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The Practice and Theory
of Bolshevism



Bertrand Russell





LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1




_First published November 1920_
_Reprinted     February 1921_



(_All rights reserved_)




PREFACE


The Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events of the
world's history. It is natural to compare it to the French Revolution,
but it is in fact something of even more importance. It does more to
change daily life and the structure of society: it also does more to
change men's beliefs. The difference is exemplified by the difference
between Marx and Rousseau: the latter sentimental and soft, appealing
to emotion, obliterating sharp outlines; the former systematic like
Hegel, full of hard intellectual content, appealing to historic
necessity and the technical development of industry, suggesting a view
of human beings as puppets in the grip of omnipotent material forces.
Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with
those of the rise of Islam; and the result is something radically new,
which can only be understood by a patient and passionate effort of
imagination.

Before entering upon any detail, I wish to state, as clearly and
unambiguously as I can, my own attitude towards this new thing.

By far the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is as an
attempt to realize Communism. I believe that Communism is necessary to
the world, and I believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's
hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of Communism in
the future. Regarded as a splendid attempt, without which ultimate
success would have been very improbable, Bolshevism deserves the
gratitude and admiration of all the progressive part of mankind.

But the method by which Moscow aims at establishing Communism is a
pioneer method, rough and dangerous, too heroic to count the cost of
the opposition it arouses. I do not believe that by this method a
stable or desirable form of Communism can be established. Three issues
seem to me possible from the present situation. The first is the
ultimate defeat of Bolshevism by the forces of capitalism. The second
is the victory of the Bolshevists accompanied by a complete loss of
their ideals and a régime of Napoleonic imperialism. The third is a
prolonged world-war, in which civilization will go under, and all its
manifestations (including Communism) will be forgotten.

It is because I do not believe that the methods of the Third
International can lead to the desired goal that I have thought it
worth while to point out what seem to me undesirable features in the
present state of Russia. I think there are lessons to be learnt which
must be learnt if the world is ever to achieve what is desired by
those in the West who have sympathy with the original aims of the
Bolsheviks. I do not think these lessons can be learnt except by
facing frankly and fully whatever elements of failure there are in
Russia. I think these elements of failure are less attributable to
faults of detail than to an impatient philosophy, which aims at
creating a new world without sufficient preparation in the opinions
and feelings of ordinary men and women.

But although I do not believe that Communism can be realized
immediately by the spread of Bolshevism, I do believe that, if
Bolshevism falls, it will have contributed a legend and a heroic
attempt without which ultimate success might never have come. A
fundamental economic reconstruction, bringing with it very
far-reaching changes in ways of thinking and feeling, in philosophy
and art and private relations, seems absolutely necessary if
industrialism is to become the servant of man instead of his master.
In all this, I am at one with the Bolsheviks; politically, I criticize
them only when their methods seem to involve a departure from their
own ideals.

There is, however, another aspect of Bolshevism from which I differ
more fundamentally. Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it
is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.
When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible,
by quoting texts from Marx and Engels. A full-fledged Communist is not
merely a man who believes that land and capital should be held in
common, and their produce distributed as nearly equally as possible.
He is a man who entertains a number of elaborate and dogmatic
beliefs--such as philosophic materialism, for example--which may be
true, but are not, to a scientific temper, capable of being known to
be true with any certainty. This habit, of militant certainty about
objectively doubtful matters, is one from which, since the
Renaissance, the world has been gradually emerging, into that temper
of constructive and fruitful scepticism which constitutes the
scientific outlook. I believe the scientific outlook to be
immeasurably important to the human race. If a more just economic
system were only attainable by closing men's minds against free
inquiry, and plunging them back into the intellectual prison of the
middle ages, I should consider the price too high. It cannot be denied
that, over any short period of time, dogmatic belief is a help in
fighting. If all Communists become religious fanatics, while
supporters of capitalism retain a sceptical temper, it may be assumed
that the Communists will win, while in the contrary case the
capitalists would win. It seems evident, from the attitude of the
capitalist world to Soviet Russia, of the Entente to the Central
Empires, and of England to Ireland and India, that there is no depth
of cruelty, perfidy or brutality from which the present holders of
power will shrink when they feel themselves threatened. If, in order
to oust them, nothing short of religious fanaticism will serve, it is
they who are the prime sources of the resultant evil. And it is
permissible to hope that, when they have been dispossessed, fanaticism
will fade, as other fanaticisms have faded in the past.

The present holders of power are evil men, and the present manner of
life is doomed. To make the transition with a minimum of bloodshed,
with a maximum of preservation of whatever has value in our existing
civilization, is a difficult problem. It is this problem which has
chiefly occupied my mind in writing the following pages. I wish I
could think that its solution would be facilitated by some slight
degree of moderation and humane feeling on the part of those who enjoy
unjust privileges in the world as it is.

The present work is the outcome of a visit to Russia, supplemented by
much reading and discussion both before and after. I have thought it
best to record what I saw separately from theoretical considerations,
and I have endeavoured to state my impressions without any bias for or
against the Bolsheviks. I received at their hands the greatest
kindness and courtesy, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for the
perfect freedom which they allowed me in my investigations. I am
conscious that I was too short a time in Russia to be able to form
really reliable judgments; however, I share this drawback with most
other westerners who have written on Russia since the October
Revolution. I feel that Bolshevism is a matter of such importance that
it is necessary, for almost every political question, to define one's
attitude in regard to it; and I have hopes that I may help others to
define their attitude, even if only by way of opposition to what I
have written.

I have received invaluable assistance from my secretary, Miss D.W.
Black, who was in Russia shortly after I had left. The chapter on Art
and Education is written by her throughout. Neither is responsible for
the other's opinions.

  BERTRAND RUSSELL

  _September, 1920._




CONTENTS


                                                        PAGE
PREFACE                                                    5


PART I
THE PRESENT CONDITION OF RUSSIA

   I. WHAT IS HOPED FROM BOLSHEVISM                       15

  II. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS                             24

 III. LENIN, TROTSKY AND GORKY                            36

  IV. ART AND EDUCATION                                   45

   V. COMMUNISM AND THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION               72

  VI. THE FAILURE OF RUSSIAN INDUSTRY                     81

 VII. DAILY LIFE IN MOSCOW                                92

VIII. TOWN AND COUNTRY                                    99

  IX. INTERNATIONAL POLICY                               106


PART II
BOLSHEVIK THEORY

   I. THE MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF HISTORY                119

  II. DECIDING FORCES IN POLITICS                        128

 III. BOLSHEVIK CRITICISM OF DEMOCRACY                   134

  IV. REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP                        146

   V. MECHANISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL                       157

  VI. WHY RUSSIAN COMMUNISM HAS FAILED                   165

 VII. CONDITIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF COMMUNISM            178




PART I

THE PRESENT CONDITION OF RUSSIA




I

WHAT IS HOPED FROM BOLSHEVISM


To understand Bolshevism it is not sufficient to know facts; it is
necessary also to enter with sympathy or imagination into a new
spirit. The chief thing that the Bolsheviks have done is to create a
hope, or at any rate to make strong and widespread a hope which was
formerly confined to a few. This aspect of the movement is as easy to
grasp at a distance as it is in Russia--perhaps even easier, because
in Russia present circumstances tend to obscure the view of the
distant future. But the actual situation in Russia can only be
understood superficially if we forget the hope which is the motive
power of the whole. One might as well describe the Thebaid without
mentioning that the hermits expected eternal bliss as the reward of
their sacrifices here on earth.

I cannot share the hopes of the Bolsheviks any more than those of the
Egyptian anchorites; I regard both as tragic delusions, destined to
bring upon the world centuries of darkness and futile violence. The
principles of the Sermon on the Mount are admirable, but their effect
upon average human nature was very different from what was intended.
Those who followed Christ did not learn to love their enemies or to
turn the other cheek. They learned instead to use the Inquisition and
the stake, to subject the human intellect to the yoke of an ignorant
and intolerant priesthood, to degrade art and extinguish science for a
thousand years. These were the inevitable results, not of the
teaching, but of fanatical belief in the teaching. The hopes which
inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by
the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically, and are
likely to do as much harm. Cruelty lurks in our instincts, and
fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty. Fanatics are seldom genuinely
humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a
fanatical creed. I do not know whether Bolshevism can be prevented
from acquiring universal power. But even if it cannot, I am persuaded
that those who stand out against it, not from love of ancient
injustice, but in the name of the free spirit of Man, will be the
bearers of the seeds of progress, from which, when the world's
gestation is accomplished, new life will be born.

The war has left throughout Europe a mood of disillusionment and
despair which calls aloud for a new religion, as the only force
capable of giving men the energy to live vigorously. Bolshevism has
supplied the new religion. It promises glorious things: an end of the
injustice of rich and poor, an end of economic slavery, an end of war.
It promises an end of the disunion of classes which poisons political
life and threatens our industrial system with destruction. It promises
an end to commercialism, that subtle falsehood that leads men to
appraise everything by its money value, and to determine money value
often merely by the caprices of idle plutocrats. It promises a world
where all men and women shall be kept sane by work, and where all work
shall be of value to the community, not only to a few wealthy
vampires. It is to sweep away listlessness and pessimism and weariness
and all the complicated miseries of those whose circumstances allow
idleness and whose energies are not sufficient to force activity. In
place of palaces and hovels, futile vice and useless misery, there is
to be wholesome work, enough but not too much, all of it useful,
performed by men and women who have no time for pessimism and no
occasion for despair.

The existing capitalist system is doomed. Its injustice is so glaring
that only ignorance and tradition could lead wage-earners to tolerate
it. As ignorance diminishes, tradition becomes weakened, and the war
destroyed the hold upon men's minds of everything merely traditional.
It may be that, through the influence of America, the capitalist
system will linger for another fifty years; but it will grow
continually weaker, and can never recover the position of easy
dominance which it held in the nineteenth century. To attempt to
bolster it up is a useless diversion of energies which might be
expended upon building something new. Whether the new thing will be
Bolshevism or something else, I do not know; whether it will be better
or worse than capitalism, I do not know. But that a radically new
order of society will emerge, I feel no doubt. And I also feel no
doubt that the new order will be either some form of Socialism or a
reversion to barbarism and petty war such as occurred during the
barbarian invasion. If Bolshevism remains the only vigorous and
effective competitor of capitalism, I believe that no form of
Socialism will be realized, but only chaos and destruction. This
belief, for which I shall give reasons later, is one of the grounds
upon which I oppose Bolshevism. But to oppose it from the point of
view of a supporter of capitalism would be, to my mind, utterly
futile and against the movement of history in the present age.

The effect of Bolshevism as a revolutionary hope is greater outside
Russia than within the Soviet Republic. Grim realities have done much
to kill hope among those who are subject to the dictatorship of
Moscow. Yet even within Russia, the Communist party, in whose hands
all political power is concentrated, still lives by hope, though the
pressure of events has made the hope severe and stern and somewhat
remote. It is this hope that leads to concentration upon the rising
generation. Russian Communists often avow that there is little hope
for those who are already adult, and that happiness can only come to
the children who have grown up under the new régime and been moulded
from the first to the group-mentality that Communism requires. It is
only after the lapse of a generation that they hope to create a Russia
that shall realize their vision.

In the Western World, the hope inspired by Bolshevism is more
immediate, less shot through with tragedy. Western Socialists who have
visited Russia have seen fit to suppress the harsher features of the
present régime, and have disseminated a belief among their followers
that the millennium would be quickly realized there if there were no
war and no blockade. Even those Socialists who are not Bolsheviks for
their own country have mostly done very little to help men in
appraising the merits or demerits of Bolshevik methods. By this lack
of courage they have exposed Western Socialism to the danger of
becoming Bolshevik through ignorance of the price that has to be paid
and of the uncertainty as to whether the desired goal will be reached
in the end. I believe that the West is capable of adopting less
painful and more certain methods of reaching Socialism than those that
have seemed necessary in Russia. And I believe that while some forms
of Socialism are immeasurably better than capitalism, others are even
worse. Among those that are worse I reckon the form which is being
achieved in Russia, not only in itself, but as a more insuperable
barrier to further progress.

In judging of Bolshevism from what is to be seen in Russia at present,
it is necessary to disentangle various factors which contribute to a
single result. To begin with, Russia is one of the nations that were
defeated in the war; this has produced a set of circumstances
resembling those found in Germany and Austria. The food problem, for
example, appears to be essentially similar in all three countries. In
order to arrive at what is specifically Bolshevik, we must first
eliminate what is merely characteristic of a country which has
suffered military disaster. Next we come to factors which are Russian,
which Russian Communists share with other Russians, but not with other
Communists. There is, for example, a great deal of disorder and chaos
and waste, which shocks Westerners (especially Germans) even when they
are in close political sympathy with the Bolsheviks. My own belief is
that, although, with the exception of a few very able men, the Russian
Government is less efficient in organization than the Germans or the
Americans would be in similar circumstances, yet it represents what is
most efficient in Russia, and does more to prevent chaos than any
possible alternative government would do. Again, the intolerance and
lack of liberty which has been inherited from the Tsarist régime is
probably to be regarded as Russian rather than Communist. If a
Communist Party were to acquire power in England, it would probably be
met by a less irresponsible opposition, and would be able to show
itself far more tolerant than any government can hope to be in Russia
if it is to escape assassination. This, however, is a matter of
degree. A great part of the despotism which characterizes the
Bolsheviks belongs to the essence of their social philosophy, and
would have to be reproduced, even if in a milder form, wherever that
philosophy became dominant.

It is customary among the apologists of Bolshevism in the West to
excuse its harshness on the ground that it has been produced by the
necessity of fighting the Entente and its mercenaries. Undoubtedly it
is true that this necessity has produced many of the worst elements in
the present state of affairs. Undoubtedly, also, the Entente has
incurred a heavy load of guilt by its peevish and futile opposition.
But the expectation of such opposition was always part of Bolshevik
theory. A general hostility to the first Communist State was both
foreseen and provoked by the doctrine of the class war. Those who
adopt the Bolshevik standpoint must reckon with the embittered
hostility of capitalist States; it is not worth while to adopt
Bolshevik methods unless they can lead to good in spite of this
hostility. To say that capitalists are wicked and we have no
responsibility for their acts is unscientific; it is, in particular,
contrary to the Marxian doctrine of economic determinism. The evils
produced in Russia by the enmity of the Entente are therefore to be
reckoned as essential in the Bolshevik method of transition to
Communism, not as specially Russian. I am not sure that we cannot even
go a step further. The exhaustion and misery caused by unsuccessful
war were necessary to the success of the Bolsheviks; a prosperous
population will not embark by such methods upon a fundamental economic
reconstruction. One can imagine England becoming Bolshevik after an
unsuccessful war involving the loss of India--no improbable
contingency in the next few years. But at present the average
wage-earner in England will not risk what he has for the doubtful gain
of a revolution. A condition of widespread misery may, therefore, be
taken as indispensable to the inauguration of Communism, unless,
indeed, it were possible to establish Communism more or less
peacefully, by methods which would not, even temporarily, destroy the
economic life of the country. If the hopes which inspired Communism at
the start, and which still inspire its Western advocates, are ever to
be realized, the problem of minimizing violence in the transition must
be faced. Unfortunately, violence is in itself delightful to most
really vigorous revolutionaries, and they feel no interest in the
problem of avoiding it as far as possible. Hatred of enemies is easier
and more intense than love of friends. But from men who are more
anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no
great good is to be expected.




II

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS


I entered Soviet Russia on May 11th and recrossed the frontier on June
16th. The Russian authorities only admitted me on the express
condition that I should travel with the British Labour Delegation, a
condition with which I was naturally very willing to comply, and which
that Delegation kindly allowed me to fulfil. We were conveyed from the
frontier to Petrograd, as well as on subsequent journeys, in a special
_train de luxe_; covered with mottoes about the Social Revolution and
the Proletariat of all countries; we were received everywhere by
regiments of soldiers, with the Internationale being played on the
regimental band while civilians stood bare-headed and soldiers at the
salute; congratulatory orations were made by local leaders and
answered by prominent Communists who accompanied us; the entrances to
the carriages were guarded by magnificent Bashkir cavalry-men in
resplendent uniforms; in short, everything was done to make us feel
like the Prince of Wales. Innumerable functions were arranged for us:
banquets, public meetings, military reviews, etc.

The assumption was that we had come to testify to the solidarity of
British Labour with Russian Communism, and on that assumption the
utmost possible use was made of us for Bolshevik propaganda. We, on
the other hand, desired to ascertain what we could of Russian
conditions and Russian methods of government, which was impossible in
the atmosphere of a royal progress. Hence arose an amicable contest,
degenerating at times into a game of hide and seek: while they assured
us how splendid the banquet or parade was going to be, we tried to
explain how much we should prefer a quiet walk in the streets. I, not
being a member of the Delegation, felt less obligation than my
companions did to attend at propaganda meetings where one knew the
speeches by heart beforehand. In this way, I was able, by the help of
neutral interpreters, mostly English or American, to have many
conversations with casual people whom I met in the streets or on
village greens, and to find out how the whole system appears to the
ordinary non-political man and woman. The first five days we spent in
Petrograd, the next eleven in Moscow. During this time we were living
in daily contact with important men in the Government, so that we
learned the official point of view without difficulty. I saw also what
I could of the intellectuals in both places. We were all allowed
complete freedom to see politicians of opposition parties, and we
naturally made full use of this freedom. We saw Mensheviks, Social
Revolutionaries of different groups, and Anarchists; we saw them
without the presence of any Bolsheviks, and they spoke freely after
they had overcome their initial fears. I had an hour's talk with
Lenin, virtually _tête-à-tête_; I met Trotsky, though only in company;
I spent a night in the country with Kamenev; and I saw a great deal of
other men who, though less known outside Russia, are of considerable
importance in the Government.

At the end of our time in Moscow we all felt a desire to see something
of the country, and to get in touch with the peasants, since they form
about 85 per cent, of the population. The Government showed the
greatest kindness in meeting our wishes, and it was decided that we
should travel down the Volga from Nijni Novgorod to Saratov, stopping
at many places, large and small, and talking freely with the
inhabitants. I found this part of the time extraordinarily
instructive. I learned to know more than I should have thought
possible of the life and outlook of peasants, village schoolmasters,
small Jew traders, and all kinds of people. Unfortunately, my friend,
Clifford Allen, fell ill, and my time was much taken up with him. This
had, however, one good result, namely, that I was able to go on with
the boat to Astrakhan, as he was too ill to be moved off it. This not
only gave me further knowledge of the country, but made me acquainted
with Sverdlov, Acting Minister of Transport, who was travelling on the
boat to organize the movement of oil from Baku up the Volga, and who
was one of the ablest as well as kindest people whom I met in Russia.

One of the first things that I discovered after passing the Red Flag
which marks the frontier of Soviet Russia, amid a desolate region of
marsh, pine wood, and barbed wire entanglements, was the profound
difference between the theories of actual Bolsheviks and the version
of those theories current among advanced Socialists in this country.
Friends of Russia here think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as
merely a new form of representative government, in which only working
men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly
occupational, not geographical. They think that "proletariat" means
"proletariat," but "dictatorship" does not quite mean "dictatorship."
This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of
dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the
proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the
"class-conscious" part of the proletariat, _i.e._, the Communist
Party.[1] He includes people by no means proletarian (such as Lenin
and Tchicherin) who have the right opinions, and he excludes such
wage-earners as have not the right opinions, whom he classifies as
lackeys of the _bourgeoisie_. The Communist who sincerely believes the
party creed is convinced that private property is the root of all
evil; he is so certain of this that he shrinks from no measures,
however harsh, which seem necessary for constructing and preserving
the Communist State. He spares himself as little as he spares others.
He works sixteen hours a day, and foregoes his Saturday half-holiday.
He volunteers for any difficult or dangerous work which needs to be
done, such as clearing away piles of infected corpses left by Kolchak
or Denikin. In spite of his position of power and his control of
supplies, he lives an austere life. He is not pursuing personal ends,
but aiming at the creation of a new social order. The same motives,
however, which make him austere make him also ruthless. Marx has
taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this fits
in with the Oriental traits in the Russian character, and produces a
state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahomet.
Opposition is crushed without mercy, and without shrinking from the
methods of the Tsarist police, many of whom are still employed at
their old work. Since all evils are due to private property, the evils
of the Bolshevik régime while it has to fight private property will
automatically cease as soon as it has succeeded.

These views are the familiar consequences of fanatical belief. To an
English mind they reinforce the conviction upon which English life has
been based ever since 1688, that kindliness and tolerance are worth
all the creeds in the world--a view which, it is true, we do not apply
to other nations or to subject races.

In a very novel society it is natural to seek for historical
parallels. The baser side of the present Russian Government is most
nearly paralleled by the Directoire in France, but on its better side
it is closely analogous to the rule of Cromwell. The sincere
Communists (and all the older members of the party have proved their
sincerity by years of persecution) are not unlike the Puritan
soldiers in their stern politico-moral purpose. Cromwell's dealings
with Parliament are not unlike Lenin's with the Constituent Assembly.
Both, starting from a combination of democracy and religious faith,
were driven to sacrifice democracy to religion enforced by military
dictatorship. Both tried to compel their countries to live at a higher
level of morality and effort than the population found tolerable. Life
in modern Russia, as in Puritan England, is in many ways contrary to
instinct. And if the Bolsheviks ultimately fall, it will be for the
reason for which the Puritans fell: because there comes a point at
which men feel that amusement and ease are worth more than all other
goods put together.

