I have told the story of my visit to Russia in a separate volume. A reference to the last chapter of “Through Bolshevik Russia” would help towards a clearer understanding of the few additional pages upon Russia which are all that can be spared to it in this book. That chapter speculates upon the future of Soviet Russia.
I have seen no reason since writing that book to revise in the slightest degree the judgment of Bolshevism there expressed. One of the points of criticism levelled against it by those who questioned the wisdom of its publication, but not the sincerity of its writer, was that I had not been sufficiently careful to distinguish between Bolshevism for the Russians and Bolshevism for this country. The one, it was argued, was necessary for the break-up of capitalism in Russia. It is unnecessary for the break-up of capitalism in a country where every adult person is equipped either with the vote or with the right of industrial organization.
With the argument I am not for the moment concerned; but I have indeed written foggily if it is not clear from my writing that I am hostile to Bolshevism as a political creed and system, and to its application to Russia only less than to its imposition upon England. The attempt to destroy an idea with guns is stupid at any time. To try to destroy it by force of arms in Russia was an unwarrantable cruelty on the part of the Allies, an impertinent interference in another country’s internal affairs, and the crowning act of folly of an Entente which has distinguished itself for acts of madness since the days of the Armistice.
Perhaps it would be as well to state once again some of the reasons which moved me to criticism of the Bolshevik leaders, their programme and their policy.
First, let it be admitted once more, and emphasized in a manner which can leave no doubt in the reader’s mind, that for the nameless sufferings of the Russian people from hunger, cold and disease, and for the state of war which has kept Europe restless, unsettled and distressed for the two and a half years since the Armistice, the Allied Governments must bear the chief burden of responsibility. During the whole of that time Russia was engaged gallantly beating off one military adventurer after another, equipped by the Allies with arms and stores. She did not want war. She desired above all things peace. With her wireless she filled the air with cries for peace even whilst she dealt triumphant blows to the right and left of her, as one foe succeeded another. These wireless waves struck upon the ears of the whole world and turned pitying hearts towards Russia who had no love for Russia’s Bolshevism. Still peace was denied. France, crazy with fear of a possible Russo-German alliance, supplied one adventurer after another with the necessary equipment, in pursuit of a policy which made for the very thing she dreaded. England with her ships blockaded Russia’s ports, sowing a deadly hatred for this country in the hearts of mothers and fathers of little children dead of hunger, and making inevitable a Russian policy in the East unfavourable to British interests.
But this fully granted, the Russian Bolsheviks must accept a very considerable part of the blame. These men and women are not fools. The chiefs are highly educated and widely read. They have an incomparable knowledge of world affairs. I very much doubt if there is a man living with a larger acquaintance with the foreign politics of the world than the brilliant Radek, or a woman who knows more of Socialist history and organization than Madame Balabanova. What outsider can judge with perfect fairness the act of a great man in the critical epochs of his country’s history? It may have seemed to the Bolshevik leaders, in order to stop the fatal disintegration of Russia’s economic life which was the first fruit of peace and the Revolution, of the first necessity to seize power and destroy the beginnings of democratic growth exemplified in the Zemstvo and the National Assembly. Their contempt for any democracy other than a Communist democracy may have sincerely justified itself in their eyes in the miserable circumstances of the time of the Second Revolution. I indict them much less for their swift deeds in the early days of the Revolution than for their settled policy after the Revolution was accomplished, although they must have known that both the one and the other would give the enemies of Russia in Western Europe the excuse for invading her for which they were looking.
No consideration was shown of the effect upon the Russian town populations of the attempt to carry out their complete party programme, with its consequent provocation of blockades, embargoes and wars, at a time when three years of war with Germany had used up even the vast Russian resources and worn her weary soldiers to the very bone and marrow of them. One noted Bolshevik met my remonstrances against the policy, which meant the wilful sacrifice of the entire population of Petrograd, with the words: “But the population of one city, what is that? Three-quarters of a million? Well, but there are plenty of millions left in Russia.”
