It was not in the industrial West, as Marx had predicted, but in Eastern Europe that socialism reaped its first concrete, tangible victories. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto they also provided for a Danish edition but not for a Russian edition. Yet the Socialist victory in Russia is one of the most important facts in modern history and is worth being a subject of special study. However, there are only three aspects of the Russian Revolution we would like to put under the magnifying glass.
Problem One concerns the question of whether there is something inherently “communist” or collective in the Russian soul.
Problem Two poses the question of whether the Russian Revolution was in any way the “natural reaction” to the “horrors of Czarism,” a swinging of the pendulum to the other side, if not a continuation of the old regime in a new form.
Problem Three leads us to the examination of the factual strength of “Maximalist Socialism,” i.e., of communism at the time of the Revolution.
As to the first question, we must state emphatically not only that there is nothing inherently collective or conformist about the Russian mind and outlook, but that the Russians are extreme individualists with an anarchical bent of mind. Those who defend the theory of the “inborn trend toward collectivism” usually cite the institutions of the mir (land communities) and of the artel’ (common workshops) as well as the principle of sobornos’ (commonalty) in the theology of the Eastern Church. Yet the mir was such an abysmal failure that Stolypin had to liquidate it in the early twentieth century, and sobornost’ has its (admittedly not too close) analogy in the Catholic concept of the Mystical Body. Still the Catholic world no less than the world of the Eastern church has always been the cradle of anarchist parties. It is the world of the Reformation Churches which cultivated strict order, discipline, frugality, conformity, sticking to rules, cooperation, and consensus through massive persuasion and compromise. (In Europe black has always been the symbolic color for Catholics and anarchists!) Russia stood for extremes at all times, but conformity is only possible where the accepted norm is the “happy medium,” the spirit of “fifty-fifty” remote from all absolutes, the juste milieu which Alexander Herzen despised so much.
Edward Crankshaw was perhaps the first author in the English-speaking world who used the anarchical mentality of the Russians as a key to their character and thus to their political behavior. “The Russian,” he wrote, “is a man who regards compromises not as a sign of strength, but as a sign of the dilution of the personality, or self-betrayal, who is, moreover, susceptible in the extreme to outside influence of every kind, who is, in a word, completely experimental and mentally free, in the way that, in the West, only artists are experimental and free (and by no means all of those).” He then went on to explain how such a profoundly anarchical people, despairing of finding an inner cohesion, are willing to accept as a necessary evil “control from above.” He added, finally, “All this, I suggest, is the rigidity of a naturally fluid people who have to forge hoops of iron around themselves or disintegrate utterly. And it all comes from a natural individualism which makes our vaunted, rugged individualism look like an abandonment of personality.”1
Russia, Spain, Italy, and France had, by no means accidentally, the largest anarchist parties at the turn of the century. In Russia the Anarchists (S.R., “Social Revolutionaries”) were the ones who committed practically all the acts of violence. The Communists were too shrewd, too clever to engage in mere terrorism. Conspiracy, organization and mass risings were their means.
The anarchical bent of the South and East Europeans (and of the Catholic or Orthodox nations living in other parts of the world) also makes for a proliferation of parties which, together with an uncompromising extremism, render parliamentary life difficult if not impossible. Hence the almost inevitable failure of the “democratic experiment” in that area.
Point Two is concerned with the swinging of the pendulum. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is an often quoted proverb in America and Britain, presupposing a certain “rationality of emotions.” Yet history (like nature) shows that a big fire can produce very little smoke, and a small fire a lot. And before answering the “pendulum” argument, let us remember that the bolsheviks did not replace an absolute or even a constitutional monarchy, but a democratic republic—the republic of Alexander Kerensky, a moderate Social Revolutionary. And if we apply the smoke-fire theory to Germany, then the Weimar Republic must have been unmitigated hell—which was not the case either. Let us therefore burn many of our history textbooks and give up the idea that history makes “sense” in a mathematical or mechanical way. Neither does great drama.