Far closer than any actual historical parallel is the parallel of
Plato's Republic. The Communist Party corresponds to the guardians;
the soldiers have about the same status in both; there is in Russia an
attempt to deal with family life more or less as Plato suggested. I
suppose it may be assumed that every teacher of Plato throughout the
world abhors Bolshevism, and that every Bolshevik regards Plato as an
antiquated _bourgeois_. Nevertheless, the parallel is extraordinarily
exact between Plato's Republic and the régime which the better
Bolsheviks are endeavouring to create.

Bolshevism is internally aristocratic and externally militant. The
Communists in many ways resemble the British public-school type: they
have all the good and bad traits of an aristocracy which is young and
vital. They are courageous, energetic, capable of command, always
ready to serve the State; on the other hand, they are dictatorial,
lacking in ordinary consideration for the plebs. They are practically
the sole possessors of power, and they enjoy innumerable advantages in
consequence. Most of them, though far from luxurious, have better food
than other people. Only people of some political importance can obtain
motor-cars or telephones. Permits for railway journeys, for making
purchases at the Soviet stores (where prices are about one-fiftieth of
what they are in the market), for going to the theatre, and so on,
are, of course, easier to obtain for the friends of those in power
than for ordinary mortals. In a thousand ways, the Communists have a
life which is happier than that of the rest of the community. Above
all, they are less exposed to the unwelcome attentions of the police
and the extraordinary commission.

The Communist theory of international affairs is exceedingly simple.
The revolution foretold by Marx, which is to abolish capitalism
throughout the world, happened to begin in Russia, though Marxian
theory would seem to demand that it should begin in America. In
countries where the revolution has not yet broken out, the sole duty
of a Communist is to hasten its advent. Agreements with capitalist
States can only be make-shifts, and can never amount on either side to
a sincere peace. No real good can come to any country without a bloody
revolution: English Labour men may fancy that a peaceful evolution is
possible, but they will find their mistake. Lenin told me that he
hopes to see a Labour Government in England, and would wish his
supporters to work for it, but solely in order that the futility of
Parliamentarism may be conclusively demonstrated to the British
working man. Nothing will do any real good except the arming of the
proletariat and the disarming of the _bourgeoisie_. Those who preach
anything else are social traitors or deluded fools.

For my part, after weighing this theory carefully, and after admitting
the whole of its indictment of _bourgeois_ capitalism, I find myself
definitely and strongly opposed to it. The Third International is an
organization which exists to promote the class-war and to hasten the
advent of revolution everywhere. My objection is not that capitalism
is less bad than the Bolsheviks believe, but that Socialism is less
good, not in its best form, but in the only form which is likely to be
brought about by war. The evils of war, especially of civil war, are
certain and very great; the gains to be achieved by victory are
problematical. In the course of a desperate struggle, the heritage of
civilization is likely to be lost, while hatred, suspicion, and
cruelty become normal in the relations of human beings. In order to
succeed in war, a concentration of power is necessary, and from
concentration of power the very same evils flow as from the capitalist
concentration of wealth. For these reasons chiefly, I cannot support
any movement which aims at world revolution. The damage to
civilization done by revolution in one country may be repaired by the
influence of another in which there has been no revolution; but in a
universal cataclysm civilization might go under for a thousand years.
But while I cannot advocate world revolution, I cannot escape from the
conclusion that the Governments of the leading capitalist countries
are doing everything to bring it about. Abuse of our power against
Germany, Russia, and India (to say nothing of any other countries) may
well bring about our downfall, and produce those very evils which the
enemies of Bolshevism most dread.

The true Communist is thoroughly international. Lenin, for example, so
far as I could judge, is not more concerned with the interests of
Russia than with those of other countries; Russia is, at the moment,
the protagonist of the social revolution, and, as such, valuable to
the world, but Lenin would sacrifice Russia rather than the
revolution, if the alternative should ever arise. This is the orthodox
attitude, and is no doubt genuine in many of the leaders. But
nationalism is natural and instinctive; through pride in the
revolution, it grows again even in the breasts of Communists. Through
the Polish war, the Bolsheviks have acquired the support of national
feeling, and their position in the country has been immensely
strengthened.

The only time I saw Trotsky was at the Opera in Moscow. The British
Labour Delegation were occupying what had been the Tsar's box. After
speaking with us in the ante-chamber, he stepped to the front of the
box and stood with folded arms while the house cheered itself hoarse.
Then he spoke a few sentences, short and sharp, with military
precision, winding up by calling for "three cheers for our brave
fellows at the front," to which the audience responded as a London
audience would have responded in the autumn of 1914. Trotsky and the
Red Army undoubtedly now have behind them a great body of nationalist
sentiment. The reconquest of Asiatic Russia has even revived what is
essentially an imperialist way of feeling, though this would be
indignantly repudiated by many of those in whom I seemed to detect it.
Experience of power is inevitably altering Communist theories, and men
who control a vast governmental machine can hardly have quite the same
outlook on life as they had when they were hunted fugitives. If the
Bolsheviks remain in power, it is much to be feared that their
Communism will fade, and that they will increasingly resemble any
other Asiatic Government--for example, our own Government in India.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the article "On the rôle of the Communist Party in the
Proletarian Revolution," in _Theses presented to the Second Congress
of the Communist International, Petrograd-Moscow, 18 July, 1920_--a
valuable work which I possess only in French.




III

LENIN, TROTSKY AND GORKY


Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with
Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well. An interpreter was
present, but his services were scarcely required. Lenin's room is very
bare; it contains a big desk, some maps on the walls, two book-cases,
and one comfortable chair for visitors in addition to two or three
hard chairs. It is obvious that he has no love of luxury or even
comfort. He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without
a trace of _hauteur_. If one met him without knowing who he was, one
would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is
in any way eminent. I have never met a personage so destitute of
self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up
one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of
the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely
friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He
is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of
self-seeking, an embodied theory. The materialist conception of
history, one feels, is his life-blood. He resembles a professor in his
desire to have the theory understood and in his fury with those who
misunderstand or disagree, as also in his love of expounding, I got
the impression that he despises a great many people and is an
intellectual aristocrat.

The first question I asked him was as to how far he recognized the
peculiarity of English economic and political conditions? I was
anxious to know whether advocacy of violent revolution is an
indispensable condition of joining the Third International, although I
did not put this question directly because others were asking it
officially. His answer was unsatisfactory to me. He admitted that
there is little chance of revolution in England now, and that the
working man is not yet disgusted with Parliamentary government. But he
hopes that this result may be brought about by a Labour Ministry. He
thinks that, if Mr. Henderson, for instance, were to become Prime
Minister, nothing of importance would be done; organized Labour would
then, so he hopes and believes, turn to revolution. On this ground, he
wishes his supporters in this country to do everything in their power
to secure a Labour majority in Parliament; he does not advocate
abstention from Parliamentary contests, but participation with a view
to making Parliament obviously contemptible. The reasons which make
attempts at violent revolution seem to most of us both improbable and
undesirable in this country carry no weight with him, and seem to him
mere _bourgeois_ prejudices. When I suggested that whatever is
possible in England can be achieved without bloodshed, he waved aside
the suggestion as fantastic. I got little impression of knowledge or
psychological imagination as regards Great Britain. Indeed the whole
tendency of Marxianism is against psychological imagination, since it
attributes everything in politics to purely material causes.

I asked him next whether he thought it possible to establish Communism
firmly and fully in a country containing such a large majority of
peasants. He admitted that it was difficult, and laughed over the
exchange the peasant is compelled to make, of food for paper; the
worthlessness of Russian paper struck him as comic. But he said--what
is no doubt true--that things will right themselves when there are
goods to offer to the peasant. For this he looks partly to
electrification in industry, which, he says, is a technical necessity
in Russia, but will take ten years to complete.[2] He spoke with
enthusiasm, as they all do, of the great scheme for generating
electrical power by means of peat. Of course he looks to the raising
of the blockade as the only radical cure; but he was not very hopeful
of this being achieved thoroughly or permanently except through
revolutions in other countries. Peace between Bolshevik Russia and
capitalist countries, he said, must always be insecure; the Entente
might be led by weariness and mutual dissensions to conclude peace,
but he felt convinced that the peace would be of brief duration. I
found in him, as in almost all leading Communists, much less eagerness
than existed in our delegation for peace and the raising of the
blockade. He believes that nothing of real value can be achieved
except through world revolution and the abolition of capitalism; I
felt that he regarded the resumption of trade with capitalist
countries as a mere palliative of doubtful value.

He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the
Government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to
acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing. He spoke as though
the dictatorship over the peasant would have to continue a long time,
because of the peasant's desire for free trade. He said he knew from
statistics (what I can well believe) that the peasants have had more
to eat these last two years than they ever had before, "and yet they
are against us," he added a little wistfully. I asked him what to
reply to critics who say that in the country he has merely created
peasant proprietorship, not Communism; he replied that that is not
quite the truth, but he did not say what the truth is.[3]

The last question I asked him was whether resumption of trade with
capitalist countries, if it took place, would not create centres of
capitalist influence, and make the preservation of Communism more
difficult? It had seemed to me that the more ardent Communists might
well dread commercial intercourse with the outer world, as leading to
an infiltration of heresy, and making the rigidity of the present
system almost impossible. I wished to know whether he had such a
feeling. He admitted that trade would create difficulties, but said
they would be less than those of the war. He said that two years ago
neither he nor his colleagues thought they could survive against the
hostility of the world. He attributes their survival to the jealousies
and divergent interests of the different capitalist nations; also to
the power of Bolshevik propaganda. He said the Germans had laughed
when the Bolsheviks proposed to combat guns with leaflets, but that
the event had proved the leaflets quite as powerful. I do not think he
recognizes that the Labour and Socialist parties have had any part in
the matter. He does not seem to know that the attitude of British
Labour has done a great deal to make a first-class war against Russia
impossible, since it has confined the Government to what could be done
in a hole-and-corner way, and denied without a too blatant mendacity.

He thoroughly enjoys the attacks of Lord Northcliffe, to whom he
wishes to send a medal for Bolshevik propaganda. Accusations of
spoliation, he remarked, may shock the _bourgeois_, but have an
opposite effect upon the proletarian.

I think if I had met him without knowing who he was, I should not have
guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and
narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty,
courage, and unwavering faith--religious faith in the Marxian gospel,
which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise,
except that it is less egotistical. He has as little love of liberty
as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when
they acquired power. Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with
whole-hearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot
but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world. I went to
Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has
intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in
itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its
sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Trotsky, whom the Communists do not by any means regard as Lenin's
equal, made more impression upon me from the point of view of
intelligence and personality, though not of character. I saw too
little of him, however, to have more than a very superficial
impression. He has bright eyes, military bearing, lightning
intelligence and magnetic personality. He is very good-looking, with
admirable wavy hair; one feels he would be irresistible to women. I
felt in him a vein of gay good humour, so long as he was not crossed
in any way. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that his vanity was even
greater than his love of power--the sort of vanity that one associates
with an artist or actor. The comparison with Napoleon was forced upon
one. But I had no means of estimating the strength of his Communist
conviction, which may be very sincere and profound.

An extraordinary contrast to both these men was Gorky, with whom I had
a brief interview in Petrograd. He was in bed, apparently very ill and
obviously heart-broken. He begged me, in anything I might say about
Russia, always to emphasize what Russia has suffered. He supports the
Government--as I should do, if I were a Russian--not because he thinks
it faultless, but because the possible alternatives are worse. One
felt in him a love of the Russian people which makes their present
martyrdom almost unbearable, and prevents the fanatical faith by which
the pure Marxians are upheld. I felt him the most lovable, and to me
the most sympathetic, of all the Russians I saw. I wished for more
knowledge of his outlook, but he spoke with difficulty and was
constantly interrupted by terrible fits of coughing, so that I could
not stay. All the intellectuals whom I met--a class who have suffered
terribly--expressed their gratitude to him for what he has done on
their behalf. The materialistic conception of history is all very
well, but some care for the higher things of civilization is a relief.
The Bolsheviks are sometimes said to have done great things for art,
but I could not discover that they had done more than preserve
something of what existed before. When I questioned one of them on the
subject, he grew impatient, and said: "We haven't time for a new art,
any more than for a new religion." Unavoidably, although the
Government favours art as much as it can, the atmosphere is one in
which art cannot flourish, because art is anarchic and resistant to
organization. Gorky has done all that one man could to preserve the
intellectual and artistic life of Russia. I feared that he was dying,
and that, perhaps, it was dying too. But he recovered, and I hope it
will recover also.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Electrification is desired not merely for reorganizing industry,
but in order to industrialize agriculture. In _Theses presented to the
Second Congress of the Communist International_ (an instructive little
book, which I shall quote as _Theses_), it is said in an article on
the Agrarian question that Socialism will not be secure till industry
is reorganized on a new basis with "general application of electric
energy in all branches of agriculture and rural economy," which "alone
can give to the towns the possibility of offering to backward rural
districts a technical and social aid capable of determining an
extraordinary increase of productivity of agricultural and rural
labour, and of engaging the small cultivators, in their own interest,
to pass progressively to a collectivist mechanical cultivation" (p. 36
of French edition).

[3] In _Theses_ (p. 34) it is said: "It would be an irreparable error
... not to admit the gratuitous grant of part of the expropriated
lands to poor and even well-to-do peasants."




IV

ART AND EDUCATION


It has often been said that, whatever the inadequacy of Bolshevik
organization in other fields, in art and in education at least they
have made great progress.

To take first of all art: it is true that they began by recognizing,
as perhaps no other revolutionary government would, the importance and
spontaneity of the artistic impulse, and therefore while they
controlled or destroyed the counter-revolutionary in all other social
activities, they allowed the artist, whatever his political creed,
complete freedom to continue his work. Moreover, as regards clothing
and rations they treated him especially well. This, and the care
devoted to the upkeep of churches, public monuments, and museums, are
well-known facts, to which there has already been ample testimony.

The preservation of the old artistic community practically intact was
the more remarkable in view of the pronounced sympathy of most of them
with the old régime. The theory, however, was that art and politics
belonged to two separate realms; but great honour would of course be
the portion of those artists who would be inspired by the revolution.

Three years' experience, however, have proved the falsity of this
doctrine and led to a divorce between art and popular feeling which a
sensitive observer cannot fail to remark. It is glaringly apparent in
the hitherto most vital of all Russian arts, the theatre. The artists
have continued to perform the old classics in tragedy or comedy, and
the old-style operette. The theatre programmes have remained the same
for the last two years, and, but for the higher standard of artistic
performance, might belong to the theatres of Paris or London. As one
sits in the theatre, one is so acutely conscious of the discrepancy
between the daily life of the audience and that depicted in the play
that the latter seems utterly dead and meaningless. To some of the
more fiery Communists it appears that a mistake has been made. They
complain that _bourgeois_ art is being preserved long after its time,
they accuse the artists of showing contempt for their public, of being
as untouched by the revolutionary mood as an elderly _bourgeoise_
bewailing the loss of her personal comfort; they would like to see
only the revolutionary mood embodied in art, and to achieve this
would make a clean sweep, enforcing the writing and performance of
nothing but revolutionary plays and the painting of revolutionary
pictures. Nor can it be argued that they are wrong as to the facts: it
is plain that the preservation of the old artistic tradition has
served very little purpose; but on the other hand it is equally plain
that an artist cannot be drilled like a military recruit. There is,
fortunately, no sign that these tactics will be directly adopted, but
in an indirect fashion they are already being applied. An artist is
not to blame if his temperament leads him to draw cartoons of leading
Bolsheviks, or satirize the various comical aspects--and they are
many--of the Soviet régime. To force such a man, however, to turn his
talent only against Denikin, Yudenitch and Kolchak, or the leaders of
the Entente, is momentarily good for Communism, but it is discouraging
to the artist, and may prove in the long run bad for art, and possibly
for Communism also. It is plain from the religious nature of Communism
in Russia, that such controlling of the impulse to artistic creation
is inevitable, and that propaganda art alone can flourish in such an
atmosphere. For example, no poetry or literature that is not orthodox
will reach the printing press. It is so easy to make the excuse of
lack of paper and the urgent need for manifestoes. Thus there may
well come to be a repetition of the attitude of the mediæval Church to
the sagas and legends of the people, except that, in this case, it is
the folk tales which will be preserved, and the more sensitive and
civilized products banned. The only poet who seems to be much spoken
of at present in Russia is one who writes rough popular songs. There
are revolutionary odes, but one may hazard a guess that they resemble
our patriotic war poetry.

I said that this state of affairs may in the long run be bad for art,
but the contrary may equally well prove to be the truth. It is of
course discouraging and paralysing to the old-style artist, and it is
death to the old individual art which depended on subtlety and oddity
of temperament, and arose very largely from the complicated psychology
of the idle. There it stands, this old art, the purest monument to the
nullity of the art-for-art's-sake doctrine, like a rich exotic plant
of exquisite beauty, still apparently in its glory, till one perceives
that the roots are cut, and that leaf by leaf it is gradually fading
away.

But, unlike the Puritans in this respect, the Bolsheviks have not
sought to dig up the roots, and there are signs that the paralysis is
merely temporary. Moreover, individual art is not the only form, and
in particular the plastic arts have shown that they can live by mass
action, and flourish under an intolerant faith. Communist artists of
the future may erect public buildings surpassing in beauty the
mediæval churches, they may paint frescoes, organize pageants, make
Homeric songs about their heroes. Communist art will begin, and is
beginning now, in the propaganda pictures, and stories such as those
designed for peasants and children. There is, for instance, a kind of
Rake's Progress or "How she became a Communist," in which the Entente
leaders make a sorry and grotesque appearance. Lenin and Trotsky
already figure in woodcuts as Moses and Aaron, deliverers of their
people, while the mother and child who illustrate the statistics of
the maternity exhibition have the grace and beauty of mediæval
madonnas. Russia is only now emerging from the middle ages, and the
Church tradition in painting is passing with incredible smoothness
into the service of Communist doctrine. These pictures have, too, an
oriental flavour: there are brown Madonnas in the Russian churches,
and such an one illustrates the statistics of infant mortality in
India, while the Russian mother, broad-footed, in gay petticoat and
kerchief, sits in a starry meadow suckling her baby from a very ample
white breast. I think that this movement towards the Church tradition
may be unconscious and instinctive, and would perhaps be deplored by
many Communists, for whom grandiose bad Rodin statuary and the crudity
of cubism better express what they mean by revolution. But this
revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well,
should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp. It is would-be
primitive and popular art that is vulgar. Such at least is the
reflection engendered by an inspection of Russian peasant work as
compared with the spirit of _Children's Tales_.

The Russian peasant's artistic impulse is no legend. Besides the
carving and embroidery which speak eloquently to peasant skill, one
observes many instances in daily life. He will climb down, when his
slowly-moving train stops by the wayside, to gather branches and
flowers with which he will decorate the railway carriage both inside
and out, he will work willingly at any task which has beauty for its
object, and was all too prone under the old régime to waste his time
and his employer's material in fashioning small metal or wooden
objects with his hands.

If the _bourgeois_ tradition then will not serve, there is a popular
tradition which is still live and passionate and which may perhaps
persist. Unhappily it has a formidable enemy in the organization and
development of industry, which is far more dangerous to art than
Communist doctrine. Indeed, industry in its early stages seems
everywhere doomed to be the enemy of beauty and instinctive life. One
might hope that this would not prove to be so in Russia, the first
Socialist State, as yet unindustrial, able to draw on the industrial
experience of the whole world, were it not that one discovers with a
certain misgiving in the Bolshevik leaders the rasping arid
temperament of those to whom the industrial machine is an end in
itself, and, in addition, reflects that these industrially minded men
have as yet no practical experience, nor do there exist men of
goodwill to help them. It does not seem reasonable to hope that Russia
can pass through the period of industrialization without a good deal
of mismanagement, involving waste resulting in too long hours, child
labour and other evils with which the West is all too familiar. What
the Bolsheviks would not therefore willingly do to art, the Juggernaut
which they are bent on setting in motion may accomplish for them.

The next generation in Russia will have to consist of practical
hard-working men, the old-style artists will die off and successors
will not readily arise. A State which is struggling with economic
difficulties is bound to be slow to admit an artistic vocation, since
this involves exemption from practical work. Moreover the majority of
minds always turn instinctively to the real need of the moment. A man
therefore who is adapted by talent and temperament to becoming an
opera singer, will under the pressure of Communist enthusiasm and
Government encouragement turn his attention to economics. (I am here
quoting an actual instance.) The whole Russian people at this stage in
their development strike one as being forced by the logic of their
situation to make a similar choice.

It may be all to the good that there should be fewer professional
artists, since some of the finest work has been done by men and groups
of men to whom artistic expression was only a pastime. They were not
hampered by the solemnity and reverence for art which too often
destroy the spontaneity of the professional. Indeed a revival of this
attitude to art is one of the good results which may be hoped for from
a Communist revolution in a more advanced industrial community. There
the problem of education will be to stimulate the creative impulses
towards art and science so that men may know how to employ their
leisure hours. Work in the factory can never be made to provide an
adequate outlet. The only hope, if men are to remain human beings
under industrialism, is to reduce hours to the minimum. But this is
only possible when production and organization are highly efficient,
which will not be the case for a long time in Russia. Hence not only
does it appear that the number of artists will grow less, but that the
number of people undamaged in their artistic impulses and on that
account able to create or appreciate as amateurs is likely to be
deplorably small. It is in this damaging effect of industry on human
instinct that the immediate danger to art in Russia lies.