This is the true militarist psychology. I almost imagined I heard Mr. Winston Churchill speak; or General Ludendorff; or Marshal Foch.
The inevitable consequence of forcing a programme upon a people unripe for it, or unwilling, is tyranny and terror. In Ireland it is the tyranny of the minority. In Russia it is the tyranny of the minority. In Russia it is called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a mere phrase, apt as most clever phrases to enslave and corrupt. The dictatorship of the proletariat means, in Russia, the dictatorship of a handful of clever political economists, very few of whom are proletarians, over an immense mass of peasants and workmen. Their intelligent support they drew from the workmen of the towns, their tacit support from the peasants, whom they bribed with the promise of land. Indeed, they established a system of virtual peasant proprietorship, creating a thousand vested interests where one had existed before, and yielding up the first plank in their programme in the very first hour of their power!
I do not charge the Bolshevik leaders with wilfully contriving terror and torture. I do not suggest they wallowed delightedly in the blood of fellow creatures. Ignorant and lustful brutes, self-elevated to power in remote towns and villages, did deeds in the name of the Soviet which make distressing reading. The official Terror of the Government was aimed at their own firm establishment and not carried on for the mere pleasure of killing. But the Communist philosophy predicates terror, and advocates its ruthless use against the adversary in the supposed interests of a glorious eventuality. To such lengths does the policy that the end justifies the means bring men and women otherwise humane! To such dangers is a population brought which permits its minority to ride rough-shod over the majority as in Russia!
That Lenin and the others sincerely desired peace in the beginning I am convinced. At Brest-Litovsk they issued a manifesto to the world which, for the idealism of its language and the beauty of its appeal, has not been surpassed in the political and diplomatic history of mankind. It was a plea to all the nations and their governments to stop fighting and to make peace upon the basis of self-determination for the nations and without penal indemnities for the conquered, the programme afterwards professed by Allied statesmen in order to undermine the resistance of the German people. The crime of rejecting this proposal rests with Germans and Allies alike. Mutual fears, hates, mistrusts were too strong, too deeply ingrained, and the Russian idealists were despised and rejected of men!
The Trotsky who raised the banner of universal peace at Brest-Litovsk, the prince of pacifists, became the prince of militarists, the great war lord of a hundred and fifty millions of people stung to arms again. The marvellously revived and sternly disciplined armies of Trotsky have performed miracles of soldier-craft which have filled an astonished world with reluctant admiration, tossing aside their enemies, Judenitch, Petlura, Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, like terriers in a barn full of rats. Such exploits and the sympathetic agitation they aroused in the Allied countries compelled the Allies to face facts, always a difficult thing for them to do; and the outstanding fact of the situation is that, whether Bolshevism be approved or not, Soviet Russia must be taken into account in the shaping of the foreign policies of the Western Powers by a statesman who does not wish to go down to posterity as the worst kind of detrimental.
I am not a Communist in the Russian sense of the term. And the Communism of primitive Christianity, voluntary and unselfish, appears not to be practical politics at the moment. I believe that the system called Capitalism will have to give place some day to a collectivist internationalism which shall secure life and the fruits of the earth to its populations in proportion to their needs. I believe this change will come about slowly as the intelligence of the peoples develops, as they become acquainted with facts and see demonstrated before their eyes the insufficiency, insecurity and injustice of a system based upon production for profit rather than for use. Such things as are fundamental to life itself—land, minerals and means of communication—should not be at the disposal and under the control of a small number of private persons any more than the army, the navy and the arsenals. It is too unsafe. For the rest: Those things of which there is an abundant supply might not unreasonably be held privately; provided that nobody who desires them goes without, and nobody’s private ownership inflicts injury on the community at large.