When we talk about Imperial Russia we ought to bear in mind that after 1905 it was in many ways very different from what it had been in, let us say, 1890. One might easily imagine a bearded man with a newspaper under his arm walking across a street in St. Petersburg in 1912. Who is he? A deputy of the bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party—in other words, a bolshevik sitting in the Duma. What sort of paper does he carry under his arm? Pravda. Where did he buy it? There, at the street corner. Of course, before 1905 people were less free, but Vyera Zassulitch, who tried to assassinate the police prefect Tryepov, was acquitted by a jury. Trotsky described how delightful Russian jails were, with what respect political “criminals” were treated by their wardens. Lenin suffered ssylka, exile in Siberia, but simple exile merely meant that one was forced to live in or near a certain village, received a meager pension but was still able to read, write, hunt, and fish. Life in Siberia around 1900 was no worse than life in North Dakota or Saskatchewan at that time. A friend of mine has even seen the copy of the letter Lenin’s wife wrote from Shushenskoye to the Governor in Irkutsk protesting against the insufficient staff she had been alloted.
Nor should one have wrong conceptions about the agrarian situation. At the time of the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917 the peasantry owned nearly 80 percent of the arable land,2 whereas in Britain more than half of the fertile soil belonged to large estates. (Yet Britain had no violent agrarian movement and Russia had.) Illiteracy was down to about 56 percent, and the schools were multiplying by leaps and bounds. It is also important to note that from a sociological viewpoint the lower classes were much better represented in the Russian high school-colleges than in those of Western Europe.3 The misconceptions about the Russian class structure prevailing in the Western world are so manifold and so deeply rooted that they seem ineradicable. Reading the brilliant three volumes by Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu on late nineteenth-century Russia, L’Empire des tsars et les Russes, one gets a glimpse of a totally mixed society not based on birth or money. Needless to say, the same impression is conveyed by the great Russian novelists of that period.4 As a matter of fact, Russia before the Red October was Europe’s “Eastern America,” a country where social mobility was greater than anywhere else, where titles had by no means the nimbus they had in the West, where fortunes could be made overnight by intelligent and thrifty people regardless of their social background. And if one knew how to speak and to write one indeed had total liberty even before 1905.
Naturally, the lot of the worker was as difficult in Imperial Russia as everywhere else in a nascent industrial society. This was as true of England in the first third of the nineteenth century as it is of contemporary Socialist India. Yet the Imperial government had never any intention of favoring manufacturers unilaterally, nor did it ever side unilaterally with the large landowners. (The emancipation of the serfs—who had never been slaves—was the work of “autocracy” against the wish of the landowning class.) Many a Gordon could say without exaggeration that “records have proved conclusively that Russia was a pioneer in labor legislation.”5 The Okhrana, the secret police, actually started to aid the workers in the establishment of trade unions so that they could defend themselves against exploitation. Actually, a quarter of a century after the Red October the living standards of the workers were lower than they had been in 1914, a fact we find well documented in Manya Gordon’s book, Workers Before and After Lenin. Ilya Ehrenburg, in his recently published memoirs, tells us that in the early 1950s there were fewer domestic animals in the USSR than on the same territory in 1916.6 This situation has not changed much since.7
No doubt certain aspects of the Imperial regime had not improved much even after 1905. There was discrimination against Catholics (but not against Lutherans) in the higher ranks of the administration, but this was also the case in Scandinavia. The Jesuits were outlawed, but they still are in Switzerland. Jews could not reside in the northern and eastern provinces unless they held university degrees or were “merchants first class.” (These restrictions were lifted for those who became Christians: The discrimination was purely religious, not ethnic nor racial.) Only a certain percentage of the university students could be of the Jewish faith, but a numerus clausus of this sort was not unknown in American universities, especially in medical schools priding themselves on their “liberalism.”
In higher female education old Russia was also a pioneer. It was the literary leader of Europe before World War I and had some of the best textbooks on the Continent. Its universities were as good as any in the Western world. Its intelligentsiya (a Russian word!) was perhaps confused but in richness and diversity of ideas it was unexcelled.8
However, this brings us to Problem Three: How did it happen that communism could overpower that great nation? Obviously the turmoil following the lost war provided the setting for the Revolution which was not made by the industrial proletariat. There were practically no workers among the leaders of the Russian Social Democratic party. And when in 1903, at the London congress of this then illegal party, the majority voted for a radical program while the minority stuck to more moderate demands, a real schism took place. The bol’shevikí (majoritarians, maximalists) opposed the men’ shevikí (minoritarians, minimalists), though both still called themselves Social Democrats: Only the bolsheviks favored the Communist label which they have used officially since 1918.9 By 1921 the schism had become permanent: The Social Democrats remained loyal to the Second International, while the Communists established the Third International.