The effect of industry on the crafts is quite obvious. A craftsman who
is accustomed to work with his hands, following the tradition
developed by his ancestors, is useless when brought face to face with
a machine. And the man who can handle the machine will only be
concerned with quantity and utility in the first instance. Only
gradually do the claims of beauty come to be recognized. Compare the
modern motor car with the first of its species, or even, since the
same law seems to operate in nature, the prehistoric animal with its
modern descendant. The same relation exists between them as between
man and the ape, or the horse and the hipparion. The movement of life
seems to be towards ever greater delicacy and complexity, and man
carries it forward in the articles that he makes and the society that
he develops. Industry is a new tool, difficult to handle, but it will
produce just as beautiful objects as did the mediæval builder and
craftsman, though not until it has been in being for a long time and
belongs to tradition.

One may expect, therefore, that while the crafts in Russia will lose
in artistic value, the drama, sculpture and painting and all those
arts which have nothing to do with the machine and depend entirely
upon mental and spiritual inspiration will receive an impetus from the
Communist faith. Whether the flowering period will be long or short
depends partly on the political situation, but chiefly on the rapidity
of industrial development. It may be that the machine will ultimately
conquer the Communist faith and grind out the human impulses, and
Russia become during this transition period as inartistic and soulless
as was America until quite recent years. One would like to hope that
mechanical progress will be swift and social idealism sufficiently
strong to retain control. But the practical difficulties are almost
insuperable.

Such signs of the progress of art as it is possible to notice at this
early stage would seem to bear out the above argument. For instance,
an attempt is being made to foster the continuation of peasant
embroidery, carving, &c., in the towns. It is done by people who have
evidently lost the tradition already. They are taught to copy the
models which are placed in the Peasant Museum, but there is no
comparison between the live little wooden lady who smiles beneath the
glass case, and the soulless staring-eyed creature who is offered for
sale, nor between the quite ordinary carved fowl one may buy and the
amusing life-like figure one may merely gaze at.

But when one comes to art directly inspired by Communism it is a
different story. Apart from the propaganda pictures already referred
to, there are propaganda plays performed by the Red Army in its spare
moments, and there are the mass pageant plays performed on State
occasions. I had the good fortune to witness one of each kind.

The play was called _Zarevo_ (The Dawn), and was performed on a
Saturday night on a small stage in a small hall in an entirely amateur
fashion. It represented Russian life just before the revolution. It
was intense and tragic and passionately acted. Dramatic talent is not
rare in Russia. Almost the only comic relief was provided by the
Tsarist police, who made one appearance towards the end, got up like
comic military characters in a musical comedy--just as, in mediæval
miracle plays, the comic character was Satan. The play's intention was
to show a typical Russian working-class family. There were the old
father, constantly drunk on vodka, alternately maudlin and scolding;
the old mother; two sons, the one a Communist and the other an
Anarchist; the wife of the Communist, who did dressmaking; her
sister, a prostitute; and a young girl of _bourgeois_ family, also a
Communist, involved in a plot with the Communist son, who was of
course the hero of the play.

The first act revealed the stern and heroic Communist maintaining his
views despite the reproaches of father and mother and the nagging of
his wife. It showed also the Anarchist brother (as might be expected
from the Bolshevik hostility to Anarchism) as an unruly, lazy,
ne'er-do-well, with a passionate love for Sonia, the young
_bourgeoise_, which was likely to become dangerous if not returned.
She, on the other hand, obviously preferred the Communist. It was
clear that he returned her love, but it was not quite clear that he
would wish the relation to be anything more than platonic comradeship
in the service of their common ideal. An unsuccessful strike, bringing
want and danger from the police, together with increasing jealousy on
the part of the Anarchist, led up to the tragic dénouement. I was not
quite definite as to how this was brought about. All violent action
was performed off the stage, and this made the plot at times difficult
to follow. But it seemed that the Anarchist in a jealous rage forged a
letter from his brother to bring Sonia to a rendezvous, and there
murdered her, at the same time betraying his brother to the police.
When the latter came to effect his arrest, and accuse him also, as the
most likely person, of the murder, the Anarchist was seized with
remorse and confessed. Both were therefore led away together. Once the
plot is sketched, the play calls for no comment. It had not great
merit, though it is unwise to hazard a judgment on a play whose
dialogue was not fully interpreted, but it was certainly real, and the
link between audience and performers was established as it never
seemed to be in the professional theatre. After the performance, the
floor was cleared for dancing, and the audience were in a mood of
thorough enjoyment.

The pageant of the "World Commune," which was performed at the opening
of the Third International Congress in Petrograd, was a still more
important and significant phenomenon. I do not suppose that anything
of the kind has been staged since the days of the mediæval mystery
plays. It was, in fact, a mystery play designed by the High Priests of
the Communist faith to instruct the people. It was played on the steps
of an immense white building that was once the Stock Exchange, a
building with a classical colonnade on three sides of it, with a vast
flight of steps in front, that did not extend the whole width of the
building but left at each side a platform that was level with the
floor of the colonnade. In front of this building a wide road ran
from a bridge over one arm of the river to a bridge over the other, so
that the stretches of water and sky on either side seemed to the eye
of imagination like the painted wings of a gigantic stage. Two
battered red columns of fantastic design, that were once light towers
to guide ships, stood on either side midway between the extremities of
the building and the water, but on the opposite side of the road.
These two towers were beflagged and illuminated and carried the
limelight, and between and behind them was gathered a densely packed
audience of forty or fifty thousand people. The play began at sundown,
while the sky was still red away to the right and the palaces on the
far bank to the left still aglow with the setting sun, and it
continued under the magic of the darkening sky. At first the beauty
and grandeur of the setting drew the attention away from the
performers, but gradually one became aware that on the platform before
the columns kings and queens and courtiers in sumptuous conventional
robes, and attended by soldiers, were conversing in dumb show with one
another. A few climbed the steps of a small wooden platform that was
set up in the middle, and one indicated by a lifted hand that here
should be built a monument to the power of capitalism over the earth.
All gave signs of delight. Sentimental music was heard, and the gay
company fell to waltzing away the hours. Meanwhile, from below on the
road level, there streamed out of the darkness on either side of the
building and up the half-lit steps, their fetters ringing in harmony
with the music, the enslaved and toiling masses coming in response to
command to build the monument for their masters. It is impossible to
describe the exquisite beauty of the slow movement of those dark
figures aslant the broad flight of steps; individual expressions were
of course indistinguishable, and yet the movement and attitude of the
groups conveyed pathos and patient endurance as well as any individual
speech or gesture in the ordinary theatre. Some groups carried hammer
and anvil, and others staggered under enormous blocks of stone. Love
for the ballet has perhaps made the Russians understand the art of
moving groups of actors in unison. As I watched these processions
climbing the steps in apparently careless and spontaneous fashion, and
yet producing so graceful a result, I remembered the mad leap of the
archers down the stage in _Prince Igor_, which is also apparently
careless and spontaneous and full of wild and irregular beauty, yet
never varies a hair-breadth from one performance to the next.

For a time the workers toiled in the shadow in their earthly world,
and dancing continued in the lighted paradise of the rulers above,
until presently, in sign that the monument was complete, a large
yellow disc was hoisted amid acclamation above the highest platform
between the columns. But at the same moment a banner was uplifted
amongst the people, and a small figure was seen gesticulating. Angry
fists were shaken and the banner and speaker disappeared, only to
reappear almost immediately in another part of the dense crowd. Again
hostility, until finally among the French workers away up on the
right, the first Communist manifesto found favour. Rallying around
their banner the _communards_ ran shouting down the steps, gathering
supporters as they came. Above, all is confusion, kings and queens
scuttling in unroyal fashion with flying velvet robes to safe citadels
right and left, while the army prepares to defend the main citadel of
capitalism with its golden disc of power. The _communards_ scale the
steps to the fortress which they finally capture, haul down the disc
and set their banner in its place. The merry music of the _Carmagnole_
is heard, and the victors are seen expressing their delight by dancing
first on one foot and then on the other, like marionettes. Below, the
masses dance with them in a frenzy of joy. But a pompous procession of
Prussian legions is seen approaching, and, amid shrieks and wails of
despair, the people are driven back, and their leaders set in a row
and shot. Thereafter came one of the most moving scenes in the drama.
Several dark-clad women appeared carrying a black pall supported on
sticks, which they set in front of the bodies of the leaders so that
it stood out, an irregular pointed black shape against the white
columns behind. But for this melancholy monument the stage was now
empty. Thick clouds of black smoke arose from braziers on either side
and obscured the steps and the platform. Through the smoke came the
distant sound of Chopin's _Marche Funèbre_, and as the air became
clearer white figures could be dimly seen moving around the black pall
in a solemn dance of mourning. Behind them the columns shone ghostly
and unreal against the glimmering mauve rays of an uncertain and
watery dawn.

The second part of the pageant opened in July 1914. Once again the
rulers were feasting and the workers at toil, but the scene was
enlivened by the presence of the leaders of the Second International,
a group of decrepit professorial old men, who waddled in in solemn
procession carrying tomes full of international learning. They sat in
a row between the rulers and the people, deep in study, spectacles on
nose. The call to war was the signal for a dramatic appeal from the
workers to these leaders, who refused to accept the Red Flag, but
weakly received patriotic flags from their respective governments.
Jaurès, elevated to be the symbol of protest, towered above the
people, crying in a loud voice, but fell back immediately as the
assassin's shot rang out. Then the people divided into their national
groups and the war began. It was at this point that "God Save the
King" was played as the English soldiers marched out, in a comic
manner which made one think of it as "_Gawd_ save the King." Other
national anthems were burlesqued in a similar fashion, but none quite
so successfully. A ridiculous effigy of the Tsar with a knout in his
hand now occupied the symbolic position and dominated the scene. The
incidents of the war which affected Russia were then played.
Spectacular cavalry charges on the road, marching soldiers, batteries
of artillery, a pathetic procession of cripples and nurses, and other
scenes too numerous to describe, made up that part of the pageant
devoted to the war.

Then came the Russian Revolution in all its stages. Cars dashed by
full of armed men, red flags appeared everywhere, the people stormed
the citadel and hauled down the effigy of the Tsar. The Kerensky
Government assumed control and drove them forth to war again, but soon
they returned to the charge, destroyed the Provisional Government, and
hoisted all the emblems of the Russian Soviet Republic. The Entente
leaders, however, were seen preparing their troops for battle, and the
pageant went on to show the formation of the Red Army under its emblem
the Red Star. White figures with golden trumpets appeared foretelling
victory for the proletariat. The last scene, the World Commune, is
described in the words of the abstract, taken from a Russian
newspaper, as follows:--

    Cannon shots announce the breaking of the blockade against
    Soviet Russia, and the victory of the World Proletariat. The
    Red Army returns from the front, and passes in triumphant
    review before the leaders of the Revolution. At their feet lie
    the crowns of kings and the gold of the bankers. Ships draped
    with flags are seen carrying workers from the west. The
    workers of the whole world, with the emblems of labour, gather
    for the celebration of the World Commune. In the heavens
    luminous inscriptions in different languages appear, greeting
    the Congress: "Long live the Third International! Workers of
    the world, unite! Triumph to the sounds of the hymn of the
    World Commune, the 'International'."

Even so glowing an account, however, hardly does it justice. It had
the pomp and majesty of the Day of Judgment itself. Rockets climbed
the skies and peppered them with a thousand stars, fireworks blazed on
all sides, garlanded and beflagged ships moved up and down the river,
chariots bearing the emblems of prosperity, grapes and corn, travelled
slowly along the road. The Eastern peoples came carrying gifts and
emblems. The actors, massed upon the steps, waved triumphant hands,
trumpets sounded, and the song of the International from ten thousand
throats rose like a mighty wave engulfing the whole.

Though the end of this drama may have erred on the side of the
grandiose, this may perhaps be forgiven the organizers in view of the
occasion for which they prepared it. Nothing, however, could detract
from the beauty and dramatic power of the opening and of many of the
scenes. Moreover, the effects obtained by movement in the mass were
almost intoxicating. The first entrance of the masses gave a sense of
dumb and patient force that was moving in the extreme, and the
frenzied delight of the dancing crowd at the victory of the French
_communards_ stirred one to ecstasy. The pageant lasted for five hours
or more, and was as exhausting emotionally as the Passion Play is said
to be. I had the vision of a great period of Communist art, more
especially of such open-air spectacles, which should have the grandeur
and scope and eternal meaning of the plays of ancient Greece, the
mediæval mysteries, or the Shakespearean theatre. In building,
writing, acting, even in painting, work would be done, as it once was,
by groups, not by one hand or mind, and evolution would proceed slowly
until once again the individual emerged from the mass.

In considering Education under the Bolshevik régime, the same two
factors which I have already dealt with in discussing art, namely
industrial development and the communist doctrine, must be taken into
account. Industrial development is in reality one of the tenets of
Communism, but as it is one which in Russia is likely to endanger the
doctrine as a whole I have thought it better to consider it as a
separate item.

As in the matter of art, so in education, those who have given
unqualified praise seem to have taken the short and superficial view.
It is hardly necessary to launch into descriptions of the crèches,
country homes or palaces for children, where Montessori methods
prevail, where the pupils cultivate their little gardens, model in
plasticine, draw and sing and act, and dance their Eurythmic dances
barefoot on floors once sacred to the tread of the nobility. I saw a
reception and distributing house in Petrograd with which no fault
could be found from the point of view of scientific organization. The
children were bright-eyed and merry, and the rooms airy and clean. I
saw, too, a performance by school children in Moscow which included
some quite wonderful Eurythmic dancing, in particular an
interpretation of Grieg's _Tanz in der Halle des Bergkönigs_ by the
Dalcroze method, but with a colour and warmth which were Russian, and
in odd contrast to the mathematical precision associated with most
Dalcroze performances.

But in spite of the obvious merit of such institutions as exist,
misgivings would arise. To begin with, it must be remembered that it
is necessary first to admit that children should be delivered up
almost entirely to the State. Nominally, the mother still comes to see
her child in these schools, but in actual fact, the drafting of
children to the country must intervene, and the whole temper of the
authorities seemed to be directed towards breaking the link between
mother and child. To some this will seem an advantage, and it is a
point which admits of lengthy discussion, but as it belongs rather to
the question of women and the family under Communism, I can do no more
than mention it here.

Then, again, it must be remembered that the tactics of the Bolsheviks
towards such schools as existed under the old régime in provincial
towns and villages, have not been the same as their tactics towards
the theatres. The greater number of these schools are closed, in part,
it would seem, from lack of personnel, and in part from fear of
counter-revolutionary propaganda. The result is that, though those
schools which they have created are good and organized on modern
lines, on the whole there would seem to be less diffusion of child
education than before. In this, as in most other departments, the
Bolsheviks show themselves loath to attempt anything which cannot be
done on a large scale and impregnated with Communist doctrine. It goes
without saying that Communist doctrine is taught in schools, as
Christianity has been taught hitherto, moreover the Communist teachers
show bitter hostility to other teachers who do not accept the
doctrine. At the children's entertainment alluded to above, the dances
and poems performed had nearly all some close relation to Communism,
and a teacher addressed the children for something like an hour and a
half on the duties of Communists and the errors of Anarchism.

This teaching of Communism, however necessary it may appear for the
building of the Communist state of the future, does seem to me to be
an evil in that it is done emotionally and fanatically, with an appeal
to hate and militant ardour rather than to constructive reason. It
binds the free intellect and destroys initiative. An industrial state
needs not only obedient and patient workers and artists, it needs also
men and women with initiative in scientific research. It is idle to
provide channels for scientific research later if it is to be choked
at the source. That source is an enquiring and free intellect
unhampered by iron dogma. Beneficial to artistic and emotional
development therefore, the teaching of Communism as a faith may well
be most pernicious to the scientific and intellectual side of
education, and will lead direct to the pragmatist view of knowledge
and scientific research which the Church and the capitalist already
find it so convenient to adopt.

But to come to the chief and most practical question, the relation of
education to industry. Sooner or later education in Russia must become
subordinate to the needs of industrial development. That the
Bolsheviks already realize this is proved by the articles of
Lunacharsky which recently appeared in _Le Phare_ (Geneva). It was the
spectre of industry that haunted me throughout the consideration of
education as in the consideration of art, and what I have said above
of its dangers to the latter seems to me also to apply here.
Montessori schools belong, in my view, to that stage in industrial
development when education is directed as much towards leisure
occupations as towards preparation for professional life. Possibly the
fine flower of useless scientific enquiry belongs to this stage also.
Nobody in Russia is likely to have much leisure for a good many years
to come, if the Bolshevik programme of industrial development is
efficiently carried out. And there seemed to me to be something
pathetic and almost cruel in this varied and agreeable education of
the child, when one reflected on the long hours of grinding toil to
which he was soon to be subject in workshop or factory. For I repeat
that I do not believe industrial work in the early days of industry
can be made tolerable to the worker. Once again I experienced the
dread of seeing the ideals of the Russian revolutionaries go down
before the logic of necessity. They are beginning to pride themselves
on being hard, practical men, and it seems quite reasonable to fear
that they should come to regard this full and humane development of
the child as a mere luxury and ultimately neglect it. Worse still, the
few of these schools which already exist may perhaps become exclusive
to the Communists and their children, or that company of Samurai which
is to leaven and govern the mass of the people. If so, they will soon
come to resemble our public schools, in that they will prepare, in an
artificial play atmosphere, men who will pass straight to the position
of leaders, while the portion of the proletariat who serve under them
will be reading and writing, just so much technical training as is
necessary, and Communist doctrine.

This is a nightmare hypothesis, but the difficulties of the practical
problem seem to warrant its entertainment. The number of people in
Russia who can even read and write is extremely small, the need to
get them employed industrially as rapidly as possible is very great,
hence the system of education which develops out of this situation
cannot be very ambitious or enlightened. Further it will have to
continue over a sufficiently long period of time to allow of the risk
of its becoming stable and traditional. In adult education already the
pupil comes for a short period, learns Communism, reading and
writing--there is hardly time to give him much more--and returns to
leaven the army or his native village. In achieving this the
Bolsheviks are already doing a very important and valuable work, but
they cannot hope for a long while to become the model of public
instruction which they have hitherto been represented to be. And the
conditions of their becoming so ultimately are adherence to their
ideals through a very long period of stress, and a lessening of
fanaticism in their Communist teaching, conditions which, unhappily,
seem to be mutually incompatible.

The whole of the argument set out in this chapter may be summed up in
the statement of one fact which the mere idealist is prone to
overlook, namely that Russia is a country at a stage in economic
development not much more advanced than America in the pioneer days.
The old civilization was aristocratic and exotic; it could not survive
in the modern world. It is true that it produced great men, but its
foundations were rotten. The new civilization may, for the moment, be
less productive of individual works of genius, but it has a new
solidity and gives promise of a new unity. It may be that I have taken
too hopeful a view and that the future evolution of Russia will have
as little connection with the life and tradition of its present
population as modern America with the life of the Red Indian tribes.
The fact that there exists in Russia a population at a far higher
stage of culture, which will be industrially educated, not
exterminated, militates against this hypothesis, but the need for
education may make progress slower than it was in the United States.

One would not have looked for the millennium of Communism, nor even
for valuable art and educational experiment in the America of early
railroading and farming days. Nor must one look for such things from
Russia yet. It may be that during the next hundred years there,
economic evolution will obscure Communist ideals, until finally, in a
country that has reached the stage of present-day America, the battle
will be fought out again to a victorious and stable issue. Unless,
indeed, the Marxian scripture prove to be not infallible, and faith
and heroic devotion show themselves capable of triumphing over
economic necessity.




V

COMMUNISM AND THE SOVIET CONSTITUTION


Before I went to Russia I imagined that I was going to see an
interesting experiment in a new form of representative government. I
did see an interesting experiment, but not in representative
government. Every one who is interested in Bolshevism knows the series
of elections, from the village meeting to the All-Russian Soviet, by
which the people's commissaries are supposed to derive their power. We
were told that, by the recall, the occupational constituencies, and so
on, a new and far more perfect machinery had been devised for
ascertaining and registering the popular will. One of the things we
hoped to study was the question whether the Soviet system is really
superior to Parliamentarism in this respect.

We were not able to make any such study, because the Soviet system is
moribund.[4] No conceivable system of free election would give
majorities to the Communists, either in town or country. Various
methods are therefore adopted for giving the victory to Government
candidates. In the first place, the voting is by show of hands, so
that all who vote against the Government are marked men. In the second
place, no candidate who is not a Communist can have any printing done,
the printing works being all in the hands of the State. In the third
place, he cannot address any meetings, because the halls all belong to
the State. The whole of the press is, of course, official; no
independent daily is permitted. In spite of all these obstacles, the
Mensheviks have succeeded in winning about 40 seats out of 1,500 on
the Moscow Soviet, by being known in certain large factories where the
electoral campaign could be conducted by word of mouth. They won, in
fact, every seat that they contested.

But although the Moscow Soviet is nominally sovereign in Moscow, it is
really only a body of electors who choose the executive committee of
forty, out of which, in turn, is chosen the Presidium, consisting of
nine men who have all the power. The Moscow Soviet, as a whole, meets
rarely; the Executive Committee is supposed to meet once a week, but
did not meet while we were in Moscow. The Presidium, on the contrary,
meets daily. Of course, it is easy for the Government to exercise
pressure over the election of the executive committee, and again over
the election of the Presidium. It must be remembered that effective
protest is impossible, owing to the absolutely complete suppression of
free speech and free Press. The result is that the Presidium of the
Moscow Soviet consists only of orthodox Communists.