But the Russian Communists favour the complete abolition of private property down to the books one reads and the clothes one wears. This programme they have carried out by methods of wholesale and swift confiscation without the slightest consideration for the unfortunate owners, creating new injustices in order to remove the old, and provoking thereby the inevitable reaction. This is of the essence of the revolutionary method. It is not happy for Russia. It would be just as unhappy for England or America.
The Bolshevik Government is now in the fourth year of its existence. This fact is adduced by its admirers in this country as a mark of super-excellence. Truly at a time when European Governments are changed with the regularity and rapidity of moving pictures at a theatre some credit is due to a Government which can survive the shocks of war and revolution through nearly four years of Europe’s stormiest history.
But the long life of the present Russian Government is due to three or four primary causes. It is due to Allied support of counter-revolutionary movements, which drew every section of the Russian population together for common defence against the foreign intruder. It is due to the fact that no alternative government has presented itself with a programme which would give more food and furniture, clothes and medicines to the people of Russia. It is due to the fear of the Extraordinary Commission with its agents and spies and prisons and executioners. But above all it is due—and particularly in these latter days since the fear of foreign invasion has departed—to the acceptance by Lenin and his friends of moderate counsels, and the gradually achieved ascendancy in the government of the nation of the more moderate men amongst the Bolsheviks.
It is, and always has been, a mistake to assume that all the Bolshevik leaders are equally extreme. It was not true when we visited Russia in May, 1920. It is much less true to-day. During the period of civil wars and Allied invasions the extreme element was dominant. Now the moderates rule. Lenin has never wavered from his fixed idea of world-communism and world-revolution; but he has proved his greatness to his friends and has confounded his enemies by yielding to the necessity for compromise, making deals with the alien capitalist governments and with the native individualist peasants alike.
Turning to my other pages on Russia for the estimate I there recorded of the keen-brained, merry-eyed fanatic of the Kremlin (for the wisdom and statesmanship of twelve months later have astonished me as much as they have surprised most people), I discovered the following sentences:
“He (Lenin) impressed me with his fanaticism. This is surely the source of his driving power. And yet I am told that compared with the really fanatical Communist Lenin is mildness itself, and should be classed with the ‘Right.’ It was rumoured that he is engaged on a new book to be given the name ‘The Infant Diseases of Communism,’ or some such title, which suggests an honest confession of mistakes made in the early days of the commune. If this be true there is hope of happiness for Russia yet. But I must confess his firm belief in the necessity of violence for the establishment throughout the world of his ideals makes one doubt miserably.”
I no longer doubt Lenin’s capacity. More than that I am inclined to believe that history will accord to him one of her foremost places when the tale of these times comes to be told, in spite of the terrible blunders and awful crimes for which he will, in part, be held responsible. It takes either a true lover of his country or one who having tasted power knows how to keep it, to confess his mistakes in the ear of a listening world apt to say “I told you so.” If Lenin loves power and means to keep it, I, who differ from him in aim and loathe with a deadly loathing his past methods, declare my conviction that it is for no selfish end that he seeks to preserve his hold upon the Russian nation, but for the good of his cause and for the ultimate realization of his dreams that he has risked unpopularity with his extreme supporters, and has met half-way the capitalists at home and abroad. The following sentences extracted from his speech to the Annual Congress of the Russian Communist Party held on March 7, 1921, promise a bright era for Russia yet:
“As far back as April, 1918, it was thought that the civil war was concluded. In March, 1920, the Soviet Government supposed that a period of peace was beginning, but already in the following month the Polish attack was launched. This experience teaches us that we should not cherish undue optimism, although at the present time there is not a single enemy soldier on Russian territory. Our internal affairs are concerned mainly with problems of demobilization, food supplies and fuel. We have made mistakes in the distribution of the food supplies, although these supplies were much greater than in previous years. Difficulties with fuel were due to the fact that we began to renew our industries at too rapid a rate. We over-estimated our powers in the transition from war-time to peace-time management. Agriculture is passing through a period of crisis, not only in consequence of the imperial and civil war, but also because the new State mechanism