Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia

Sir Paul Dukes, K.B.E.
Copyright in U.S.A., 1922, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY
First Printed May 1922. Reprinted February 1923. Printed in Great Britain
If ever there was a period when people blindly hitched their wagons to shibboleths and slogans instead of stars it is the present. In the helter-skelter of events which constantly outrun mankind, the essential meaning of commonly used words is becoming increasingly confused. Not only the abstract ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but more concrete and more recently popularized ones such as proletariat, bourgeois, soviet, are already surrounded with a sort of fungous growth concealing their real meaning, so that every time they are employed they have to be freshly defined.
The phenomenon of Red Russia is a supreme example of the triumph over reason of the shibboleth, the slogan, and the political catchword. War-weary and politics-weary, the Russian people easily succumbed to those who promised wildly what nobody could give, the promisers least of all. Catchwords such as “All Power to the Soviets,” possessing cryptic power before their coiners seized the reins of government, were afterward discovered either to have no meaning whatsoever, or else to be endowed with some arbitrary, variable, and quite unforeseen sense. Similarly, words such as “workers,” “bourgeois,” “proletariat,” “imperialist,” “socialist,” “co-operative,” “soviet,” are endowed by mob orators everywhere with arbitrary significations, meaning one thing one day and another the next as occasion demands.
The extreme opponents of Bolshevism, especially amongst Russians, have sinned in this respect as greatly as the extreme proponents, and with no advantage to themselves even in their own class. For to their unreasoning immoderation, as much as to the distortion of ideas by ultra-radicals, is due the appearance, among a certain class of people of inquiring minds but incomplete information, of that oddest of anomalies, the “parlour Bolshevik.” Clearness of vision and understanding will never be restored until precision in terminology is again re-established, and that will take years and years.