Kamenev, the President of the Moscow Soviet, informed us that the
recall is very frequently employed; he said that in Moscow there are,
on an average, thirty recalls a month. I asked him what were the
principal reasons for the recall, and he mentioned four: drinking,
going to the front (and being, therefore, incapable of performing the
duties), change of politics on the part of the electors, and failure
to make a report to the electors once a fortnight, which all members
of the Soviet are expected to do. It is evident that the recall
affords opportunities for governmental pressure, but I had no chance
of finding out whether it is used for this purpose.

In country districts the method employed is somewhat different. It is
impossible to secure that the village Soviet shall consist of
Communists, because, as a rule, at any rate in the villages I saw,
there are no Communists. But when I asked in the villages how they
were represented on the Volost (the next larger area) or the Gubernia,
I was met always with the reply that they were not represented at all.
I could not verify this, and it is probably an overstatement, but all
concurred in the assertion that if they elected a non-Communist
representative he could not obtain a pass on the railway and,
therefore, could not attend the Volost or Gubernia Soviet. I saw a
meeting of the Gubernia Soviet of Saratov. The representation is so
arranged that the town workers have an enormous preponderance over the
surrounding peasants; but even allowing for this, the proportion of
peasants seemed astonishingly small for the centre of a very important
agricultural area.

The All-Russian Soviet, which is constitutionally the supreme body, to
which the People's Commissaries are responsible, meets seldom, and has
become increasingly formal. Its sole function at present, so far as I
could discover, is to ratify, without discussion, previous decisions
of the Communist Party on matters (especially concerning foreign
policy) upon which the constitution requires its decision.

All real power is in the hands of the Communist Party, who number
about 600,000 in a population of about 120 millions. I never came
across a Communist by chance: the people whom I met in the streets or
in the villages, when I could get into conversation with them, almost
invariably said they were of no party. The only other answer I ever
had was from some of the peasants, who openly stated that they were
Tsarists. It must be said that the peasants' reasons for disliking the
Bolsheviks are very inadequate. It is said--and all I saw confirmed
the assertion--that the peasants are better off than they ever were
before. I saw no one--man, woman, or child--who looked underfed in the
villages. The big landowners are dispossessed, and the peasants have
profited. But the towns and the army still need nourishing, and the
Government has nothing to give the peasants in return for food except
paper, which the peasants resent having to take. It is a singular fact
that Tsarist roubles are worth ten times as much as Soviet roubles,
and are much commoner in the country. Although they are illegal,
pocket-books full of them are openly displayed in the market places. I
do not think it should be inferred that the peasants expect a Tsarist
restoration: they are merely actuated by custom and dislike of
novelty. They have never heard of the blockade; consequently they
cannot understand why the Government is unable to give them the
clothes and agricultural implements that they need. Having got their
land, and being ignorant of affairs outside their own neighbourhood,
they wish their own village to be independent, and would resent the
demands of any Government whatever.

Within the Communist Party there are, of course, as always in a
bureaucracy, different factions, though hitherto the external pressure
has prevented disunion. It seemed to me that the personnel of the
bureaucracy could be divided into three classes. There are first the
old revolutionists, tested by years of persecution. These men have
most of the highest posts. Prison and exile have made them tough and
fanatical and rather out of touch with their own country. They are
honest men, with a profound belief that Communism will regenerate the
world. They think themselves utterly free from sentiment, but, in
fact, they are sentimental about Communism and about the régime that
they are creating; they cannot face the fact that what they are
creating is not complete Communism, and that Communism is anathema to
the peasant, who wants his own land and nothing else. They are
pitiless in punishing corruption or drunkenness when they find either
among officials; but they have built up a system in which the
temptations to petty corruption are tremendous, and their own
materialistic theory should persuade them that under such a system
corruption must be rampant.

The second class in the bureaucracy, among whom are to be found most
of the men occupying political posts just below the top, consists of
_arrivistes_, who are enthusiastic Bolsheviks because of the material
success of Bolshevism. With them must be reckoned the army of
policemen, spies, and secret agents, largely inherited from the
Tsarist times, who make their profit out of the fact that no one can
live except by breaking the law. This aspect of Bolshevism is
exemplified by the Extraordinary Commission, a body practically
independent of the Government, possessing its own regiments, who are
better fed than the Red Army. This body has the power of imprisoning
any man or woman without trial on such charges as speculation or
counter-revolutionary activity. It has shot thousands without proper
trial, and though now it has nominally lost the power of inflicting
the death penalty, it is by no means certain that it has altogether
lost it in fact. It has spies everywhere, and ordinary mortals live in
terror of it.

The third class in the bureaucracy consists of men who are not ardent
Communists, who have rallied to the Government since it has proved
itself stable, and who work for it either out of patriotism or because
they enjoy the opportunity of developing their ideas freely without
the obstacle of traditional institutions. Among this class are to be
found men of the type of the successful business man, men with the
same sort of ability as is found in the American self-made Trust
magnate, but working for success and power, not for money. There is no
doubt that the Bolsheviks are successfully solving the problem of
enlisting this kind of ability in the public service, without
permitting it to amass wealth as it does in capitalist communities.
This is perhaps their greatest success so far, outside the domain of
war. It makes it possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to
have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making
Russia a rival of the United States. The Bolsheviks are industrialists
in all their aims; they love everything in modern industry except the
excessive rewards of the capitalists. And the harsh discipline to
which they are subjecting the workers is calculated, if anything can,
to give them the habits of industry and honesty which have hitherto
been lacking, and the lack of which alone prevents Russia from being
one of the foremost industrial countries.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] In _Theses_ (p. 6 of French edition) it is said: "The ancient
classic subdivision of the Labour movement into three forms (parties,
trade unions, and co-operatives) has served its time. The proletarian
revolution has raised up in Russia the essential form of proletarian
dictatorship, the _soviets_. But the work in the Soviets, as in the
industrial trade unions which have become revolutionary, must be
invariably and systematically directed by the party of the
proletariat, i.e. the Communist Party. As the organized advanced guard
of the working class, the Communist Party answers equally to the
economic, political and spiritual needs of the entire working class.
It must be the soul of the trade unions, the soviets, and all other
proletarian organizations.

"The appearance of the Soviets, the principal historical form of the
dictatorship of the proletariat, in no way diminishes the directing
rôle of the party in the proletarian revolution. When the German
Communists of the 'Left' ... declare that 'the party itself must also
adapt itself more and more to the Soviet idea and proletarianize
itself,' we see there only an insinuating expression of the idea that
the Communist Party must dissolve itself into the Soviets, so that the
Soviets can replace it.

"This idea is profoundly erroneous and reactionary.

"The history of the Russian Revolution shows us, at a certain moment,
the Soviets going against the proletarian party and helping the agents
of the bourgeoisie....

"In order that the Soviets may fulfil their historic mission, the
existence of a Communist Party, strong enough not to 'adapt' itself to
the Soviets but to exercise on them a decisive influence, to force
them _not to adapt themselves_ to the bourgeoisie and official social
democracy, ... is on the contrary necessary."




VI

THE FAILURE OF RUSSIAN INDUSTRY


At first sight it is surprising that Russian industry should have
collapsed as badly as it has done, and still more surprising that the
efforts of the Communists have not been more successful in reviving
it. As I believe that the continued efficiency of industry is the main
condition for success in the transition to a Communist State, I shall
endeavour to analyse the causes of the collapse, with a view to the
discovery of ways by which it can be avoided elsewhere.

Of the fact of the collapse there can be no doubt. The Ninth Congress
of the Communist Party (March-April, 1920) speaks of "the incredible
catastrophes of public economy," and in connection with transport,
which is one of the vital elements of the problem, it acknowledges
"the terrible collapse of the transport and the railway system," and
urges the introduction of "measures which cannot be delayed and which
are to obviate the complete paralysis of the railway system and,
together with this, the ruin of the Soviet Republic." Almost all those
who have visited Russia would confirm this view of the gravity of the
situation. In the factories, in great works like those of Putilov and
Sornovo, very little except war work is being done; machinery stands
idle and plant is becoming unusable. One sees hardly any new
manufactured articles in Russia, beyond a certain very inadequate
quantity of clothes and boots--always excepting what is needed for the
army. And the difficulty of obtaining food is conclusive evidence of
the absence of goods such as are needed by the peasants.

How has this state of affairs arisen? And why does it continue?

A great deal of disorganization occurred before the first revolution
and under Kerensky. Russian industry was partly dependent on Poland;
the war was conducted by methods of reckless extravagance, especially
as regards rolling-stock; under Kerensky there was a tendency to
universal holiday, under the impression that freedom had removed the
necessity for work. But when all this is admitted to the full, it
remains true that the state of industry under the Bolsheviks is much
worse than even under Kerensky.

The first and most obvious reason for this is that Russia was quite
unusually dependent upon foreign assistance. Not only did the
machinery in the factories and the locomotives on the railways come
from abroad, but the organizing and technical brains in industry were
mainly foreign. When the Entente became hostile to Russia, the
foreigners in Russian industry either left the country or assisted
counter-revolution. Even those who were in fact loyal naturally became
suspect, and could not well be employed in responsible posts, any more
than Germans could in England during the war. The native Russians who
had technical or business skill were little better; they almost all
practised sabotage in the first period of the Bolshevik régime. One
hears amusing stories of common sailors frantically struggling with
complicated accounts, because no competent accountant would work for
the Bolsheviks.

But those days passed. When the Government was seen to be stable, a
great many of those who had formerly sabotaged it became willing to
accept posts under it, and are now in fact so employed, often at quite
exceptional salaries. Their importance is thoroughly realized. One
resolution at the above-mentioned Congress says (I quote verbally the
unedited document which was given to us in Moscow):

    Being of opinion that without a scientific organization of
    industry, even the widest application of compulsory labour
    service, as the great labour heroism of the working class,
    will not only fail to secure the establishment of a powerful
    socialist production, but will also fail to assist the country
    to free itself from the clutches of poverty--the Congress
    considers it imperative to register all able specialists of
    the various departments of public economy and widely to
    utilize them for the purpose of industrial organization.

    The Congress considers the elucidation for the wide masses of
    the workers of the tremendous character of the economic
    problems of the country to be one of the chief problems of
    industrial and general political agitation and propaganda; and
    of equal importance to this, technical education, and
    administrative and scientific technical experience. The
    Congress makes it obligatory on all the members of the party
    mercilessly to fight that particular obnoxious form, the
    ignorant conceit which deems the working class capable of
    solving all problems without the assistance _in the most
    responsible cases_ of specialists of the bourgeois school, the
    management. Demagogic elements who speculate on this kind of
    prejudice in the more backward section of our working classes,
    can have no place in the ranks of the party of Scientific
    Socialism.

But Russia alone is unable to supply the amount of skill required, and
is very deficient in technical instructors, as well as in skilled
workmen. One was told, over and over again, that the first step in
improvement would be the obtaining of spare parts for locomotives. It
seems strange that these could not be manufactured in Russia. To some
extent they can be, and we were shown locomotives which had been
repaired on Communist Saturdays. But in the main the machinery for
making spare parts is lacking and the skill required for its
manufacture does not exist. Thus dependence on the outside world
persists, and the blockade continues to do its deadly work of
spreading hunger, demoralization and despair.

The food question is intimately bound up with the question of
industry. There is a vicious circle, for not only does the absence of
manufactured goods cause a food shortage in the towns, but the food
shortage, in turn, diminishes the strength of the workers and makes
them less able to produce goods. I cannot but think that there has
been some mismanagement as regards the food question. For example, in
Petrograd many workers have allotments and often work in them for
eight hours after an eight hours' day in their regular employment. But
the food produced in the allotments is taken for general consumption,
not left to each individual producer. This is in accordance with
Communist theory, but of course greatly diminishes the incentive to
work, and increases the red tape and administrative machinery.

Lack of fuel has been another very grave source of trouble. Before the
war coal came mostly from Poland and the Donetz Basin. Poland is lost
to Russia, and the Donetz Basin was in the hands of Denikin, who so
destroyed the mines before retreating that they are still not in
working order. The result is a practically complete absence of coal.
Oil, which is equally important in Russia, was also lacking until the
recent recovery of Baku. All that I saw on the Volga made me believe
that real efficiency has been shown in reorganizing the transport of
oil, and doubtless this will do something to revive industry. But the
oil used to be worked very largely by Englishmen, and English
machinery is much needed for refining it. In the meantime, Russia has
had to depend upon wood, which involves immense labour. Most of the
houses are not warmed in winter, so that people live in a temperature
below freezing-point. Another consequence of lack of fuel was the
bursting of water-pipes, so that people in Petrograd, for the most
part, have to go down to the Neva to fetch their water--a considerable
addition to the labour of an already overworked day.

I find it difficult to believe that, if greater efficiency had existed
in the Government, the food and fuel difficulties could not have been
considerably alleviated. In spite of the needs of the army, there are
still many horses in Russia; I saw troops of thousands of horses on
the Volga, which apparently belonged to Kalmuk tribes. By the help of
carts and sledges, it ought to be possible, without more labour than
is warranted by the importance of the problem, to bring food and
timber into Moscow and Petrograd. It must be remembered that both
cities are surrounded by forests, and Moscow at least is surrounded by
good agricultural land. The Government has devoted all its best
energies hitherto to the two tasks of war and propaganda, while
industry and the food problem have been left to a lesser degree of
energy and intelligence. It is no doubt probable that, if peace is
secured, the economic problems will receive more attention than
hitherto. But the Russian character seems less adapted to steady work
of an unexciting nature than to heroic efforts on great occasions; it
has immense passive endurance, but not much active tenacity. Whether,
with the menace of foreign invasion removed, enough day-by-day
detailed energy would exist for the reorganization of industry, is a
doubtful question, as to which only time can decide.

This leads to the conclusion--which I think is adopted by most of the
leading men in Russia--that it will be very difficult indeed to save
the revolution without outside economic assistance. Outside assistance
from capitalist countries is dangerous to the principles of Communism,
as well as precarious from the likelihood of fresh causes of quarrel.
But the need of help is urgent, and if the policy of promoting
revolution elsewhere were to succeed, it would probably render the
nations concerned temporarily incapable of supplying Russian needs.
It is, therefore, necessary for Russia to accept the risks and
uncertainties involved in attempting to make peace with the Entente
and to trade with America. By continuing war, Russia can do infinite
damage to us, especially in Asia, but cannot hope, for many years, to
achieve any degree of internal prosperity. The situation, therefore,
is one in which, even from the narrowest point of view, peace is to
the interest of both parties.

It is difficult for an outsider with only superficial knowledge to
judge of the efforts which have been made to reorganize industry
without outside help. These efforts have chiefly taken the form of
industrial conscription. Workers in towns seek to escape to the
country, in order to have enough to eat; but this is illegal and
severely punished. The same Communist Report from which I have already
quoted speaks on this subject as follows:

    _Labour Desertion._--Owing to the fact that a considerable
    part of the workers either in search of better food conditions
    or often for the purposes of speculation, voluntarily leave
    their places of employment or change from place to place,
    which inevitably harms production and deteriorates the general
    position of the working class, the Congress considers one of
    the most urgent problems of Soviet Government and of the Trade
    Union organization to be established as the firm, systematic
    and insistent struggle with labour desertion, The way to fight
    this is to publish a list of desertion fines, the creation of
    a labour Detachment of Deserters under fine, and, finally,
    internment in concentration camps.

It is hoped to extend the system to the peasantry:

    The defeat of the White Armies and the problems of peaceful
    construction in connection with the incredible catastrophes of
    public economy demand an extraordinary effort of all the
    powers of the proletariat and the drafting into the process of
    public labour of the wide masses of the peasantry.

On the vital subject of transport, in a passage of which I have
already quoted a fragment, the Communist Party declares:

    For the most immediate future transport remains the centre of
    the attention and the efforts of the Soviet Government. The
    improvement of transport is the indispensable basis upon which
    even the most moderate success in all other spheres of
    production and first of all in the provision question can be
    gained.

    The chief difficulty with regard to the improvement of
    transport is the weakness of the Transport Trade Union, which
    is due in the first case to the heterogeneity of the personnel
    of the railways, amongst whom there are still a number of
    those who belong to the period of disorganization, and,
    secondly, to the fact that the most class-conscious and best
    elements of the railway proletariat were at the various fronts
    of the civil war.

    Considering wide Trade Union assistance to the railway workers
    to be one of the principal tasks of the Party, and as the only
    condition under which transport can be raised to its height,
    the Congress at the same time recognizes the inflexible
    necessity of employing exclusive and extraordinary measures
    (martial law, and so forth). Such necessity is the result of
    the terrible collapse of the transport and the railroad system
    and is to introduce measures which cannot be delayed and which
    are to obviate the complete paralysis of the railway system
    and, together with this, the ruin of the Soviet Republic.

The general attitude to the militarization of labour is stated in the
Resolution with which this section of the Proceedings begins:

    The ninth Congress approves of the decision of the Central
    Committee of the Russian Communist Party on the mobilization
    of the industrial proletariat, compulsory labour service,
    militarization of production and the application of military
    detachments to economic needs.

    In connection with the above, the Congress decrees that the
    Party organization should in every way assist the Trade Unions
    and the Labour Sections in registering all skilled workers
    with a view of employing them in the various branches of
    production with the same consistency and strictness as was
    done, and is being carried out at the present time, in
    relation to the commanding staff for army needs.

    Every skilled worker is to return to his particular trade
    Exceptions, i.e. the retention of the skilled worker in any
    other branch of Soviet service, is allowed only with the
    sanction of the corresponding central and local authorities.

It is, of course, evident that in these measures the Bolsheviks have
been compelled to travel a long way from the ideals which originally
inspired the revolution. But the situation is so desperate that they
could not be blamed if their measures were successful. In a shipwreck
all hands must turn to, and it would be ridiculous to prate of
individual liberty. The most distressing feature of the situation is
that these stern laws seem to have produced so little effect. Perhaps
in the course of years Russia might become self-supporting without
help from the outside world, but the suffering meantime would be
terrible. The early hopes of the revolution would fade more and more.
Every failure of industry, every tyrannous regulation brought about by
the desperate situation, is used by the Entente as a justification of
its policy. If a man is deprived of food and drink, he will grow weak,
lose his reason, and finally die. This is not usually considered a
good reason for inflicting death by starvation. But where nations are
concerned, the weakness and struggles are regarded as morally
culpable, and are held to justify further punishment. So at least it
has been in the case of Russia. Nothing produced a doubt in our
governing minds as to the rightness of our policy except the strength
of the Red Army and the fear of revolution in Asia. Is it surprising
that professions of humanitarian feeling on the part of English people
are somewhat coldly received in Soviet Russia?




VII

DAILY LIFE IN MOSCOW


Daily life in Moscow, so far as I could discover, has neither the
horrors depicted by the Northcliffe Press nor the delights imagined by
the more ardent of our younger Socialists.

On the one hand, there is no disorder, very little crime, not much
insecurity for those who keep clear of politics. Everybody works hard;
the educated people have, by this time, mostly found their way into
Government offices or teaching or some other administrative profession
in which their education is useful. The theatres, the opera and the
ballet continue as before, and are quite admirable; some of the seats
are paid for, others are given free to members of trade unions. There
is, of course, no drunkenness, or at any rate so little that none of
us ever saw a sign of it. There is very little prostitution,
infinitely less than in any other capital. Women are safer from
molestation than anywhere else in the world. The whole impression is
one of virtuous, well-ordered activity.

On the other hand, life is very hard for all except men in good posts.
It is hard, first of all, owing to the food shortage. This is familiar
to all who have interested themselves in Russia, and it is unnecessary
to dwell upon it. What is less realized is that most people work much
longer hours than in this country. The eight-hour day was introduced
with a flourish of trumpets; then, owing to the pressure of the war,
it was extended to ten hours in certain trades. But no provision
exists against extra work at other jobs, and very many people do extra
work, because the official rates do not afford a living wage. This is
not the fault of the Government, at any rate as regards the major
part; it is due chiefly to war and blockade. When the day's work is
over, a great deal of time has to be spent in fetching food and water
and other necessaries of life. The sight of the workers going to and
fro, shabbily clad, with the inevitable bundle in one hand and tin can
in the other, through streets almost entirely empty of traffic,
produces the effect of life in some vast village, rather than in an
important capital city.

Holidays, such as are common throughout all but the very poorest class
in this country, are very difficult in Russia. A train journey
requires a permit, which is only granted on good reasons being shown;
with the present shortage of transport, this regulation is quite
unavoidable. Railway queues are a common feature in Moscow; it often
takes several days to get a permit. Then, when it has been obtained,
it may take several more days to get a seat in a train. The ordinary
trains are inconceivably crowded, far more so, though that seems
impossible, than London trains at the busiest hour. On the shorter
journeys, passengers are even known to ride on the roof and buffers,
or cling like flies to the sides of the waggons. People in Moscow
travel to the country whenever they can afford the time and get a
permit, because in the country there is enough to eat. They go to stay
with relations--most people in Moscow, in all classes, but especially
among manual workers, have relations in the country. One cannot, of
course, go to an hotel as one would in other countries. Hotels have
been taken over by the State, and the rooms in them (when they are
still used) are allocated by the police to people whose business is
recognized as important by the authorities. Casual travel is therefore
impossible even on a holiday.

Journeys have vexations in addition to the slowness and overcrowding
of the trains. Police search the travellers for evidences of
"speculation," especially for food. The police play, altogether, a
much greater part in daily life than they do in other countries--much
greater than they did, for example, in Prussia twenty-five years ago,
when there was a vigorous campaign against Socialism. Everybody breaks
the law almost daily, and no one knows which among his acquaintances
is a spy of the Extraordinary Commission. Even in the prisons, among
prisoners, there are spies, who are allowed certain privileges but not
their liberty.