is building up its methods of work only by a gradual process, and for that reason it still makes mistakes from time to time. The most important political problem of the present period is the relation between the peasants and the industrial population which in Russia preponderates to a considerable degree. The international situation is marked by an unusually slow development of the revolutionary movement throughout the world, and in no case do we look for its speedy victory. The Soviet Government is therefore considering the question of the necessity for an agreement with the bourgeois Governments, which would result in the granting of concessions to foreign capitalists in Russia. The agricultural population, which supposes that the Czarist generals are no longer a menace to it and that it is receiving too small a share of industrial products, considers that the sacrifices demanded of it are too great. We must show consideration for the efforts of the agricultural workers. We are introducing a natural food tax which will be distributed in proportion to the resources of the peasantry, and will give a free scope of activity to their material interests. This tax will absorb only a portion of the agricultural worker’s produce. What he has left he will be able to sell by means of local markets and trade. And just as the concessions are to provide us with the means of production for our industries, so, too, by showing consideration for the wishes of the agricultural worker, we are at the same time mitigating the agricultural crisis and improving at the same time the relationship between the working classes in the cities and the peasantry. The question of the natural food tax is the most important problem of the Soviet policy. The accomplishment of this task is beset with serious obstacles, and demands the closest concentration of the Party, as well as a clear understanding of the difficulties delaying the dictatorship of the proletarist in a petty bourgeois state.”
Thus passes at a stroke the communal ownership of the fruits of the land as well as of the land itself! Thus return the bourgeois institution of private trading and the ancient exploitation of the concessionaire! It was inevitable, and the wise man bowed to the necessity. Lenin’s line is the one upon which I hoped and believed that Russia’s future might develop, the line which, but for the fanaticism of a comparative few, once including Lenin, might have been taken very much earlier with advantage to Russia and the rest of Europe.
But whether this line of slower and more peaceful development will be permitted to Russia remains to be seen. I sincerely hope it may. There are discontented democrats, however, rightly insisting on the speedy restoration of democratic political methods. They want the Zemstvo restored and the National Constituent Assembly. They want simple and equal adult suffrage, as much for the peasants as for the townsfolk. They want vote by ballot. They want freedom of thought, of speech and of the press. They want restrictions on labour removed and freedom of contract restored. They want free trade. Will these good things be given back to the Russians at an early date? I am very hopeful. A good beginning has just been made.
If Lenin has restored to himself and his Government by his drastic reform of the levy on the peasants, those vast millions of Russian folk, he can, if he chooses, continue his regime for an indefinite time. With such modifications in the system as I have just named this would be the best way out of Russia’s present distressing state, for, should counter-revolution arise and spread, a new chaos would almost certainly follow, opening up dreadful possibilities for the population; and for the watchful and greedy adventurers, out to carve a kingdom for themselves from Russia’s enormous territories, or thirsty to exploit her unimaginable resources of precious metals and rich forests in their own selfish interests, would present the opportunities they are palpitating to use.
But there is yet another element threatening the future happiness of Russia—her own Napoleons, and the flushed and triumphant militarism which supports them. Trotsky has the reputation of an extremist. There is said to be a coldness between Lenin and himself. It is commonly believed that he will not readily disband the army that he has created and employed with such signal success. Not only that, but he believes with many others that Bolshevism can only survive if a strong, active and triumphant army supports it. He believes that the conquest of the East for Bolshevism will not only keep the soldiers busy and add to the glory of Russian arms, but will menace the proud empires which have caused so much unnecessary suffering to his people, and which are still opposing the interests of Russia, though in less apparent fashion. It is openly said in Moscow that Trotsky himself is the coming Napoleon.
The Russo-Polish peace signed at Riga on March 18, 1921, and ratified by Poland on April 16 points rather in the other direction; unless, as is suggested, it was signed through fear of defeat or in order to clear the way for a concentration of warlike operations in the Caucasus and the Near East. The fear of defeat it is impossible to believe in. Russia is too big to be defeated.