The Bolsheviks, no less than the Mensheviks, were led by men who either belonged to the lower nobility (dvoryane),10 or had a middle-class intellectual background (there were Jews and gentiles among them), or were ex-seminarians. When Joseph de Maistre prophesied that the coming Russian revolution would be led by a “Pugatshov with a university background,”11 he was not far wrong. This description fits Lenin12 only too well, but it could be applied to most other leaders who combined more or less the three great revolutionary gifts: intellectuality, the talent for organizing, and oratorical magnetism.
Yet all these talkers and doers rolled into one could never have won without the aid of rebellious soldiers and sailors consisting mostly of peasants and sons of peasants. The working class of Russia was then only a very small percentage of the population. (We have no exact statistics.) After fighting a rough foreign enemy under oppressive discipline, the soldiers and sailors were now looking for an easy victory. They also wanted to get rid of their officers. Strongly represented in the “Councils (sovyeti) of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers,” they helped the intellectual rabble-rousers to win the day. The middle classes were not only a relatively small layer, they were also unorganized and lacked all cohesion. The Kerensky government fought the rebellious soldiers in the last stage with a female regiment that was decimated, defeated, and taken prisoner by the half-drunken Red heroes. The scenes which followed would have delighted the Divine Marquis, as would the bestial slaughter of the Imperial family in Yekaterinburg.13 Kerensky wanted to have them shipped to Britain, but Lloyd George refused because to the “liberal” Prime Minister, eager to achieve victory at all costs, Nicholas II, desperately wanting peace, was a traitor. The British public would not stand for it, he declared.14 It was manifest in World War I that we have to see in the “moderate left” the force most opposed to peace and prone to the worst excesses of nationalism. In England the main culprit was the leftist David Lloyd George, in America the Democratic Party led by Woodrow Wilson, in France the old Communard Clemenceau and in Russia the “progressive republican” regime of Alexander Kerensky. Those who were eager for peace were the crowned heads, the Pope, and, it must be candidly admitted, the representatives of the working class who tried to gather in Stockholm.
It was evident, however, that in Russia the fall of the monarchy in March 1917 had destroyed the center and object of all loyalty. It was impossible to stabilize the country on a juste milieu, in a middle of the road position. Effective opposition against the victorious Communists came only from the right and from the Anarchists. A series of civil wars (1918-1920) followed, fought on a military rather than a revolutionary basis. From these wars the Communists emerged as victors not only because they held the center of the Russian railroad net but also because they had the support of the peasantry which was thoroughly intoxicated by dreams of further land gains.
The first big agrarian partition had taken place after the emancipation of the serfs, when land was allotted in the form of the mir to entire communities. The mir was a complete failure, so Stolypin,15 Minister of the Interior and then Prime Minister, decided to carve up the mir-lands and to give them in permanence to individual holders, which set an end to the periodic famines. He planned additional partitions of latifundia so that by 1930 the large landowners would have held no more than 11 percent of the arable land. (They had only slightly more than 22 percent in 1916).16 While thrifty peasants now got ahead, the lazy ones sold their plots to the more ambitious, the so-called kulaks. Since ambition is not considered a great virtue in Russia,17 the kulaks became generally disliked.
The Communists promised to divide all estates not owned by peasants. The result was a fairly general adherence of the peasantry to the Communists. (This was less true in the Ukraine or in the Cossack—Don and Kuban—areas.) The “Whites” fought a losing battle because the soldiers (practically all of them peasants and peasants’ sons) ran over to the Red Army which promised them land. After the collapse of the White Armies (which had some battalions consisting of officers and noncoms only), the peasants failed to till the land they had, and new famines were the result, whereupon the Red authorities started to confiscate food. The reaction to this was a further lessening of production: Money, after all, was worthless. Then collectivization had to be enforced. First the kulaks were denounced, attacked, expropriated, and frequently deported. Next the lesser peasants were enslaved. The Russian countryside, far more so than the cities, went through incredible agonies. In a sense this was poetic justice. To this day the agrarian sector of the USSR is the poorhouse of the nation—and its unhappiest part too.