Newspapers are not taken in, except by very few people, but they are
stuck up in public places, where passers-by occasionally glance at
them.[5] There is very little to read; owing to paper shortage, books
are rare, and money to buy them is still rarer. One does not see
people reading, as one does here in the Underground for example. There
is practically no social life, partly because of the food shortage,
partly because, when anybody is arrested, the police are apt to arrest
everybody whom they find in his company, or who comes to visit him.
And once arrested, a man or woman, however innocent, may remain for
months in prison without trial. While we were in Moscow, forty social
revolutionaries and Anarchists were hunger-striking to enforce their
demand to be tried and to be allowed visits. I was told that on the
eighth day of the strike the Government consented to try them, and
that few could be proved guilty of any crime; but I had no means of
verifying this.

Industrial conscription is, of course, rigidly enforced. Every man and
woman has to work, and slacking is severely punished, by prison or a
penal settlement. Strikes are illegal, though they sometimes occur. By
proclaiming itself the friend of the proletarian, the Government has
been enabled to establish an iron discipline, beyond the wildest
dreams of the most autocratic American magnate. And by the same
professions the Government has led Socialists from other countries to
abstain from reporting unpleasant features in what they have seen.

The Tolstoyans, of whom I saw the leaders, are obliged by their creed
to resist every form of conscription, though some have found ways of
compromising. The law concerning conscientious objectors to military
service is practically the same as ours, and its working depends upon
the temper of the tribunal before which a man comes. Some
conscientious objectors have been shot; on the other hand, some have
obtained absolute exemption.

Life in Moscow, as compared to life in London, is drab, monotonous,
and depressed. I am not, of course, comparing life there with that of
the rich here, but with that of the average working-class family. When
it is realized that the highest wages are about fifteen shillings a
month, this is not surprising. I do not think that life could, under
any system, be very cheerful in a country so exhausted by war as
Russia, so I am not saying this as a criticism of the Bolsheviks. But
I do think there might be less police interference, less vexatious
regulation, and more freedom for spontaneous impulses towards harmless
enjoyments.

Religion is still very strong. I went into many churches, where I saw
obviously famished priests in gorgeous vestments, and a congregation
enormously devout. Generally more than half the congregation were men,
and among the men many were soldiers. This applies to the towns as
well as to the country. In Moscow I constantly saw people in the
streets crossing themselves.

There is a theory that the Moscow working man feels himself free from
capitalist domination, and therefore bears hardships gladly. This is
no doubt true of the minority who are active Communists, but I do not
think it has any truth for the others. The average working man, to
judge by a rather hasty impression, feels himself the slave of the
Government, and has no sense whatever of having been liberated from a
tyranny.

I recognize to the full the reasons for the bad state of affairs, in
the past history of Russia and the recent policy of the Entente. But I
have thought it better to record impressions frankly, trusting the
readers to remember that the Bolsheviks have only a very limited share
of responsibility for the evils from which Russia is suffering.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] The ninth Communist Congress (March-April, 1920) says on this
subject: "In view of the fact that the first condition of the success
of the Soviet Republic in all departments, including the economic, is
chiefly systematic printed agitation, the Congress draws the attention
of the Soviet Government to the deplorable state in which our paper
and printing industries find themselves. The ever decreasing number of
newspapers fail to reach not only the peasants but even the workers,
in addition to which our poor technical means render the papers hardly
readable. The Congress strongly appeals to the Supreme Council of
Public Economy, to the corresponding Trade Unions and other interested
institutions, to apply all efforts to raise the quantity, to introduce
general system and order in the printing business, and so secure for
the worker and peasant in Russia a supply of Socialist printed
matter."




VIII

TOWN AND COUNTRY


The problem of inducing the peasants to feed the towns is one which
Russia shares with Central Europe, and from what one hears Russia has
been less unsuccessful than some other countries in dealing with this
problem. For the Soviet Government, the problem is mainly concentrated
in Moscow and Petrograd; the other towns are not very large, and are
mostly in the centre of rich agricultural districts. It is true that
in the North even the rural population normally depends upon food from
more southerly districts; but the northern population is small. It is
commonly said that the problem of feeding Moscow and Petrograd is a
transport problem, but I think this is only partially true. There is,
of course, a grave deficiency of rolling-stock, especially of
locomotives in good repair. But Moscow is surrounded by very good
land. In the course of a day's motoring in the neighbourhood, I saw
enough cows to supply milk to the whole child population of Moscow,
although what I had come to see was children's sanatoria, not farms.
All kinds of food can be bought in the market at high prices. I
travelled over a considerable extent of Russian railways, and saw a
fair number of goods trains. For all these reasons, I feel convinced
that the share of the transport problem in the food difficulties has
been exaggerated. Of course transport plays a larger part in the
shortage in Petrograd than in Moscow, because food comes mainly from
south of Moscow. In Petrograd, most of the people one sees in the
streets show obvious signs of under-feeding. In Moscow, the visible
signs are much less frequent, but there is no doubt that
under-feeding, though not actual starvation, is nearly universal.

The Government supplies rations to every one who works in the towns at
a very low fixed price. The official theory is that the Government has
a monopoly of the food and that the rations are sufficient to sustain
life. The fact is that the rations are not sufficient, and that they
are only a portion of the food supply of Moscow. Moreover, people
complain, I do not know how truly, that the rations are delivered
irregularly; some say, about every other day. Under these
circumstances, almost everybody, rich or poor, buys food in the
market, where it costs about fifty times the fixed Government price.
A pound of butter costs about a month's wages. In order to be able to
afford extra food, people adopt various expedients. Some do additional
work, at extra rates, after their official day's work is over. For,
though there is supposed to be by law an eight-hours day, extended to
ten in certain vital industries, the wage paid for it is not a living
wage, and there is nothing to prevent a man from undertaking other
work in his spare time. But the usual resource is what is called
"speculation," i.e., buying and selling. Some person formerly rich
sells clothes or furniture or jewellery in return for food; the buyer
sells again at an enhanced price, and so on through perhaps twenty
hands, until a final purchaser is found in some well-to-do peasant or
_nouveau riche_ speculator. Again, most people have relations in the
country, whom they visit from time to time, bringing back with them
great bags of flour. It is illegal for private persons to bring food
into Moscow, and the trains are searched; but, by corruption or
cunning, experienced people can elude the search. The food market is
illegal, and is raided occasionally; but as a rule it is winked at.
Thus the attempt to suppress private commerce has resulted in an
amount of unprofessional buying and selling which far exceeds what
happens in capitalist countries. It takes up a great deal of time
that might be more profitably employed; and, being illegal, it places
practically the whole population of Moscow at the mercy of the police.
Moreover, it depends largely upon the stores of goods belonging to
those who were formerly rich, and when these are expended the whole
system must collapse, unless industry has meanwhile been
re-established on a sound basis.

It is clear that the state of affairs is unsatisfactory, but, from the
Government's point of view, it is not easy to see what ought to be
done. The urban and industrial population is mainly concerned in
carrying on the work of government and supplying munitions to the
army. These are very necessary tasks, the cost of which ought to be
defrayed out of taxation. A moderate tax in kind on the peasants would
easily feed Moscow and Petrograd. But the peasants take no interest in
war or government. Russia is so vast that invasion of one part does
not touch another part; and the peasants are too ignorant to have any
national consciousness, such as one takes for granted in England or
France or Germany. The peasants will not willingly part with a portion
of their produce merely for purposes of national defence, but only for
the goods they need--clothes, agricultural implements, &c.--which the
Government, owing to the war and the blockade, is not in a position to
supply.

When the food shortage was at its worst, the Government antagonized
the peasants by forced requisitions, carried out with great harshness
by the Red Army. This method has been modified, but the peasants still
part unwillingly with their food, as is natural in view of the
uselessness of paper and the enormously higher prices offered by
private buyers.

The food problem is the main cause of popular opposition to the
Bolsheviks, yet I cannot see how any popular policy could have been
adopted. The Bolsheviks are disliked by the peasants because they take
so much food; they are disliked in the towns because they take so
little. What the peasants want is what is called free trade, i.e.,
de-control of agricultural produce. If this policy were adopted, the
towns would be faced by utter starvation, not merely by hunger and
hardship. It is an entire misconception to suppose that the peasants
cherish any hostility to the Entente. The _Daily News_ of July 13th,
in an otherwise excellent leading article, speaks of "the growing
hatred of the Russian peasant, who is neither a Communist nor a
Bolshevik, for the Allies generally and this country in particular."
The typical Russian peasant has never heard of the Allies or of this
country; he does not know that there is a blockade; all he knows is
that he used to have six cows but the Government reduced him to one
for the sake of poorer peasants, and that it takes his corn (except
what is needed for his own family) at a very low price. The reasons
for these actions do not interest him, since his horizon is bounded by
his own village. To a remarkable extent, each village is an
independent unit. So long as the Government obtains the food and
soldiers that it requires, it does not interfere, and leaves untouched
the old village communism, which is extraordinarily unlike Bolshevism
and entirely dependent upon a very primitive stage of culture.

The Government represents the interests of the urban and industrial
population, and is, as it were, encamped amid a peasant nation, with
whom its relations are rather diplomatic and military than
governmental in the ordinary sense. The economic situation, as in
Central Europe, is favourable to the country and unfavourable to the
towns. If Russia were governed democratically, according to the will
of the majority, the inhabitants of Moscow and Petrograd would die of
starvation. As it is, Moscow and Petrograd just manage to live, by
having the whole civil and military power of the State devoted to
their needs. Russia affords the curious spectacle of a vast and
powerful Empire, prosperous at the periphery, but faced with dire want
at the centre. Those who have least prosperity have most power; and
it is only through their excess of power that they are enabled to live
at all. The situation is due at bottom to two facts: that almost the
whole industrial energies of the population have had to be devoted to
war, and that the peasants do not appreciate the importance of the war
or the fact of the blockade.

It is futile to blame the Bolsheviks for an unpleasant and difficult
situation which it has been impossible for them to avoid. Their
problem is only soluble in one of two ways: by the cessation of the
war and the blockade, which would enable them to supply the peasants
with the goods they need in exchange for food; or by the gradual
development of an independent Russian industry. This latter method
would be slow, and would involve terrible hardships, but some of the
ablest men in the Government believe it to be possible if peace cannot
be achieved. If we force this method upon Russia by the refusal of
peace and trade, we shall forfeit the only inducement we can hold out
for friendly relations; we shall render the Soviet State unassailable
and completely free to pursue the policy of promoting revolution
everywhere. But the industrial problem is a large subject, which has
been already discussed in Chapter VI.




IX

INTERNATIONAL POLICY


In the course of these chapters, I have had occasion to mention
disagreeable features of the Bolshevik régime. But it must always be
remembered that these are chiefly due to the fact that the industrial
life of Russia has been paralysed except as ministering to the wants
of the Army, and that the Government has had to wage a bitter and
doubtful civil and external war, involving the constant menace of
domestic enemies. Harshness, espionage, and a curtailment of liberty
result unavoidably from these difficulties. I have no doubt whatever
that the sole cure for the evils from which Russia is suffering is
peace and trade. Peace and trade would put an end to the hostility of
the peasants, and would at once enable the Government to depend upon
popularity rather than force. The character of the Government would
alter rapidly under such conditions. Industrial conscription, which is
now rigidly enforced, would become unnecessary. Those who desire a
more liberal spirit would be able to make their voices heard without
the feeling that they were assisting reaction and the national
enemies. The food difficulties would cease, and with them the need for
an autocratic system in the towns.

It must not be assumed, as is common with opponents of Bolshevism,
that any other Government could easily be established in Russia. I
think every one who has been in Russia recently is convinced that the
existing Government is stable. It may undergo internal developments,
and might easily, but for Lenin, become a Bonapartist military
autocracy. But this would be a change from within--not perhaps a very
great change--and would probably do little to alter the economic
system. From what I saw of the Russian character and of the opposition
parties, I became persuaded that Russia is not ready for any form of
democracy, and needs a strong Government. The Bolsheviks represent
themselves as the Allies of Western advanced Socialism, and from this
point of view they are open to grave criticism. For their
international programme there is, to my mind, nothing to be said. But
as a national Government, stripped of their camouflage, regarded as
the successors of Peter the Great, they are performing a necessary
though unamiable task. They are introducing, as far as they can,
American efficiency among a lazy and undisciplined population. They
are preparing to develop the natural resources of their country by the
methods of State Socialism, for which, in Russia, there is much to be
said. In the Army they are abolishing illiteracy, and if they had
peace they would do great things for education everywhere.

But if we continue to refuse peace and trade, I do not think the
Bolsheviks will go under. Russia will endure great hardships, in the
years to come as before. But the Russians are inured to misery as no
Western nation is; they can live and work under conditions which we
should find intolerable. The Government will be driven more and more,
from mere self-preservation, into a policy of imperialism. The Entente
has been doing everything to expose Germany to a Russian invasion of
arms and leaflets, by allowing Poland to engage in war and compelling
Germany to disarm. All Asia lies open to Bolshevik ambitions. Almost
the whole of the former Russian Empire in Asia is quite firmly in
their grasp. Trains are running at a reasonable speed to Turkestan,
and I saw cotton from there being loaded on to Volga steamers. In
Persia and Turkey, revolts are taking place, with Bolshevik support.
It is only a question of a few years before India will be in touch
with the Red Army. If we continue to antagonize the Bolsheviks, I do
not see what force exists that can prevent them from acquiring the
whole of Asia within ten years.

The Russian Government is not yet definitely imperialistic in spirit,
and would still prefer peace to conquest. The country is weary of war
and denuded of goods. But if the Western Powers insist upon war,
another spirit, which is already beginning to show itself, will become
dominant. Conquest will be the only alternative to submission. Asiatic
conquest will not be difficult. But for us, from the imperialist
standpoint, it will mean utter ruin. And for the Continent it will
mean revolutions, civil wars, economic cataclysms. The policy of
crushing Bolshevism by force was always foolish and criminal; it has
now become impossible and fraught with disaster. Our own Government,
it would seem, have begun to realize the dangers, but apparently they
do not realize them sufficiently to enforce their view against
opposition.

In the Theses presented to the Second Congress of the Third
International (July 1920), there is a very interesting article by
Lenin called "First Sketch of the Theses on National and Colonial
Questions" (_Theses_, pp. 40-47). The following passages seemed to me
particularly illuminating:--

    The present world-situation in politics places on the order of
    the day the dictatorship of the proletariat; and all the
    events of world politics are inevitably concentrated round one
    centre of gravity: the struggle of the international
    bourgeoisie against the Soviet Republic, which inevitably
    groups round it, on the one hand the Sovietist movements of
    the advanced working men of all countries, on the other hand
    all the national movements of emancipation of colonies and
    oppressed nations which have been convinced by a bitter
    experience that there is no salvation for them except in the
    victory of the Soviet Government over world-imperialism.

    We cannot therefore any longer confine ourselves to
    recognizing and proclaiming the union of the workers of all
    countries. It is henceforth necessary to pursue the
    realization of the strictest union of all the national and
    colonial movements of emancipation with Soviet Russia, by
    giving to this union forms corresponding to the degree of
    evolution of the proletarian movement among the proletariat of
    each country, or of the democratic-bourgeois movement of
    emancipation among the workers and peasants of backward
    countries or backward nationalities.

    The federal principle appears to us as a transitory form
    towards the complete unity of the workers of all countries.

This is the formula for co-operation with Sinn Fein or with Egyptian
and Indian nationalism. It is further defined later. In regard to
backward countries, Lenin says, we must have in view:--

    The necessity of the co-operation of all Communists in the
    democratic-bourgeois movement of emancipation in those
    countries.

Again:

    "The Communist International must conclude temporary alliances
    with the bourgeois democracy of backward countries, but must
    never fuse with it." The class-conscious proletariat must
    "show itself particularly circumspect towards the survivals of
    national sentiment in countries long oppressed," and must
    "consent to certain useful concessions."

The Asiatic policy of the Russian Government was adopted as a move
against the British Empire, and as a method of inducing the British
Government to make peace. It plays a larger part in the schemes of the
leading Bolsheviks than is realized by the Labour Party in this
country. Its method is not, for the present, to preach Communism,
since the Persians and Hindoos are considered scarcely ripe for the
doctrines of Marx. It is nationalist movements that are supported by
money and agitators from Moscow. The method of quasi-independent
states under Bolshevik protection is well understood. It is obvious
that this policy affords opportunities for imperialism, under the
cover of propaganda, and there is no doubt that some among the
Bolsheviks are fascinated by its imperialist aspect. The importance
officially attached to the Eastern policy is illustrated by the fact
that it was the subject of the concluding portion of Lenin's speech to
the recent Congress of the Third International (July 1920).

Bolshevism, like everything Russian, is partly Asiatic in character.
One may distinguish two distinct trends, developing into two distinct
policies. On the one side are the practical men, who wish to develop
Russia industrially, to secure the gains of the Revolution nationally,
to trade with the West, and gradually settle down into a more or less
ordinary State. These men have on their side the fact of the economic
exhaustion of Russia, the danger of ultimate revolt against Bolshevism
if life continues to be as painful as it is at present, and the
natural sentiment of humanity that wishes to relieve the sufferings of
the people; also the fact that, if revolutions elsewhere produce a
similar collapse of industry, they will make it impossible for Russia
to receive the outside help which is urgently needed. In the early
days, when the Government was weak, they had unchallenged control of
policy, but success has made their position less secure.

On the other side there is a blend of two quite different aims: first,
the desire to promote revolution in the Western nations, which is in
line with Communist theory, and is also thought to be the only way of
obtaining a really secure peace; secondly, the desire for Asiatic
dominion, which is probably accompanied in the minds of some with
dreams of sapphires and rubies and golden thrones and all the glories
of their forefather Solomon. This desire produces an unwillingness to
abandon the Eastern policy, although it is realized that, until it is
abandoned, peace with capitalist England is impossible. I do not know
whether there are some to whom the thought occurs that if England were
to embark on revolution we should become willing to abandon India to
the Russians. But I am certain that the converse thought occurs,
namely that, if India could be taken from us, the blow to imperialist
feeling might lead us to revolution. In either case, the two policies,
of revolution in the West and conquest (disguised as liberation of
oppressed peoples) in the East, work in together, and dovetail into a
strongly coherent whole.

Bolshevism as a social phenomenon is to be reckoned as a religion, not
as an ordinary political movement. The important and effective mental
attitudes to the world may be broadly divided into the religious and
the scientific. The scientific attitude is tentative and piecemeal,
believing what it finds evidence for, and no more. Since Galileo, the
scientific attitude has proved itself increasingly capable of
ascertaining important facts and laws, which are acknowledged by all
competent people regardless of temperament or self-interest or
political pressure. Almost all the progress in the world from the
earliest times is attributable to science and the scientific temper;
almost all the major ills are attributable to religion.

By a religion I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the
conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated
by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual. By
this definition, Bolshevism is a religion: that its dogmas go beyond
or contrary to evidence, I shall try to prove in what follows. Those
who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and
commit intellectual suicide. Even if all the doctrines of Bolshevism
were true, this would still be the case, since no unbiased examination
of them is tolerated. One who believes, as I do, that the free
intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be
fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism, as much as to the Church of Rome.

Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism
rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism
are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love
of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social,
unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world. Their founders
would not have resisted the third of the temptations in the
wilderness. What Mohammedanism did for the Arabs, Bolshevism may do
for the Russians. As Ali went down before the politicians who only
rallied to the Prophet after his success, so the genuine Communists
may go down before those who are now rallying to the ranks of the
Bolsheviks. If so, Asiatic empire with all its pomps and splendours
may well be the next stage of development, and Communism may seem, in
historical retrospect, as small a part of Bolshevism as abstinence
from alcohol is of Mohammedanism. It is true that, as a world force,
whether for revolution or for empire, Bolshevism must sooner or later
be brought by success into a desperate conflict with America; and
America is more solid and strong, as yet, than anything that
Mohammed's followers had to face. But the doctrines of Communism are
almost certain, in the long run, to make progress among American
wage-earners, and the opposition of America is therefore not likely to
be eternal. Bolshevism may go under in Russia, but even if it does it
will spring up again elsewhere, since it is ideally suited to an
industrial population in distress. What is evil in it is mainly due to
the fact that it has its origin in distress; the problem is to
disentangle the good from the evil, and induce the adoption of the
good in countries not goaded into ferocity by despair.

Russia is a backward country, not yet ready for the methods of equal
co-operation which the West is seeking to substitute for arbitrary
power in politics and industry. In Russia, the methods of the
Bolsheviks are probably more or less unavoidable; at any rate, I am
not prepared to criticize them in their broad lines. But they are not
the methods appropriate to more advanced countries, and our Socialists
will be unnecessarily retrograde if they allow the prestige of the
Bolsheviks to lead them into slavish imitation. It will be a far less
excusable error in our reactionaries if, by their unteachableness,
they compel the adoption of violent methods. We have a heritage of
civilization and mutual tolerance which is important to ourselves and
to the world. Life in Russia has always been fierce and cruel, to a
far greater degree than with us, and out of the war has come a danger
that this fierceness and cruelty may become universal. I have hopes
that in England this may be avoided through the moderation of both
sides. But it is essential to a happy issue that melodrama should no
longer determine our views of the Bolsheviks: they are neither angels
to be worshipped nor devils to be exterminated, but merely bold and
able men attempting with great skill an almost impossible task.