The recent news from the Caucasus, however, supplies conclusive evidence, as far as it goes, of a distinctively imperialist policy, which recks as little of the right of self-determination as the policies of capitalist governments. A treaty with Kemal Pasha and joint action between the Turkish Nationalists and the Bolsheviks against Armenia (that pitiful victim of Allied policy), and Georgia, promised self-government and independence by Moscow only a few months previously; the domination of Azerbaijan from Moscow for the security to Russia of the oil supplies of Baku; the intrusion of Soviet politics into Persia with its intended threat to British interests in India; Bolshevik propaganda marching with the armies or bulging from the portfolios of the political and diplomatic agents of Russia—these things and others, have an alarming appearance of old-fashioned militarist Imperialism very disturbing to those who wish well to Russia, and who long desperately that she shall not copy too closely the aims and methods of the discredited diplomacy of the Western Powers, even though it be on behalf of the whole nation and not of a single class that the methods of conquest and spoliation be employed.
The alliance between Kemal Pasha and the Bolsheviks can have no other meaning than a common design to embarrass the Entente’s plans in the Near East, and to menace British and French capitalist interests in India, Mesopotamia and Angora. Kemal Pasha is no more a Bolshevik than the man in the moon. The cynical Radek is clearly aware of all this. He wrote in the Moscow Pravda of January 26, 1921, examining the possibility of the revision of the Treaty of Sèvres and the consequent desertion of themselves by Kemal and his army:
“Which way Kemal Pasha will choose we certainly cannot say; but we have never been so simple as to throw ourselves unreservedly in the embraces of the Nationalists of the East. It is an absolute necessity for us to be on guard, and not only to be awake but to act also. The stronger we are on the Caucasus the more solid our position in Turkestan, the more real our assistance, the more certain shall we be to hasten the development of the East in the direction and in the interests of world revolution.”
He rejoices in the same article on the complete Bolshevization of Georgia, the recalcitrant, whilst his colleague, Steklov, in Isvestia of January 30, 1921, wrote with equal cynicism of removing “the black point” (Georgia) from the Caucasus, and so making easy joint action between the Kemalists and themselves against the armies serving the interests of the Entente. Thus, in spite of solemn pledges, promises of protection, League of Nations covenants and the rest, the wretched Armenians are tossed into the laps of new tyrants, the close associates of the old, whose unspeakable cruelties towards their hapless dependents have scandalized mankind for generations; whilst the unhappy Georgians have had to stop their constructive work for social democracy to defend themselves almost with bare fists against the faithless Russian hordes whose leaders had guaranteed their independence. Of this I shall write elsewhere.
Writing these words in the warmth of a bright April sun, within sight of trees weighed down with vast masses of snowy blossom, the pink and white of the cherry and the apple, a soft wind from the valley blowing gently in at the tiny casement window, the mind turns to the quite other scenes of exactly a year ago. In the imagination are pictured the endless plains of Russia with the patient peasant walking at midnight behind his span of oxen and his wooden plough; the brown, muddy waters of the rolling Volga with its picturesque rafts carrying whole villages; the red-robed Kalmuk priest in the cold moonlight; the glittering domes of Moscow’s thousand churches; the dull, pale-faced hungry crowds of Petrograd; the happy children, utterly fearless, on the great estates of vanished proprietors; the lazy routine of numberless offices; the careworn and incompetent high officials, with their indolent staffs and littered desks and stuffy buildings; the talkative Commissars; the strife, the passion, the idealism of it all.
In Moscow sits Tchicherine, master of the foreign policy of a country the size of Europe. Who would have expected Tchicherine to achieve such an exalted position in so short a time who had seen this delicate man fidgeting on the edge of his chair in the office of the National Council for Civil Liberties, seeking the help for Russian prisoners in England of the Council’s Executive Committee? His thin, artistic fingers tapped the table nervously as he spoke in a high-pitched rather strained voice. His manner was shrinking. He lacked the usual voluble earnestness of the Socialist exile. He suggested the gentle and refined artist, the man of taste and leisure. He was full of a timid courtesy. His diffidence was a temptation to the coarse and undiscerning to be rough and contemptuous of the suppliant.