As one can see, each part of Russia has its share of guilt in the Revolution. So too, of course, have other “Christian” nations and, last but not least, those Germans such as General Ludendorff who reimported Lenin to Russia in 1917. (Which only proves that it is criminal to commit immoralities for the benefit of one’s nation. Right causes are universal causes—such as the Christian tradition in government. The thinly disguised contempt with which the bolsheviks treated the Germans during the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk was well deserved.) The Russian working class was perhaps the least guilty. Eminently guilty were the avaricious peasants and, above all, the brilliant, scintillating, amiable intelligentsiya. For generations it had undermined the fabric of Holy Mother Russia, either by siding with the Social Revolutionaries, the Narodnaya Volya, the Social Democrats, or by being “open minded,”18 by deriding the national heritage, by spreading polite doubt, by stupidly imitating Western patterns, ideas, and institutions which never would do for Russia. Dostoyevski in The Possessed (Byessy) has shown very vividly how liberal relativism and skepticism spawned the monstrosities which came to the surface in the last decades before the Revolution.19 And Dostoyevski knew. In his youth he had been a leftist himself and, as a member of the Pyetrashevski conspiracy, he had been condemned to death and had lived in a Siberian prison, in “The House of the Dead.”20
In one of the most brilliant books on the Communist Revolution, Tsarstvo Antikhrista,21 Dmitri Myerezhkovski wrote: “Not on account of their own strength are the Bolsheviks powerful but only thanks to your weakness. They know what they want, but you do not know what you want. They all want the same thing: among you everybody wants something else.”
And he also quotes Rozanov: “The deeper reason for all that has happened now has to be found in the fact that in the civilized world vanishing Christianity has created enormous cavities and now everything tumbles down into them.”22
In Russia, however, (and some time later in Germany) these cavities were not only of a religious but of a political nature. It is important to remember that there always will be a more or less obvious, a more or less subtle, a more or less invisible connection between the two. In the case of Russia it was the small, evil glow of communism that lit up the entire dark void until, at last, in our days the residue of Christianity along with the natural protest of man against an inhuman ideology generated a spirit of resistance.
The picture offered to us by dogmatic socialism23 in action is strikingly similar to that of the French Revolution. No wonder, since the leadership had a very similar sociological structure: bitter and confused members of the nobility,24 murderously idealistic intellectual bourgeois, alienated wicked priests, friars, and seminarians. There were almost the same high-flown speeches, the destruction of ancient buildings, the desecration of tombs and cemeteries, the furious attacks against religion, the declamatory pathos of writers, the complete one-track-mindedness in political thought, mob violence, and turmoil in the countryside accompanied by arson and robbery. Gracchus Babeuf, after all, was worshiped and exalted by the bolsheviki as their forerunner. And instead of the virtuous citoyen the virtuous proletarian was now arrayed against the “rotten old order” as a new ideal.
This was an image to gladden the heart of “progressives” the world over. However, what they overlooked was the price for introducing what was really a retrogressive system: the thousands of people killed in the Revolution, male and female soldiers;25 the two million killed in the two years of civil war; the six million who died in the famines of 1920-1922; the eight million who perished under the same circumstances; the hundreds of thousands executed by the Tshe-Ka,26 the GPU, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB; the millions who died in Stalin’s concentration camps, including Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tartars, Jews, and Volga-Germans, all deported under inhuman conditions. But even this gigantic massacre is dwarfed by the record of Red China. Mao Tse-tung murdered in a shorter period millions more than Lenin, Stalin and his successors combined. And today we see how a heroic Chinese communism in Indochina fights to the last Vietnamese while the Americans at least risk their own skins in preventing the massacre of at least four million innocents. To these staggering numbers must be added those killed in “foreign wars” fought over ideological issues.
Indeed the calamities caused by Soviet communism are not confined to Russia. (Nor did Chinese communism remain a “local” affair.) World War II would never have taken place had not Stalin given the “green light” to Hitler by promising a simultaneous attack against Poland.27 One of its consequences was (with Western acquiescence, to be sure) the tyranny established in Europe between the Soviet border and the Iron Curtain. Going further back, there was the Russian intervention in Spain and, at the root of all this, the reaction to the Soviet challenge in the form of Fascism and, even worse, of German National Socialism. In character and basic doctrine these reactions very much resembled “communistic socialism” (which is genuine socialism) and differed from it only in financial techniques. While the Western totalitarians accepted statism and the total subordination of the individual to the whole, while they clearly represented another form of materialism, they nevertheless revolted against the Russian edition of Communist danger, against the new imperialism emanating from Moscow.28 They were not the “enemies” of communism but its “competitors,” even if there can be greater bitterness in rivalry than in opposition. And, as a matter of fact, the tensions and hatreds mounted literally to a cutthroat competition, a term which under the circumstances very well illustrates this tragic and terrifying issue, expressed geographically in one of the worst wars history has ever seen, the “Third War of Austrian Succession,” commonly called World War II. In this struggle the economic left overpowered the biological left, while the “moderate left” shared in none of the spoils and was in spite of all their efforts and merits the loser.