PART II

BOLSHEVIK THEORY




I

THE MATERIALISTIC THEORY OF HISTORY


The materialistic conception of history, as it is called, is due to
Marx, and underlies the whole Communist philosophy. I do not mean, of
course, that a man could not be a Communist without accepting it, but
that in fact it is accepted by the Communist Party, and that it
profoundly influences their views as to politics and tactics. The name
does not convey at all accurately what is meant by the theory. It
means that all the mass-phenomena of history are determined by
economic motives. This view has no essential connection with
materialism in the philosophic sense. Materialism in the philosophic
sense may be defined as the theory that all apparently mental
occurrences either are really physical, or at any rate have purely
physical causes. Materialism in this sense also was preached by Marx,
and is accepted by all orthodox Marxians. The arguments for and
against it are long and complicated, and need not concern us, since,
in fact, its truth or falsehood has little or no bearing on politics.

In particular, philosophic materialism does not prove that economic
causes are fundamental in politics. The view of Buckle, for example,
according to which climate is one of the decisive factors, is equally
compatible with materialism. So is the Freudian view, which traces
everything to sex. There are innumerable ways of viewing history which
are materialistic in the philosophic sense without being economic or
falling within the Marxian formula. Thus the "materialistic conception
of history" may be false even if materialism in the philosophic sense
should be true.

On the other hand, economic causes might be at the bottom of all
political events even if philosophic materialism were false. Economic
causes operate through men's desire for possessions, and would be
supreme if this desire were supreme, even if desire could not, from a
philosophic point of view, be explained in materialistic terms.

There is, therefore, no logical connection either way between
philosophic materialism and what is called the "materialistic
conception of history."

It is of some moment to realize such facts as this, because otherwise
political theories are both supported and opposed for quite
irrelevant reasons, and arguments of theoretical philosophy are
employed to determine questions which depend upon concrete facts of
human nature. This mixture damages both philosophy and politics, and
is therefore important to avoid.

For another reason, also, the attempt to base a political theory upon
a philosophical doctrine is undesirable. The philosophical doctrine of
materialism, if true at all, is true everywhere and always; we cannot
expect exceptions to it, say, in Buddhism or in the Hussite movement.
And so it comes about that people whose politics are supposed to be a
consequence of their metaphysics grow absolute and sweeping, unable to
admit that a general theory of history is likely, at best, to be only
true on the whole and in the main. The dogmatic character of Marxian
Communism finds support in the supposed philosophic basis of the
doctrine; it has the fixed certainty of Catholic theology, not the
changing fluidity and sceptical practicality of modern science.

Treated as a practical approximation, not as an exact metaphysical
law, the materialistic conception of history has a very large measure
of truth. Take, as an instance of its truth, the influence of
industrialism upon ideas. It is industrialism, rather than the
arguments of Darwinians and Biblical critics, that has led to the
decay of religious belief in the urban working class. At the same
time, industrialism has revived religious belief among the rich. In
the eighteenth century French aristocrats mostly became free-thinkers;
now their descendants are mostly Catholics, because it has become
necessary for all the forces of reaction to unite against the
revolutionary proletariat. Take, again, the emancipation of women.
Plato, Mary Wolstonecraft, and John Stuart Mill produced admirable
arguments, but influenced only a few impotent idealists. The war came,
leading to the employment of women in industry on a large scale, and
instantly the arguments in favour of votes for women were seen to be
irresistible. More than that, traditional sexual morality collapsed,
because its whole basis was the economic dependence of women upon
their fathers and husbands. Changes in such a matter as sexual
morality bring with them profound alterations in the thoughts and
feelings of ordinary men and women; they modify law, literature, art,
and all kinds of institutions that seem remote from economics.

Such facts as these justify Marxians in speaking, as they do, of
"bourgeois ideology," meaning that kind of morality which has been
imposed upon the world by the possessors of capital. Contentment with
one's lot may be taken as typical of the virtues preached by the rich
to the poor. They honestly believe it is a virtue--at any rate they
did formerly. The more religious among the poor also believed it,
partly from the influence of authority, partly from an impulse to
submission, what MacDougall calls "negative self-feeling," which is
commoner than some people think. Similarly men preached the virtue of
female chastity, and women usually accepted their teaching; both
really believed the doctrine, but its persistence was only possible
through the economic power of men. This led erring women to punishment
here on earth, which made further punishment hereafter seem probable.
When the economic penalty ceased, the conviction of sinfulness
gradually decayed. In such changes we see the collapse of "bourgeois
ideology."

But in spite of the fundamental importance of economic facts in
determining the politics and beliefs of an age or nation, I do not
think that non-economic factors can be neglected without risks of
errors which may be fatal in practice.

The most obvious non-economic factor, and the one the neglect of which
has led Socialists most astray, is nationalism. Of course a nation,
once formed, has economic interests which largely determine its
politics; but it is not, as a rule, economic motives that decide what
group of human beings shall form a nation. Trieste, before the war,
considered itself Italian, although its whole prosperity as a port
depended upon its belonging to Austria. No economic motive can account
for the opposition between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. In Eastern
Europe, the Balkanization produced by self-determination has been
obviously disastrous from an economic point of view, and was demanded
for reasons which were in essence sentimental. Throughout the war
wage-earners, with only a few exceptions, allowed themselves to be
governed by nationalist feeling, and ignored the traditional Communist
exhortation: "Workers of the world, unite." According to Marxian
orthodoxy, they were misled by cunning capitalists, who made their
profit out of the slaughter. But to any one capable of observing
psychological facts, it is obvious that this is largely a myth.
Immense numbers of capitalists were ruined by the war; those who were
young were just as liable to be killed as the proletarians were. No
doubt commercial rivalry between England and Germany had a great deal
to do with causing the war; but rivalry is a different thing from
profit-seeking. Probably by combination English and German capitalists
could have made more than they did out of rivalry, but the rivalry
was instinctive, and its economic form was accidental. The capitalists
were in the grip of nationalist instinct as much as their proletarian
"dupes." In both classes some have gained by the war; but the
universal will to war was not produced by the hope of gain. It was
produced by a different set of instincts, and one which Marxian
psychology fails to recognize adequately.

The Marxian assumes that a man's "herd," from the point of view of
herd-instinct, is his class, and that he will combine with those whose
economic class-interest is the same as his. This is only very
partially true in fact. Religion has been the most decisive factor in
determining a man's herd throughout long periods of the world's
history. Even now a Catholic working man will vote for a Catholic
capitalist rather than for an unbelieving Socialist. In America the
divisions in local elections are mainly on religious lines. This is no
doubt convenient for the capitalists, and tends to make them religious
men; but the capitalists alone could not produce the result. The
result is produced by the fact that many working men prefer the
advancement of their creed to the improvement of their livelihood.
However deplorable such a state of mind may be, it is not necessarily
due to capitalist lies.

All politics are governed by human desires. The materialist theory of
history, in the last analysis, requires the assumption that every
politically conscious person is governed by one single desire--the
desire to increase his own share of commodities; and, further, that
his method of achieving this desire will usually be to seek to
increase the share of his class, not only his own individual share.
But this assumption is very far from the truth. Men desire power, they
desire satisfactions for their pride and their self-respect. They
desire victory over rivals so profoundly that they will invent a
rivalry for the unconscious purpose of making a victory possible. All
these motives cut across the pure economic motive in ways that are
practically important.

There is need of a treatment of political motives by the methods of
psycho-analysis. In politics, as in private life, men invent myths to
rationalize their conduct. If a man thinks that the only reasonable
motive in politics is economic self-advancement, he will persuade
himself that the things he wishes to do will make him rich. When he
wants to fight the Germans, he tells himself that their competition is
ruining his trade. If, on the other hand, he is an "idealist," who
holds that his politics should aim at the advancement of the human
race, he will tell himself that the crimes of the Germans demand
their humiliation. The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage,
but not through the former. To desire one's own economic advancement
is comparatively reasonable; to Marx, who inherited eighteenth-century
rationalist psychology from the British orthodox economists,
self-enrichment seemed the natural aim of a man's political actions.
But modern psychology has dived much deeper into the ocean of insanity
upon which the little barque of human reason insecurely floats. The
intellectual optimism of a bygone age is no longer possible to the
modern student of human nature. Yet it lingers in Marxism, making
Marxians rigid and Procrustean in their treatment of the life of
instinct. Of this rigidity the materialistic conception of history is
a prominent instance.

In the next chapter I shall attempt to outline a political psychology
which seems to me more nearly true than that of Marx.




II

DECIDING FORCES IN POLITICS


The larger events in the political life of the world are determined by
the interaction of material conditions and human passions. The
operation of the passions on the material conditions is modified by
intelligence. The passions themselves may be modified by alien
intelligence guided by alien passions. So far, such modification has
been wholly unscientific, but it may in time become as precise as
engineering.

The classification of the passions which is most convenient in
political theory is somewhat different from that which would be
adopted in psychology.

We may begin with desires for the necessaries of life: food, drink,
sex, and (in cold climates) clothing and housing. When these are
threatened, there is no limit to the activity and violence that men
will display.

Planted upon these primitive desires are a number of secondary
desires. Love of property, of which the fundamental political
importance is obvious, may be derived historically and psychologically
from the hoarding instinct. Love of the good opinion of others (which
we may call vanity) is a desire which man shares with many animals; it
is perhaps derivable from courtship, but has great survival value,
among gregarious animals, in regard to others besides possible mates.
Rivalry and love of power are perhaps developments of jealousy; they
are akin, but not identical.

These four passions--acquisitiveness, vanity, rivalry, and love of
power--are, after the basic instincts, the prime movers of almost all
that happens in politics. Their operation is intensified and
regularized by herd instinct. But herd instinct, by its very nature,
cannot be a prime mover, since it merely causes the herd to act in
unison, without determining what the united action is to be. Among
men, as among other gregarious animals, the united action, in any
given circumstances, is determined partly by the common passions of
the herd, partly by imitation of leaders. The art of politics consists
in causing the latter to prevail over the former.

Of the four passions we have enumerated, only one, namely
acquisitiveness, is concerned at all directly with men's relations to
their material conditions. The other three--vanity, rivalry, and love
of power--are concerned with social relations. I think this is the
source of what is erroneous in the Marxian interpretation of history,
which tacitly assumes that acquisitiveness is the source of all
political actions. It is clear that many men willingly forego wealth
for the sake of power and glory, and that nations habitually sacrifice
riches to rivalry with other nations. The desire for some form of
superiority is common to almost all energetic men. No social system
which attempts to thwart it can be stable, since the lazy majority
will never be a match for the energetic minority.

What is called "virtue" is an offshoot of vanity: it is the habit of
acting in a manner which others praise.

The operation of material conditions may be illustrated by the
statement (Myers's _Dawn of History_) that four of the greatest
movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the
nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited. The
last of these four movements was the rise of Islam. In these four
cases, the primal need of food and drink was enough to set events in
motion; but as this need could only be satisfied by conquest, the four
secondary passions must have very soon come into play. In the
conquests of modern industrialism, the secondary passions have been
almost wholly dominant, since those who directed them had no need to
fear hunger or thirst. It is the potency of vanity and love of power
that gives hope for the industrial future of Soviet Russia, since it
enables the Communist State to enlist in its service men whose
abilities might give them vast wealth in a capitalistic society.

Intelligence modifies profoundly the operation of material conditions.
When America was first discovered, men only desired gold and silver;
consequently the portions first settled were not those that are now
most profitable. The Bessemer process created the German iron and
steel industry; inventions requiring oil have created a demand for
that commodity which is one of the chief influences in international
politics.

The intelligence which has this profound effect on politics is not
political, but scientific and technical: it is the kind of
intelligence which discovers how to make nature minister to human
passions. Tungsten had no value until it was found to be useful in the
manufacture of shells and electric light, but now people will, if
necessary, kill each other in order to acquire tungsten. Scientific
intelligence is the cause of this change.

The progress or retrogression of the world depends, broadly speaking,
upon the balance between acquisitiveness and rivalry. The former makes
for progress, the latter for retrogression. When intelligence provides
improved methods of production, these may be employed to increase the
general share of goods, or to set apart more of the labour power of
the community for the business of killing its rivals. Until 1914,
acquisitiveness had prevailed, on the whole, since the fall of
Napoleon; the past six years have seen a prevalence of the instinct of
rivalry. Scientific intelligence makes it possible to indulge this
instinct more fully than is possible for primitive peoples, since it
sets free more men from the labour of producing necessaries. It is
possible that scientific intelligence may, in time, reach the point
when it will enable rivalry to exterminate the human race. This is the
most hopeful method of bringing about an end of war.

For those who do not like this method, there is another: the study of
scientific psychology and physiology. The physiological causes of
emotions have begun to be known, through the studies of such men as
Cannon (_Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage_). In time, it
may become possible, by physiological means, to alter the whole
emotional nature of a population. It will then depend upon the
passions of the rulers how this power is used. Success will come to
the State which discovers how to promote pugnacity to the extent
required for external war, but not to the extent which would lead to
domestic dissensions. There is no method by which it can be insured
that rulers shall desire the good of mankind, and therefore there is
no reason to suppose that the power to modify men's emotional nature
would cause progress.

If men desired to diminish rivalry, there is an obvious method. Habits
of power intensify the passion of rivalry; therefore a State in which
power is concentrated will, other things being equal, be more
bellicose than one in which power is diffused. For those who dislike
wars, this is an additional argument against all forms of
dictatorship. But dislike of war is far less common than we used to
suppose; and those who like war can use the same argument to support
dictatorship.




III

BOLSHEVIK CRITICISM OF DEMOCRACY


The Bolshevik argument against Parliamentary democracy as a method of
achieving Socialism is a powerful one. My answer to it lies rather in
pointing out what I believe to be fallacies in the Bolshevik method,
from which I conclude that no swift method exists of establishing any
desirable form of Socialism. But let us first see what the Bolshevik
argument is.

In the first place, it assumes that those to whom it is addressed are
absolutely certain that Communism is desirable, so certain that they
are willing, if necessary, to force it upon an unwilling population at
the point of the bayonet. It then proceeds to argue that, while
capitalism retains its hold over propaganda and its means of
corruption, Parliamentary methods are very unlikely to give a majority
for Communism in the House of Commons, or to lead to effective action
by such a majority even if it existed. Communists point out how the
people are deceived, and how their chosen leaders have again and
again betrayed them. From this they argue that the destruction of
capitalism must be sudden and catastrophic; that it must be the work
of a minority; and that it cannot be effected constitutionally or
without violence. It is therefore, in their view, the duty of the
Communist party in a capitalist country to prepare for armed conflict,
and to take all possible measure for disarming the bourgeoisie and
arming that part of the proletariat which is willing to support the
Communists.

There is an air of realism and disillusionment about this position,
which makes it attractive to those idealists who wish to think
themselves cynics. But I think there are various points in which it
fails to be as realistic as it pretends.

In the first place, it makes much of the treachery of Labour leaders
in constitutional movements, but does not consider the possibility of
the treachery of Communist leaders in a revolution. To this the
Marxian would reply that in constitutional movements men are bought,
directly or indirectly, by the money of the capitalists, but that
revolutionary Communism would leave the capitalists no money with
which to attempt corruption. This has been achieved in Russia, and
could be achieved elsewhere. But selling oneself to the capitalists
is not the only possible form of treachery. It is also possible,
having acquired power, to use it for one's own ends instead of for the
people. This is what I believe to be likely to happen in Russia: the
establishment of a bureaucratic aristocracy, concentrating authority
in its own hands, and creating a régime just as oppressive and cruel
as that of capitalism. Marxians never sufficiently recognize that love
of power is quite as strong a motive, and quite as great a source of
injustice, as love of money; yet this must be obvious to any unbiased
student of politics. It is also obvious that the method of violent
revolution leading to a minority dictatorship is one peculiarly
calculated to create habits of despotism which would survive the
crisis by which they were generated. Communist politicians are likely
to become just like the politicians of other parties: a few will be
honest, but the great majority will merely cultivate the art of
telling a plausible tale with a view to tricking the people into
entrusting them with power. The only possible way by which politicians
as a class can be improved is the political and psychological
education of the people, so that they may learn to detect a humbug. In
England men have reached the point of suspecting a good speaker, but
if a man speaks badly they think he must be honest. Unfortunately,
virtue is not so widely diffused as this theory would imply.

In the second place, it is assumed by the Communist argument that,
although capitalist propaganda can prevent the majority from becoming
Communists, yet capitalist laws and police forces cannot prevent the
Communists, while still a minority, from acquiring a supremacy of
military power. It is thought that secret propaganda can undermine the
army and navy, although it is admittedly impossible to get the
majority to vote at elections for the programme of the Bolsheviks.
This view is based upon Russian experience, where the army and navy
had suffered defeat and had been brutally ill used by incompetent
Tsarist authorities. The argument has no application to more efficient
and successful States. Among the Germans, even in defeat, it was the
civilian population that began the revolution.

There is a further assumption in the Bolshevik argument which seems to
me quite unwarrantable. It is assumed that the capitalist governments
will have learned nothing from the experience of Russia. Before the
Russian Revolution, governments had not studied Bolshevik theory. And
defeat in war created a revolutionary mood throughout Central and
Eastern Europe. But now the holders of power are on their guard. There
seems no reason whatever to suppose that they will supinely permit a
preponderance of armed force to pass into the hands of those who wish
to overthrow them, while, according to the Bolshevik theory, they are
still sufficiently popular to be supported by a majority at the polls.
Is it not as clear as noonday that in a democratic country it is more
difficult for the proletariat to destroy the Government by arms than
to defeat it in a general election? Seeing the immense advantages of a
Government in dealing with rebels, it seems clear that rebellion could
have little hope of success unless a very large majority supported it.
Of course, if the army and navy were specially revolutionary, they
might effect an unpopular revolution; but this situation, though
something like it occurred in Russia, is hardly to be expected in the
Western nations. This whole Bolshevik theory of revolution by a
minority is one which might just conceivably have succeeded as a
secret plot, but becomes impossible as soon as it is openly avowed and
advocated.

But perhaps it will be said that I am caricaturing the Bolshevik
doctrine of revolution. It is urged by advocates of this doctrine,
quite truly, that all political events are brought about by
minorities, since the majority are indifferent to politics. But there
is a difference between a minority in which the indifferent acquiesce,
and a minority so hated as to startle the indifferent into belated
action. To make the Bolshevik doctrine reasonable, it is necessary to
suppose that they believe the majority can be induced to acquiesce, at
least temporarily, in the revolution made by the class-conscious
minority. This, again, is based upon Russian experience: desire for
peace and land led to a widespread support of the Bolsheviks in
November 1917 on the part of people who have subsequently shown no
love for Communism.

I think we come here to an essential part of Bolshevik philosophy. In
the moment of revolution, Communists are to have some popular cry by
which they win more support than mere Communism could win. Having thus
acquired the State machine, they are to use it for their own ends. But
this, again, is a method which can only be practised successfully so
long as it is not avowed. It is to some extent habitual in politics.
The Unionists in 1900 won a majority on the Boer War, and used it to
endow brewers and Church schools. The Liberals in 1906 won a majority
on Chinese labour, and used it to cement the secret alliance with
France and to make an alliance with Tsarist Russia. President Wilson,
in 1916, won his majority on neutrality, and used it to come into the
war. This method is part of the stock-in-trade of democracy. But its
success depends upon repudiating it until the moment comes to practise
it. Those who, like the Bolsheviks, have the honesty to proclaim in
advance their intention of using power for other ends than those for
which it was given them, are not likely to have a chance of carrying
out their designs.

What seems to me to emerge from these considerations is this: That in
a democratic and politically educated country, armed revolution in
favour of Communism would have no chance of succeeding unless it were
supported by a larger majority than would be required for the election
of a Communist Government by constitutional methods. It is possible
that, if such a Government came into existence, and proceeded to carry
out its programme, it would be met by armed resistance on the part of
capital, including a large proportion of the officers in the army and
navy. But in subduing this resistance it would have the support of
that great body of opinion which believes in legality and upholds the
constitution. Moreover, having, by hypothesis, converted a majority of
the nation, a Communist Government could be sure of loyal help from
immense numbers of workers, and would not be forced, as the
Bolsheviks are in Russia, to suspect treachery everywhere. Under these
circumstances, I believe that the resistance of the capitalists could
be quelled without much difficulty, and would receive little support
from moderate people. Whereas, in a minority revolt of Communists
against a capitalist Government, all moderate opinion would be on the
side of capitalism.

The contention that capitalist propaganda is what prevents the
adoption of Communism by wage-earners is only very partially true.
Capitalist propaganda has never been able to prevent the Irish from
voting against the English, though it has been applied to this object
with great vigour. It has proved itself powerless, over and over
again, in opposing nationalist movements which had almost no moneyed
support. It has been unable to cope with religious feeling. And those
industrial populations which would most obviously benefit by Socialism
have, in the main, adopted it, in spite of the opposition of
employers. The plain truth is that Socialism does not arouse the same
passionate interest in the average citizen as is roused by nationality
and used to be roused by religion. It is not unlikely that things may
change in this respect: we may be approaching a period of economic
civil wars comparable to that of the religious civil wars that
followed the Reformation. In such a period, nationalism is submerged
by party: British and German Socialists, or British and German
capitalists, will feel more kinship with each other than with
compatriots of the opposite political camp. But when that day comes,
there will be no difficulty, in highly industrial countries, in
securing Socialist majorities; if Socialism is not then carried
without bloodshed, it will be due to the unconstitutional action of
the rich, not to the need of revolutionary violence on the part of the
advocates of the proletariat. Whether such a state of opinion grows up
or not depends mainly upon the stubbornness or conciliatoriness of the
possessing classes, and, conversely, upon the moderation or violence
of those who desire fundamental economic change. The majority which
Bolsheviks regard as unattainable is chiefly prevented by the
ruthlessness of their own tactics.