When we saw him in Moscow he looked as though all the woes of the world had been laid by force upon his frail and inadequate shoulders. His clothes appeared to be many sizes too big for him. He looked over his collar like a frightened owl over a hedge fence. Soft and slow of speech, but of quick intelligence and with the clearest outlook, his true friend would none the less wish him a happier fate than to be Minister of State in a country so full of tangled problems as Russia in these dreadful days. Making beautiful music to a company of congenial souls, the samovar steaming merrily and the song going gaily behind warm, close curtains, in the light of a bright fire, till the dawn on the horizon told of the coming day, is the proper life for this gentle Minister, whom to know is to like. Perhaps such a dream-picture comes to him in the small hours of many a weary morning to cheer him to renewed efforts in the cause which alone, he believes, can make his dreams come true.
“You will never go to Russia again, of course,” said a friend. “They would never let you come out alive.” But I shall go to Russia again some day. I shall go because Russia is the kind of country which, having once won you, claims your interest and affection for all time. You cannot escape the love of her. She draws in a fatal way all who have come under her magic spell.
Russia is crammed full of mystery. Nobody can define her. Her people are lovable, beautiful, idealistic, spiritual; but coarse and cruel too. They are a race of artists with gifts of this sort for mankind that have not yet been dreamt of. Russia is not Bolshevism. This hard, cruel phase will pass, is already passing. What the next chapter in Russian history will be who can tell? What Russia’s contribution will be to the world’s political problems who will dare to prophesy?
A generation is growing up in Russia which has seen fearful things and done dreadful deeds. Its children have grown weary, toying with corpses. But in spite of that I am sure that Russia will justify the brightest hopes of her. That her gift to mankind will be a great contribution both materially and spiritually I am convinced. At present the land of mystery calls for our aid and co-operation. She will give to us more than we can give to her. But for many years to come she will be clothed in mystery for most, until the material blends with the spiritual and the oneness of life becomes known to all the nations of the earth.
I must tell a true story of Moscow. Hauntingly, like a strange, sad dream, comes the remembrance of that nightly experience in the big city. Every morn, at the same hour, the hour when the last rays of twilight give instant place to the first beams of morning light, the hour of two, a woman’s clear voice rang out in a mournful strain, sometimes piercingly shrill, sometimes pathetic; sometimes a tender moan, sometimes a scream of agony; never joyous, ever tormented. The singing seemed to come from the building opposite the hotel where we were lodged, a building which looked like a factory. The song was always the same.
Larghissimo e con angore.
The key was changed for every repetition of the wailing song. Sometimes a line was omitted. Sometimes only three or four notes of a line were sung. A pause of the proper length was made whenever notes were left out of a line, or for the whole line when this was not sung, and the tune resumed at the end of the pause, thus:
Larghissimo e con angore.
The effect was weird and torturing. Whom could it be? What could it mean? Was some sick creature housed opposite? Was some poor woman kept a prisoner by force? Was it a piece of religious ritual? Was somebody mad?
I spoke to one or two of my colleagues about it. They slept soundly and heard nothing. I inquired of the Bolshevik servants. They knew nothing about it. A Bolshevik secretary had the room next to mine. Often he typed all night. Sometimes he paced the room till the day dawned. He could scarcely fail to hear the voice. But he could not help me.
Perhaps some Russian reading this book will write and tell me the meaning of that torturing cry, of that singing ghost which is one of my liveliest memories. She shall be, till then, the symbol of all Russia, tragic, seductive, mysterious; the bride of the East calling to the bridegroom of the West to come and set her free for the marriage which is to be fruitful for the happiness of mankind.
