders. It is the most stable autocratic oligarchy of which modern history has any record.
Communism was decreed. But Communism could not be created while the peasants were against it, and the peasants withstood it with the whole vast weight of their vie inertiae. In a way this was strange, as the Russian peasant was familiar with the idea of land held communally. What the peasant could not abide was that he should grow crops merely to hand the profits over to the State. He was far too much in love with the land which he had managed as he liked since the expropriation of the lordly owners. The peasants won because they independently refused to budge. By their passive resistance they beat Communism.
In the towns trade languished not so much from deliberate obstruction as from the incompetence of the State organizers. These organizers could get nothing but the poorest results from miserable workers whose normal lethargy was increased by the low physique peculiar to the first years of the revolution. When Lenin saw that Communism in trade was fast going backwards instead of forwards he invented the New Economic Policy by which the Soviet leased out certain trades to private enterprise. Even under. the N.E.P. production remains very low and Stalin would now willingly resort to all sorts of devices to gain a larger share of the world's trade for Russia if most of his time were not taken up in quarrelling with Trotsky. There is certainly enough energy in Russia, if only under the scourge of necessity, for the country to go ahead if it were allowed to do so. In spite of all the deadening restrictions and incompetence there has been an appreciable improve- ment during the last four years.
The general result of ten years of experiment is that Communism is further from realization than ever, but the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is still in possession and seems likely to remain so. The belief that the Russian Revolution had only to succeed for all other nations to follow suit has already passed into the category of wild half-forgotten dreams. Stalin is under no illusions about this, and the fashionable doctrine in Moscow to-day is not that the Capitalism of Europe is wilting, but that the Capitalistic Powers are conspiring to make a joint attack upon Russia. This, of course, is sheer nonsense, and Stalin must know that it is.
It was perhaps natural for Russians to believe that the atmosphere of almost universal revolution could be produced as easily as it was produced (or rather produced itself) in that annus mirabilis of revolution, 1848. However, they were wrong. The moral, in our judgment, is that Russia, instead of being driven back upon herself and forced into the position of a permanent Ishmaelite, or compelled to make undesirable alliances with those who are indifferent to the maintenance of peace, should be brought whenever and wherever it may, be possible into contact with the normal world. Her decision to send representatives to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva makes an opportunity for estahlishing better, because safer, relations. The Soviet has changed much already. It will change more, but it had better be helped to do so.
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