Apart from all arguments of detail, there are two broad objections to
violent revolution in a democratic community. The first is that, when
once the principle of respecting majorities as expressed at the
ballot-box is abandoned, there is no reason to suppose that victory
will be secured by the particular minority to which one happens to
belong. There are many minorities besides Communists: religious
minorities, teetotal minorities, militarist minorities, capitalist
minorities. Any one of these could adopt the method of obtaining power
advocated by the Bolsheviks, and any one would be just as likely to
succeed as they are. What restrains these minorities, more or less, at
present, is respect for the law and the constitution. Bolsheviks
tacitly assume that every other party will preserve this respect while
they themselves, unhindered, prepare the revolution. But if their
philosophy of violence becomes popular, there is not the slightest
reason to suppose that they will be its beneficiaries. They believe
that Communism is for the good of the majority; they ought to believe
that they can persuade the majority on this question, and to have the
patience to set about the task of winning by propaganda.

The second argument of principle against the method of minority
violence is that abandonment of law, when it becomes widespread, lets
loose the wild beast, and gives a free rein to the primitive lusts and
egoisms which civilization in some degree curbs. Every student of
mediæval thought must have been struck by the extraordinarily high
value placed upon law in that period. The reason was that, in
countries infested by robber barons, law was the first requisite of
progress. We, in the modern world, take it for granted that most
people will be law-abiding, and we hardly realize what centuries of
effort have gone to making such an assumption possible. We forget how
many of the good things that we unquestionably expect would disappear
out of life if murder, rape, and robbery with violence became common.
And we forget even more how very easily this might happen. The
universal class-war foreshadowed by the Third International, following
upon the loosening of restraints produced by the late war, and
combined with a deliberate inculcation of disrespect for law and
constitutional government, might, and I believe would, produce a state
of affairs in which it would be habitual to murder men for a crust of
bread, and in which women would only be safe while armed men protected
them. The civilized nations have accepted democratic government as a
method of settling internal disputes without violence. Democratic
government may have all the faults attributed to it, but it has the
one great merit that people are, on the whole, willing to accept it as
a substitute for civil war in political disputes. Whoever sets to work
to weaken this acceptance, whether in Ulster or in Moscow, is taking a
fearful responsibility. Civilization is not so stable that it cannot
be broken up; and a condition of lawless violence is not one out of
which any good thing is likely to emerge. For this reason, if for no
other, revolutionary violence in a democracy is infinitely dangerous.




IV

REVOLUTION AND DICTATORSHIP


The Bolsheviks have a very definite programme for achieving
Communism--a programme which has been set forth by Lenin repeatedly,
and quite recently in the reply of the Third International to the
questionnaire submitted by the Independent Labour Party.

Capitalists, we are assured, will stick at nothing in defence of their
privileges. It is the nature of man, in so far as he is politically
conscious, to fight for the interests of his class so long as classes
exist. When the conflict is not pushed to extremes, methods of
conciliation and political deception may be preferable to actual
physical warfare; but as soon as the proletariat make a really vital
attack upon the capitalists, they will be met by guns and bayonets.
This being certain and inevitable, it is as well to be prepared for
it, and to conduct propaganda accordingly. Those who pretend that
pacific methods can lead to the realization of Communism are false
friends to the wage-earners; intentionally or unintentionally, they
are covert allies of the bourgeoisie.

There must, then, according to Bolshevik theory, be armed conflict
sooner or later, if the injustices of the present economic system are
ever to be remedied. Not only do they assume armed conflict: they have
a fairly definite conception of the way in which it is to be
conducted. This conception has been carried out in Russia, and is to
be carried out, before very long, in every civilized country. The
Communists, who represent the class-conscious wage-earners, wait for
some propitious moment when events have caused a mood of revolutionary
discontent with the existing Government. They then put themselves at
the head of the discontent, carry through a successful revolution, and
in so doing acquire the arms, the railways, the State treasure, and
all the other resources upon which the power of modern Governments is
built. They then confine political power to Communists, however small
a minority they may be of the whole nation. They set to work to
increase their number by propaganda and the control of education. And
meanwhile, they introduce Communism into every department of economic
life as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, after a longer or shorter period, according to
circumstances, the nation will be converted to Communism, the relics
of capitalist institutions will have been obliterated, and it will be
possible to restore freedom. But the political conflicts to which we
are accustomed will not reappear. All the burning political questions
of our time, according to the Communists, are questions of class
conflict, and will disappear when the division of classes disappears.
Accordingly the State will no longer be required, since the State is
essentially an engine of power designed to give the victory to one
side in the class conflict. Ordinary States are designed to give the
victory to the capitalists; the proletarian State (Soviet Russia) is
designed to give the victory to the wage-earners. As soon as the
community contains only wage-earners, the State will cease to have any
functions. And so, through a period of dictatorship, we shall finally
arrive at a condition very similar to that aimed at by Anarchist
Communism.

Three questions arise in regard to this method of reaching Utopia.
First, would the ultimate state foreshadowed by the Bolsheviks be
desirable in itself? Secondly, would the conflict involved in
achieving it by the Bolshevik method be so bitter and prolonged that
its evils would outweigh the ultimate good? Thirdly, is this method
likely to lead, in the end, to the state which the Bolsheviks desire,
or will it fail at some point and arrive at a quite different result?
If we are to be Bolsheviks, we must answer all these questions in a
sense favourable to their programme.

As regards the first question, I have no hesitation in answering it in
a manner favourable to Communism. It is clear that the present
inequalities of wealth are unjust. In part, they may be defended as
affording an incentive to useful industry, but I do not think this
defence will carry us very far. However, I have argued this question
before in my book on _Roads to Freedom_, and I will not spend time
upon it now. On this matter, I concede the Bolshevik case. It is the
other two questions that I wish to discuss.

Our second question was: Is the ultimate good aimed at by the
Bolsheviks sufficiently great to be worth the price that, according to
their own theory, will have to be paid for achieving it?

If anything human were absolutely certain, we might answer this
question affirmatively with some confidence. The benefits of
Communism, if it were once achieved, might be expected to be lasting;
we might legitimately hope that further change would be towards
something still better, not towards a revival of ancient evils. But if
we admit, as we must do, that the outcome of the Communist revolution
is in some degree uncertain, it becomes necessary to count the cost;
for a great part of the cost is all but certain.

Since the revolution of October, 1917, the Soviet Government has been
at war with almost all the world, and has had at the same time to face
civil war at home. This is not to be regarded as accidental, or as a
misfortune which could not be foreseen. According to Marxian theory,
what has happened was bound to happen. Indeed, Russia has been
wonderfully fortunate in not having to face an even more desperate
situation. First and foremost, the world was exhausted by the war, and
in no mood for military adventures. Next, the Tsarist régime was the
worst in Europe, and therefore rallied less support than would be
secured by any other capitalist Government. Again, Russia is vast and
agricultural, making it capable of resisting both invasion and
blockade better than Great Britain or France or Germany. The only
other country that could have resisted with equal success is the
United States, which is at present very far removed from a proletarian
revolution, and likely long to remain the chief bulwark of the
capitalist system. It is evident that Great Britain, attempting a
similar revolution, would be forced by starvation to yield within a
few months, provided America led a policy of blockade. The same is
true, though in a less degree, of continental countries. Therefore,
unless and until an international Communist revolution becomes
possible, we must expect that any other nation following Russia's
example will have to pay an even higher price than Russia has had to
pay.

Now the price that Russia is having to pay is very great. The almost
universal poverty might be thought to be a small evil in comparison
with the ultimate gain, but it brings with it other evils of which the
magnitude would be acknowledged even by those who have never known
poverty and therefore make light of it. Hunger brings an absorption in
the question of food, which, to most people, makes life almost purely
animal. The general shortage makes people fierce, and reacts upon the
political atmosphere. The necessity of inculcating Communism produces
a hot-house condition, where every breath of fresh air must be
excluded: people are to be taught to think in a certain way, and all
free intelligence becomes taboo. The country comes to resemble an
immensely magnified Jesuit College. Every kind of liberty is banned as
being "_bourgeois_"; but it remains a fact that intelligence
languishes where thought is not free.

All this, however, according to the leaders of the Third
International, is only a small beginning of the struggle, which must
become world-wide before it achieves victory. In their reply to the
Independent Labour Party they say:

    It is probable that upon the throwing off of the chains of the
    capitalist Governments, the revolutionary proletariat of
    Europe will meet the resistance of Anglo-Saxon capital in the
    persons of British and American capitalists who will attempt
    to blockade it. It is then possible that the revolutionary
    proletariat of Europe will rise in union with the peoples of
    the East and commence a revolutionary struggle, the scene of
    which will be the entire world, to deal a final blow to
    British and American capitalism (_The Times_, July 30, 1920).

The war here prophesied, if it ever takes place, will be one compared
to which the late war will come to seem a mere affair of outposts.
Those who realize the destructiveness of the late war, the devastation
and impoverishment, the lowering of the level of civilization
throughout vast areas, the general increase of hatred and savagery,
the letting loose of bestial instincts which had been curbed during
peace--those who realize all this will hesitate to incur inconceivably
greater horrors, even if they believe firmly that Communism in itself
is much to be desired. An economic system cannot be considered apart
from the population which is to carry it out; and the population
resulting from such a world-war as Moscow calmly contemplates would
be savage, bloodthirsty and ruthless to an extent that must make any
system a mere engine of oppression and cruelty.

This brings us to our third question: Is the system which Communists
regard as their goal likely to result from the adoption of their
methods? This is really the most vital question of the three.

Advocacy of Communism by those who believe in Bolshevik methods rests
upon the assumption that there is no slavery except economic slavery,
and that when all goods are held in common there must be perfect
liberty. I fear this is a delusion.

There must be administration, there must be officials who control
distribution. These men, in a Communist State, are the repositories of
power. So long as they control the army, they are able, as in Russia
at this moment, to wield despotic power even if they are a small
minority. The fact that there is Communism--to a certain extent--does
not mean that there is liberty. If the Communism were more complete,
it would not necessarily mean more freedom; there would still be
certain officials in control of the food supply, and these officials
could govern as they pleased so long as they retained the support of
the soldiers. This is not mere theory: it is the patent lesson of the
present condition of Russia. The Bolshevik theory is that a small
minority are to seize power, and are to hold it until Communism is
accepted practically universally, which, they admit, may take a long
time. But power is sweet, and few men surrender it voluntarily. It is
especially sweet to those who have the habit of it, and the habit
becomes most ingrained in those who have governed by bayonets, without
popular support. Is it not almost inevitable that men placed as the
Bolsheviks are placed in Russia, and as they maintain that the
Communists must place themselves wherever the social revolution
succeeds, will be loath to relinquish their monopoly of power, and
will find reasons for remaining until some new revolution ousts them?
Would it not be fatally easy for them, without altering economic
structure, to decree large salaries for high Government officials, and
so reintroduce the old inequalities of wealth? What motive would they
have for not doing so? What motive is possible except idealism, love
of mankind, non-economic motives of the sort that Bolsheviks decry?
The system created by violence and the forcible rule of a minority
must necessarily allow of tyranny and exploitation; and if human
nature is what Marxians assert it to be, why should the rulers
neglect such opportunities of selfish advantage?

It is sheer nonsense to pretend that the rulers of a great empire such
as Soviet Russia, when they have become accustomed to power, retain
the proletarian psychology, and feel that their class-interest is the
same as that of the ordinary working man. This is not the case in fact
in Russia now, however the truth may be concealed by fine phrases. The
Government has a class-consciousness and a class-interest quite
distinct from those of the genuine proletarian, who is not to be
confounded with the paper proletarian of the Marxian schema. In a
capitalist state, the Government and the capitalists on the whole hang
together, and form one class; in Soviet Russia, the Government has
absorbed the capitalist mentality together with the governmental, and
the fusion has given increased strength to the upper class. But I see
no reason whatever to expect equality or freedom to result from such a
system, except reasons derived from a false psychology and a mistaken
analysis of the sources of political power.

I am compelled to reject Bolshevism for two reasons: First, because
the price mankind must pay to achieve Communism by Bolshevik methods
is too terrible; and secondly because, even after paying the price, I
do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to
desire.

But if their methods are rejected, how are we ever to arrive at a
better economic system? This is not an easy question, and I shall
treat it in a separate chapter.




V

MECHANISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL


Is it possible to effect a fundamental reform of the existing economic
system by any other method than that of Bolshevism? The difficulty of
answering this question is what chiefly attracts idealists to the
dictatorship of the proletariat. If, as I have argued, the method of
violent revolution and Communist rule is not likely to have the
results which idealists desire, we are reduced to despair unless we
can see hope in other methods. The Bolshevik arguments against all
other methods are powerful. I confess that, when the spectacle of
present-day Russia forced me to disbelieve in Bolshevik methods, I was
at first unable to see any way of curing the essential evils of
capitalism. My first impulse was to abandon political thinking as a
bad job, and to conclude that the strong and ruthless must always
exploit the weaker and kindlier sections of the population. But this
is not an attitude that can be long maintained by any vigorous and
temperamentally hopeful person. Of course, if it were the truth, one
would have to acquiesce. Some people believe that by living on sour
milk one can achieve immortality. Such optimists are answered by a
mere refutation; it is not necessary to go on and point out some other
way of escaping death. Similarly an argument that Bolshevism will not
lead to the millennium would remain valid even if it could be shown
that the millennium cannot be reached by any other road. But the truth
in social questions is not quite like truth in physiology or physics,
since it depends upon men's beliefs. Optimism tends to verify itself
by making people impatient of avoidable evils; while despair, on the
other hand, makes the world as bad as it believes it to be. It is
therefore imperative for those who do not believe in Bolshevism to put
some other hope in its place.

I think there are two things that must be admitted: first, that many
of the worst evils of capitalism might survive under Communism;
secondly, that the cure for these evils cannot be sudden, since it
requires changes in the average mentality.

What are the chief evils of the present system? I do not think that
mere inequality of wealth, in itself, is a very grave evil. If
everybody had enough, the fact that some have more than enough would
be unimportant. With a very moderate improvement in methods of
production, it would be easy to ensure that everybody should have
enough, even under capitalism, if wars and preparations for wars were
abolished. The problem of poverty is by no means insoluble within the
existing system, except when account is taken of psychological factors
and the uneven distribution of power.

The graver evils of the capitalist system all arise from its uneven
distribution of power. The possessors of capital wield an influence
quite out of proportion to their numbers or their services to the
community. They control almost the whole of education and the press;
they decide what the average man shall know or not know; the cinema
has given them a new method of propaganda, by which they enlist the
support of those who are too frivolous even for illustrated papers.
Very little of the intelligence of the world is really free: most of
it is, directly or indirectly, in the pay of business enterprises or
wealthy philanthropists. To satisfy capitalist interests, men are
compelled to work much harder and more monotonously than they ought to
work, and their education is scamped. Wherever, as in barbarous or
semi-civilized countries, labour is too weak or too disorganized to
protect itself, appalling cruelties are practised for private profit.
Economic and political organizations become more and more vast,
leaving less and less room for individual development and initiative.
It is this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the
fundamental evil of the modern world.

To cure this evil is not easy, because efficiency is promoted, at any
given moment, though not in the long run, by sacrificing the
individual to the smooth working of a vast organization, whether
military or industrial. In war and in commercial competition, it is
necessary to control individual impulses, to treat men as so many
"bayonets" or "sabres" or "hands," not as a society of separate people
with separate tastes and capacities. Some sacrifice of individual
impulses is, of course, essential to the existence of an ordered
community, and this degree of sacrifice is, as a rule, not regretable
even from the individual's point of view. But what is demanded in a
highly militarized or industrialized nation goes far beyond this very
moderate degree. A society which is to allow much freedom to the
individual must be strong enough to be not anxious about home defence,
moderate enough to refrain from difficult external conquests, and rich
enough to value leisure and a civilized existence more than an
increase of consumable commodities.

But where the material conditions for such a state of affairs exist,
the psychological conditions are not likely to exist unless power is
very widely diffused throughout the community. Where power is
concentrated in a few, it will happen, unless those few are very
exceptional people, that they will value tangible achievements in the
way of increase in trade or empire more than the slow and less obvious
improvements that would result from better education combined with
more leisure. The joys of victory are especially great to the holders
of power, while the evils of a mechanical organization fall almost
exclusively upon the less influential. For these reasons, I do not
believe that any community in which power is much concentrated will
long refrain from conflicts of the kind involving a sacrifice of what
is most valuable in the individual. In Russia at this moment, the
sacrifice of the individual is largely inevitable, because of the
severity of the economic and military struggle. But I did not feel, in
the Bolsheviks, any consciousness of the magnitude of this misfortune,
or any realization of the importance of the individual as against the
State. Nor do I believe that men who do realize this are likely to
succeed, or to come to the top, in times when everything has to be
done against personal liberty. The Bolshevik theory requires that
every country, sooner or later, should go through what Russia is going
through now. And in every country in such a condition we may expect to
find the government falling into the hands of ruthless men, who have
not by nature any love for freedom, and who will see little importance
in hastening the transition from dictatorship to freedom. It is far
more likely that such men will be tempted to embark upon new
enterprises, requiring further concentration of forces, and postponing
indefinitely the liberation of the populations which they use as their
material.

For these reasons, equalization of wealth without equalization of
power seems to me a rather small and unstable achievement. But
equalization of power is not a thing that can be achieved in a day. It
requires a considerable level of moral, intellectual, and technical
education. It requires a long period without extreme crises, in order
that habits of tolerance and good nature may become common. It
requires vigour on the part of those who are acquiring power, without
a too desperate resistance on the part of those whose share is
diminishing. This is only possible if those who are acquiring power
are not very fierce, and do not terrify their opponents by threats of
ruin and death. It cannot be done quickly, because quick methods
require that very mechanism and subordination of the individual which
we should struggle to prevent.

But even equalization of power is not the whole of what is needed
politically. The right grouping of men for different purposes is also
essential. Self-government in industry, for example, is an
indispensable condition of a good society. Those acts of an individual
or a group which have no very great importance for outsiders ought to
be freely decided by that individual or group. This is recognized as
regards religion, but ought to be recognized over a much wider field.

Bolshevik theory seems to me to err by concentrating its attention
upon one evil, namely inequality of wealth, which it believes to be at
the bottom of all others. I do not believe any one evil can be thus
isolated, but if I had to select one as the greatest of political
evils, I should select inequality of power. And I should deny that
this is likely to be cured by the class-war and the dictatorship of
the Communist party. Only peace and a long period of gradual
improvement can bring it about.

Good relations between individuals, freedom from hatred and violence
and oppression, general diffusion of education, leisure rationally
employed, the progress of art and science--these seem to me among the
most important ends that a political theory ought to have in view. I
do not believe that they can be furthered, except very rarely, by
revolution and war; and I am convinced that at the present moment they
can only be promoted by a diminution in the spirit of ruthlessness
generated by the war. For these reasons, while admitting the necessity
and even utility of Bolshevism in Russia, I do not wish to see it
spread, or to encourage the adoption of its philosophy by advanced
parties in the Western nations.




VI

WHY RUSSIAN COMMUNISM HAS FAILED


The civilized world seems almost certain, sooner or later, to follow
the example of Russia in attempting a Communist organization of
society. I believe that the attempt is essential to the progress and
happiness of mankind during the next few centuries, but I believe also
that the transition has appalling dangers. I believe that, if the
Bolshevik theory as to the method of transition is adopted by
Communists in Western nations, the result will be a prolonged chaos,
leading neither to Communism nor to any other civilized system, but to
a relapse into the barbarism of the Dark Ages. In the interests of
Communism, no less than in the interests of civilization, I think it
imperative that the Russian failure should be admitted and analysed.
For this reason, if for no other, I cannot enter into the conspiracy
of concealment which many Western Socialists who have visited Russia
consider necessary.

I shall try first to recapitulate the facts which make me regard the
Russian experiment as a failure, and then to seek out the causes of
failure.

The most elementary failure in Russia is in regard to food. In a
country which formerly produced a vast exportable surplus of cereals
and other agricultural produce, and in which the non-agricultural
population is only 15 per cent. of the total, it ought to be possible,
without great difficulty, to provide enough food for the towns. Yet
the Government has failed badly in this respect. The rations are
inadequate and irregular, so that it is impossible to preserve health
and vigour without the help of food purchased illicitly in the markets
at speculative prices. I have given reasons for thinking that the
breakdown of transport, though a contributory cause, is not the main
reason for the shortage. The main reason is the hostility of the
peasants, which, in turn, is due to the collapse of industry and to
the policy of forced requisitions. In regard to corn and flour, the
Government requisitions all that the peasant produces above a certain
minimum required for himself and his family. If, instead, it exacted a
fixed amount as rent, it would not destroy his incentive to
production, and would not provide nearly such a strong motive for
concealment. But this plan would have enabled the peasants to grow
rich, and would have involved a confessed abandonment of Communist
theory. It has therefore been thought better to employ forcible
methods, which led to disaster, as they were bound to do.

The collapse of industry was the chief cause of the food difficulties,
and has in turn been aggravated by them. Owing to the fact that there
is abundant food in the country, industrial and urban workers are
perpetually attempting to abandon their employment for agriculture.
This is illegal, and is severely punished, by imprisonment or convict
labour. Nevertheless it continues, and in so vast a country as Russia
it is not possible to prevent it. Thus the ranks of industry become
still further depleted.

Except as regards munitions of war, the collapse of industry in Russia
is extraordinarily complete. The resolutions passed by the Ninth
Congress of the Communist Party (April, 1920) speak of "the incredible
catastrophes of public economy." This language is not too strong,
though the recovery of the Baku oil has done something to produce a
revival along the Volga basin.

The failure of the whole industrial side of the national economy,
including transport, is at the bottom of the other failures of the
Soviet Government. It is, to begin with, the main cause of the
unpopularity of the Communists both in town and country: in town,
because the people are hungry; in the country, because food is taken
with no return except paper. If industry had been prosperous, the
peasants could have had clothes and agricultural machinery, for which
they would have willingly parted with enough food for the needs of the
towns. The town population could then have subsisted in tolerable
comfort; disease could have been coped with, and the general lowering
of vitality averted. It would not have been necessary, as it has been
in many cases, for men of scientific or artistic capacity to abandon
the pursuits in which they were skilled for unskilled manual labour.
The Communist Republic might have been agreeable to live in--at least
for those who had been very poor before.

The unpopularity of the Bolsheviks, which is primarily due to the
collapse of industry, has in turn been accentuated by the measures
which it has driven the Government to adopt. In view of the fact that
it was impossible to give adequate food to the ordinary population of
Petrograd and Moscow, the Government decided that at any rate the men
employed on important public work should be sufficiently nourished to
preserve their efficiency. It is a gross libel to say that the
Communists, or even the leading People's Commissaries, live luxurious
lives according to our standards; but it is a fact that they are not
exposed, like their subjects, to acute hunger and the weakening of
energy that accompanies it. No tone can blame them for this, since the
work of government must be carried on; but it is one of the ways in
which class distinctions have reappeared where it was intended that
they should be banished. I talked to an obviously hungry working man
in Moscow, who pointed to the Kremlin and remarked: "In there they
have enough to eat." He was expressing a widespread feeling which is
fatal to the idealistic appeal that Communism attempts to make.

Owing to unpopularity, the Bolsheviks have had to rely upon the army
and the Extraordinary Commission, and have been compelled to reduce
the Soviet system to an empty form. More and more the pretence of
representing the proletariat has grown threadbare. Amid official
demonstrations and processions and meetings the genuine proletarian
looks on, apathetic and disillusioned, unless he is possessed of
unusual energy and fire, in which case he looks to the ideas of
syndicalism or the I.W.W. to liberate him from a slavery far more
complete than that of capitalism. A sweated wage, long hours,
industrial conscription, prohibition of strikes, prison for slackers,
diminution of the already insufficient rations in factories where the
production falls below what the authorities expect, an army of spies
ready to report any tendency to political disaffection and to procure
imprisonment for its promoters--this is the reality of a system which
still professes to govern in the name of the proletariat.

At the same time the internal and external peril has necessitated the
creation of a vast army recruited by conscription, except as regards a
Communist nucleus, from among a population utterly weary of war, who
put the Bolsheviks in power because they alone promised peace.
Militarism has produced its inevitable result in the way of a harsh
and dictatorial spirit: the men in power go through their day's work
with the consciousness that they command three million armed men, and
that civilian opposition to their will can be easily crushed.

Out of all this has grown a system painfully like the old government
of the Tsar--a system which is Asiatic in its centralized bureaucracy,
its secret service, its atmosphere of governmental mystery and
submissive terror. In many ways it resembles our Government of India.
Like that Government, it stands for civilization, for education,
sanitation, and Western ideas of progress; it is composed in the main
of honest and hard-working men, who despise those whom they govern,
but believe themselves possessed of something valuable which they
must communicate to the population, however little it may be desired.
Like our Government in India, they live in terror of popular risings,
and are compelled to resort to cruel repressions in order to preserve
their power. Like it, they represent an alien philosophy of life,
which cannot be forced upon the people without a change of instinct,
habit, and tradition so profound as to dry up the vital springs of
action, producing listlessness and despair among the ignorant victims
of militant enlightenment. It may be that Russia needs sternness and
discipline more than anything else; it may be that a revival of Peter
the Great's methods is essential to progress. From this point of view,
much of what it is natural to criticize in the Bolsheviks becomes
defensible; but this point of view has little affinity to Communism.
Bolshevism may be defended, possibly, as a dire discipline through
which a backward nation is to be rapidly industrialized; but as an
experiment in Communism it has failed.

There are two things that a defender of the Bolsheviks may say against
the argument that they have failed because the present state of Russia
is bad. It may be said that it is too soon to judge, and it may be
urged that whatever failure there has been is attributable to the
hostility of the outside world.

As to the contention that it is too soon to judge, that is of course
undeniable in a sense. But in a sense it is always too soon to judge
of any historical movement, because its effects and developments go on
for ever. Bolshevism has, no doubt, great changes ahead of it. But the
last three years have afforded material for some judgments, though
more definitive judgments will be possible later. And, for reasons
which I have given in earlier chapters, I find it impossible to
believe that later developments will realize more fully the Communist
ideal. If trade is opened with the outer world, there will be an
almost irresistible tendency to resumption of private enterprise. If
trade is not re-opened, the plans of Asiatic conquest will mature,
leading to a revival of Yenghis Khan and Timur. In neither case is the
purity of the Communist faith likely to survive.

As for the hostility of the Entente, it is of course true that
Bolshevism might have developed very differently if it had been
treated in a friendly spirit. But in view of its desire to promote
world-revolution, no one could expect--and the Bolsheviks certainly
did not expect--that capitalist Governments would be friendly. If
Germany had won the war, Germany would have shown a hostility more
effective than that of the Entente. However we may blame Western
Governments for their policy, we must realize that, according to the
deterministic economic theory of the Bolsheviks, no other policy was
to be expected from them. Other men might have been excused for not
foreseeing the attitude of Churchill, Clemenceau and Millerand; but
Marxians could not be excused, since this attitude was in exact accord
with their own formula.

We have seen the symptoms of Bolshevik failure; I come now to the
question of its profounder causes.

Everything that is worst in Russia we found traceable to the collapse
of industry. Why has industry collapsed so utterly? And would it
collapse equally if a Communist revolution were to occur in a Western
country?

Russian industry was never highly developed, and depended always upon
outside aid for much of its plant. The hostility of the world, as
embodied in the blockade, left Russia powerless to replace the
machinery and locomotives worn out during the war. The need of
self-defence compelled the Bolsheviks to send their best workmen to
the front, because they were the most reliable Communists, and the
loss of them rendered their factories even more inefficient than they
were under Kerensky. In this respect, and in the laziness and
incapacity of the Russian workman, the Bolsheviks have had to face
special difficulties which would be less in other countries. On the
other hand, they have had special advantages in the fact that Russia
is self-supporting in the matter of food; no other country could have
endured the collapse of industry so long, and no other Great Power
except the United States could have survived years of blockade.

The hostility of the world was in no way a surprise to those who made
the October revolution; it was in accordance with their general
theory, and its consequences should have been taken into account in
making the revolution.

Other hostilities besides those of the outside world have been
incurred by the Bolsheviks with open eyes, notably the hostility of
the peasants and that of a great part of the industrial population.
They have attempted, in accordance with their usual contempt for
conciliatory methods, to substitute terror for reward as the incentive
to work. Some amiable Socialists have imagined that, when the private
capitalist had been eliminated, men would work from a sense of
obligation to the community. The Bolsheviks will have none of such
sentimentalism. In one of the resolutions of the ninth Communist
Congress they say:

    Every social system, whether based on slavery, feudalism, or
    capitalism, had its ways and means of labour compulsion and
    labour education in the interests of the exploiters.

    The Soviet system is faced with the task of developing its
    own methods of labour compulsion to attain an increase of the
    intensity and wholesomeness of labour; this method is to be
    based on the socialization of public economy in the interests
    of the whole nation.

    In addition to the propaganda by which the people are to be
    influenced and the repressions which are to be applied to all
    idlers, parasites and disorganizers who strive to undermine
    public zeal--the principal method for the increase of
    production will become the introduction of the system of
    compulsory labour.

    In capitalist society rivalry assumed the character of
    competition and led to the exploitation of man by man. In a
    society where the means of production are nationalized, labour
    rivalry is to increase the products of labour without
    infringing its solidarity.

    Rivalry between factories, regions, guilds, workshops, and
    individual workers should become the subject of careful
    organization and of close study on the side of the Trade
    Unions and the economic organs.

    The system of premiums which is to be introduced should become
    one of the most powerful means of exciting rivalry. The system
    of rationing of food supply is to get into line with it; so
    long as Soviet Russia suffers from insufficiency of
    provisions, it is only just that the industrious and
    conscientious worker receives more than the careless worker.

It must be remembered that even the "industrious and conscientious
worker" receives less food than is required to maintain efficiency.

Over the whole development of Russia and of Bolshevism since the
October revolution there broods a tragic fatality. In spite of outward
success the inner failure has proceeded by inevitable stages--stages
which could, by sufficient acumen, have been foreseen from the first.
By provoking the hostility of the outside world the Bolsheviks were
forced to provoke the hostility of the peasants, and finally the
hostility or utter apathy of the urban and industrial population.
These various hostilities brought material disaster, and material
disaster brought spiritual collapse. The ultimate source of the whole
train of evils lies in the Bolshevik outlook on life: in its dogmatism
of hatred and its belief that human nature can be completely
transformed by force. To injure capitalists is not the ultimate goal
of Communism, though among men dominated by hatred it is the part that
gives zest to their activities. To face the hostility of the world may
show heroism, but it is a heroism for which the country, not its
rulers, has to pay the price. In the principles of Bolshevism there is
more desire to destroy ancient evils than to build up new goods; it is
for this reason that success in destruction has been so much greater
than in construction. The desire to destroy is inspired by hatred,
which is not a constructive principle. From this essential
characteristic of Bolshevik mentality has sprung the willingness to
subject Russia to its present martyrdom. It is only out of a quite
different mentality that a happier world can be created.

And from this follows a further conclusion. The Bolshevik outlook is
the outcome of the cruelty of the Tsarist régime and the ferocity of
the years of the Great War, operating upon a ruined and starving
nation maddened into universal hatred. If a different mentality is
needed for the establishment of a successful Communism, then a quite
different conjuncture must see its inauguration; men must be persuaded
to the attempt by hope, not driven to it by despair. To bring this
about should be the aim of every Communist who desires the happiness
of mankind more than the punishment of capitalists and their
governmental satellites.




VII

CONDITIONS FOR THE SUCCESS OF COMMUNISM


The fundamental ideas of Communism are by no means impracticable, and
would, if realized, add immeasurably to the well-being of mankind. The
difficulties which have to be faced are not in regard to the
fundamental ideas, but in regard to the transition from capitalism. It
must be assumed that those who profit by the existing system will
fight to preserve it, and their fight may be sufficiently severe to
destroy all that is best in Communism during the struggle, as well as
everything else that has value in modern civilization. The seriousness
of this problem of transition is illustrated by Russia, and cannot be
met by the methods of the Third International. The Soviet Government,
at the present moment, is anxious to obtain manufactured goods from
capitalist countries, but the Third International is meanwhile
endeavouring to promote revolutions which, if they occurred, would
paralyse the industries of the countries concerned, and leave them
incapable of supplying Russian needs.

The supreme condition of success in a Communist revolution is that it
should not paralyse industry. If industry is paralysed, the evils
which exist in modern Russia, or others just as great, seem
practically unavoidable. There will be the problem of town and
country, there will be hunger, there will be fierceness and revolts
and military tyranny. All these things follow in a fatal sequence; and
the end of them is almost certain to be something quite different from
what genuine Communists desire.

If industry is to survive throughout a Communist revolution, a number
of conditions must be fulfilled which are not, at present, fulfilled
anywhere. Consider, for the sake of definiteness, what would happen if
a Communist revolution were to occur in England to-morrow. Immediately
America would place an embargo on all trade with us. The cotton
industry would collapse, leaving about five million of the most
productive portion of the population idle. The food supply would
become inadequate, and would fail disastrously if, as is to be
expected, the Navy were hostile or disorganized by the sabotage of the
officers. The result would be that, unless there were a
counter-revolution, about half the population would die within the
first twelve months. On such a basis it would evidently be impossible
to erect a successful Communist State.

What applies to England applies, in one form or another, to the
remaining countries of Europe. Italian and German Socialists are, many
of them, in a revolutionary frame of mind and could, if they chose,
raise formidable revolts. They are urged by Moscow to do so, but they
realize that, if they did, England and America would starve them.
France, for many reasons, dare not offend England and America beyond a
point. Thus, in every country except America, a successful Communist
revolution is impossible for economico-political reasons. America,
being self-contained and strong, would be capable, so far as material
conditions go, of achieving a successful revolution; but in America
the psychological conditions are as yet adverse. There is no other
civilized country where capitalism is so strong and revolutionary
Socialism so weak as in America. At the present moment, therefore,
though it is by no means impossible that Communist revolutions may
occur all over the Continent, it is nearly certain that they cannot be
successful in any real sense. They will have to begin by a war against
America, and possibly England, by a paralysis of industry, by
starvation, militarism and the whole attendant train of evils with
which Russia has made us familiar.

That Communism, whenever and wherever it is adopted, will have to
begin by fighting the bourgeoisie, is highly probable. The important
question is not whether there is to be fighting, but how long and
severe it is to be. A short war, in which Communism won a rapid and
easy victory, would do little harm. It is long, bitter and doubtful
wars that must be avoided if anything of what makes Communism
desirable is to survive.

Two practical consequences flow from this conclusion: first, that
nothing can succeed until America is either converted to Communism, or
at any rate willing to remain neutral; secondly, that it is a mistake
to attempt to inaugurate Communism in a country where the majority are
hostile, or rather, where the active opponents are as strong as the
active supporters, because in such a state of opinion a very severe
civil war is likely to result. It is necessary to have a great body of
opinion favourable to Communism, and a rather weak opposition, before
a really successful Communist state can be introduced either by
revolution or by more or less constitutional methods.

It may be assumed that when Communism is first introduced, the higher
technical and business staff will side with the capitalists and
attempt sabotage unless they have no hopes of a counter-revolution.
For this reason it is very necessary that among wage-earners there
should be as wide a diffusion as possible of technical and business
education, so that they may be able immediately to take control of big
complex industries. In this respect Russia was very badly off, whereas
England and America would be much more fortunate.

Self-government in industry is, I believe, the road by which England
can best approach Communism. I do not doubt that the railways and the
mines, after a little practice, could be run more efficiently by the
workers, from the point of view of production, than they are at
present by the capitalists. The Bolsheviks oppose self-government in
industry every where, because it has failed in Russia, and their
national self-esteem prevents them from admitting that this is due to
the backwardness of Russia. This is one of the respects in which they
are misled by the assumption that Russia must be in all ways a model
to the rest of the world. I would go so far as to say that the winning
of self-government in such industries as railways and mining is an
essential preliminary to complete Communism. In England, especially,
this is the case. The Unions can command whatever technical skill they
may require; they are politically powerful; the demand for
self-government is one for which there is widespread sympathy, and
could be much more with adequate propaganda; moreover (what is
important with the British temperament) self-government can be brought
about gradually, by stages in each trade, and by extension from one
trade to another. Capitalists value two things, their power and their
money; many individuals among them value only the money. It is wiser
to concentrate first on the power, as is done by seeking
self-government in industry without confiscation of capitalist
incomes. By this means the capitalists are gradually turned into
obvious drones, their active functions in industry become nil, and
they can be ultimately dispossessed without dislocation and without
the possibility of any successful struggle on their parts.

Another advantage of proceeding by way of self-government is that it
tends to prevent the Communist régime, when it comes, from having that
truly terrible degree of centralization which now exists in Russia.
The Russians have been forced to centralize, partly by the problems of
the war, but more by the shortage of all kinds of skill. This has
compelled the few competent men to attempt each to do the work of ten
men, which has not proved satisfactory in spite of heroic efforts. The
idea of democracy has become discredited as the result first of
syndicalism, and then of Bolshevism. But there are two different
things that may be meant by democracy: we may mean the system of
Parliamentary government, or we may mean the participation of the
people in affairs. The discredit of the former is largely deserved,
and I have no desire to uphold Parliament as an ideal institution. But
it is a great misfortune if, from a confusion of ideas, men come to
think that, because Parliaments are imperfect, there is no reason why
there should be self-government. The grounds for advocating
self-government are very familiar: first, that no benevolent despot
can be trusted to know or pursue the interests of his subjects;
second, that the practice of self-government is the only effective
method of political education; third, that it tends to place the
preponderance of force on the side of the constitution, and thus to
promote order and stable government. Other reasons could be found, but
I think these are the chief. In Russia self-government has
disappeared, except within the Communist Party. If it is not to
disappear elsewhere during a Communist revolution, it is very
desirable that there should exist already important industries
competently administered by the workers themselves.

The Bolshevik philosophy is promoted very largely by despair of more
gradual methods. But this despair is a mark of impatience, and is not
really warranted by the facts. It is by no means impossible, in the
near future, to secure self-government in British railways and mines
by constitutional means. This is not the sort of measure which would
bring into operation an American blockade or a civil war or any of the
other catastrophic dangers that are to be feared from a full-fledged
Communist revolution in the present international situation.
Self-government in industry is feasible, and would be a great step
towards Communism. It would both afford many of the advantages of
Communism and also make the transition far easier without a technical
break-down of production.

There is another defect in the methods advocated by the Third
International. The sort of revolution which is recommended is never
practically feasible except in a time of national misfortune; in fact,
defeat in war seems to be an indispensable condition. Consequently, by
this method, Communism will only be inaugurated where the conditions
of life are difficult, where demoralization and disorganization make
success almost impossible, and where men are in a mood of fierce
despair very inimical to industrial construction. If Communism is to
have a fair chance, it must be inaugurated in a prosperous country.
But a prosperous country will not be readily moved by the arguments of
hatred and universal upheaval which are employed by the Third
International. It is necessary, in appealing to a prosperous country,
to lay stress on hope rather than despair, and to show how the
transition can be effected without a calamitous loss of prosperity.
All this requires less violence and subversiveness, more patience and
constructive propaganda, less appeal to the armed might of a
determined minority.

The attitude of uncompromising heroism is attractive, and appeals
especially to the dramatic instinct. But the purpose of the serious
revolutionary is not personal heroism, nor martyrdom, but the creation
of a happier world. Those who have the happiness of the world at heart
will shrink from attitudes and the facile hysteria of "no parley with
the enemy." They will not embark upon enterprises, however arduous and
austere, which are likely to involve the martyrdom of their country
and the discrediting of their ideals. It is by slower and less showy
methods that the new world must be built: by industrial efforts after
self-government, by proletarian training in technique and business
administration, by careful study of the international situation, by a
prolonged and devoted propaganda of ideas rather than tactics,
especially among the wage-earners of the United States. It is not true
that no gradual approaches to Communism are possible: self-government
in industry is an important instance to the contrary. It is not true
that any isolated European country, or even the whole of the Continent
in unison, can, after the exhaustion produced by the war, introduce a
successful form of Communism at the present moment, owing to the
hostility and economic supremacy of America. To find fault with those
who urge these considerations, or to accuse them of faint-heartedness,
is mere sentimental self-indulgence, sacrificing the good we can do to
the satisfaction of our own emotions.

Even under present conditions in Russia, it is possible still to feel
the inspiration of the essential spirit of Communism, the spirit of
creative hope, seeking to sweep away the incumbrances of injustice and
tyranny and rapacity which obstruct the growth of the human spirit, to
replace individual competition by collective action, the relation of
master and slave by free co-operation. This hope has helped the best
of the Communists to bear the harsh years through which Russia has
been passing, and has become an inspiration to the world. The hope is
not chimerical, but it can only be realized through a more patient
labour, a more objective study of facts, and above all a longer
propaganda, to make the necessity of the transition obvious to the
great majority of wage-earners. Russian Communism may fail and go
under, but Communism itself will not die. And if hope rather than
hatred inspires its advocates, it can be brought about without the
universal cataclysm preached by Moscow. The war and its sequel have
proved the destructiveness of capitalism; let us see to it that the
next epoch does not prove the still greater destructiveness of
Communism, but rather its power to heal the wounds which the old evil
system has inflicted upon the human spirit.




  _Printed in Great Britain by_
  UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON




ERRATA


P. 20, l. 11. For "teaching" read "reaching"

P. 23, between l. 18 and l. 19. Insert "violence in the transition
must be faced. Unfortunately,"

P. 43, l. 12. For "dying" read "very ill"

P. 44, last sentence. Substitute "But he recovered, and I hope it will
recover also." (replacing: "I hope I was mistaken in both respects.")

P. 60, l. 6 from below. For "waving triumphant hands and" read
"expressing their delight by"

P. 61, l. 21. For "professional" read "professorial"

P. 85, l. 2. For "This" read "Thus"

P. 91, l. 8. For "losses" read "hopes"

P. 104, l. 9. For "leave" read "leaves"

P. 105, last line. Substitute "which has been already discussed in
Chapter VI" (replacing: "which is better reserved for a separate
chapter.")

P. 120, l. 19 For "desires" read "desire"

P. 132, l. 5 from below. For "Caunon" read "Cannon"

P. 148, l. 5 from below. For "by" read "in"

P. 155, l. 13. For "scheme" read "schema"

P. 172, l. 15. For "Zenghis" read "Yenghis"

P. 187, l. 15. Delete comma.




BY THE SAME AUTHOR


ROADS TO FREEDOM

PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

INTRODUCTION TO MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY

THE ANALYSIS OF MIND


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Typographical errors corrected in text:

page 19: happinesss changed to happiness
page 163: genera to general


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