MARCH 18, 1918. THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS IN THE LIBERATING MOVEMENT
IN RUSSIA
By Alexander Petrunkevitch
In an interview dated November 21, and published in the New York Times in a special cable from Petrograd, Leon Trotzky in defending the attitude of the people toward the Bolsheviki coup d'etat is reported to have said substantially the following: "All the bourgeoisie is against us. The greater part of the intellectuals is against us or hesitating, awaiting a final outcome. The working class is wholly with us. The army is with us. The peasants, with the exception of exploiters, are with us. The Workmen's and Soldiers' government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants against the capitalists and landowners."
On the other hand my father, Ivan Petrunkevitch, floorleader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the first Duma and since that time owner and publisher of the Petrograd daily Rech writes in a private letter dated June 12: "... the present real government, i. e., the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies, whose leaders are neither soldiers nor workmen, but intellectuals, etc." Nothing has happened during the months intervening between the letter and the interview to change the composition of the Council appreciably. It is true that Kerensky who was vice-president of the Council has been meanwhile deposed; that Tshcheidze had to relinquish the presidency in the Council to Trotzky long before Kerensky's downfall; but the leaders of the Council still are intellectuals, are well educated men, some of them well known writers on political and economic questions and withal very different from the masses which they lead and which they purport to represent. In justice to those who had to give way to the Lenine-Trotzky crowd of supporters, I wish to state emphatically that I do not want to put them on the same plane. Tseretelli, Plekhanov, Tshcheidze, and their co-workers are men of great courage, high ideals, and personal integrity. On the other hand their successors in power are men of a totally different type. The integrity of many of their number has been openly questioned, the accusations, published & broadcast, remained unanswered, and no suit for libel was brought by the men thus accused. Lenine was put under suspicion of having accepted German help and of having planned with Germany's agents the disorganization of the Russian army. It has been even charged on apparently good evidence that the leaflets distributed at the front were printed with German money. Trotzky was accused by Miliukov in the Rech (June 7) of having received $10,000 from German-Americans for the purpose of organizing the attack on Kerensky's government. Ganetsky was forced to leave Denmark by an order of the Danish government, having been convicted of dishonest dealings in a Danish court. Zinoviev is accused of forgery. Others are also under suspicion which has been only increased by the arrest and imprisonment of Burtzev who is known for his untiring efforts to hunt down traitors to the cause of the Russian Revolution and who had important evidence in his possession. It is also a remarkable fact that the majority of the present leaders are known broadly only under assumed names. Lenine's true name is Uljanov, Trotzky's—Bronstein, Zinoviev's—Apfelbaum, Sukhanov's—Gimmer, Kamenev's—Rosenfeld, Steklov's—Nakhamkis, and a number of others whose identity is not even always known. Trotzky's assertion that the Workmen's and Soldiers' Government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants is therefore nothing but a perversion of facts.
There is, however, nothing extraordinary in the fact itself that intellectuals are the real leaders of all Russian parties. Better education and wider knowledge of the affairs of the world have always appealed to the dark masses who realize only dimly their own desires and grasp at any concrete formulation of reforms which contains a tangible promise or seems to express those desires. At the same time they often put their own meaning into the words of their leaders, which is true even of factory workers in the larger cities. As for the peasants, representing about 90 per cent of the entire population, they are still very poorly educated, questions of national import remain outside their horizon, and even their language is not the language of the educated Russian, inasmuch as it lacks the rich vocabulary of modern life and is devoid of the very conceptions to which this vast treasury of words applies. Their mind, great as it is in its potentialities, still moves in the furrows of familiar ideas abhorring things too much at variance with inherited traditions or actual experience. Yet in the turmoil of revolutionary activity the peasants are going to have their say and may become the decisive factor, because they are voters and are casting their votes for those leaders whose words they believe to contain the greatest promise and the least menace of a general disruption of their accustomed mode of life.
We are thus brought back, for the present at least, to the necessity of recognizing that even the state of anarchy under which Russia is laboring, even the rule of the renowned proletariat so much trumpeted about by Lenine and Trotzky, is in reality the work of intellectuals, an answer of the masses to the call of their leaders, a groping for principles beyond their perception.
It suffices a very casual examination of the programs and resolutions of various political parties to see the truth of this statement. They are expressive of the opinions of the leaders, not of the masses; are couched in the language of the educated Russian, not in that of the workman or peasant and, except for the concluding slogans like "Peace, Bread, and Land," are alien to the very spirit of the masses. In this respect all parties are confronted with the same difficulty since all strive to get the support of the masses, yet have to express principles evolved through careful and extensive study of national, political, and economic problems, strange to the uneducated mind. For the same reason the methods of surmounting the difficulty differ in many respects and are characteristic of each party.
The Conservative Intellectuals of Russia early realized the necessity of meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing to him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an all-suffering motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a powerful appeal upon the imagination, for a long time superseding and forcing into the background the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled longing for more land. The ideology of a perfect monarchy is so simple and its shortcomings so easily attributable to dishonesty of officials, that it answered the peasant's thoughts as long as he was not able to see the folly of distinguishing between the system and its realization, but separated in his mind the image of his loving monarch from the cruel reality of everyday life as he still distinguishes between the faith and the priest. The great mistake of all conservatives is that they seek to bring about a state of perfect justice by improving only the quality of the ruling body without changing the conditions of life of the ruled mass. Yet even so the Conservatives had quite a following among the peasants up to the time of the revolution of 1917 and in a way may still have a future before them.
The Octoberists find no support in the masses and do not make any serious attempt to gain it. They frankly acknowledged themselves as the party of industry and trade, having no wider interests at heart than the maintenance of order and law throughout the country. Their leaders were forced into a revolutionary attitude only at the time when there was danger of a universal collapse of Russia if the tsar's government persisted, and they may be forced to join in a counter-revolution, if their interests are again endangered. Their ideology is that of a capitalistic class and their power depends entirely on the future development of industry and trade in Russia. For the present they are nowhere. Unable to find a new basis for their activity in place of class interest, they lack unity of purpose and are deserted by their own former supporters among their employees. Trade and industry are disorganized and the party may never be resurrected.
The Constitutional Democrats are in this respect better off. They find their support chiefly among more or less educated people of various pursuits: lawyers, bankers, brokers, journalists, teachers, artists, scientists, etc. Their program embraces the interests of all classes and demands political, judicial, economic, industrial and agrarian legislation of a very radical and extensive kind. Their horizon of vision includes the sufferings and aspirations of the often incongruous elements of the vast whole, but their ideology is still based on the long outworn idealistic capitalism and for this reason alone does not and cannot appeal to not-owning classes. Their agrarian program is in this respect the most striking example. It is worked out in great detail and is aimed at a betterment of the condition of peasants without deep injury to the present landowners. It recognizes the right of the peasant to more land, it provides for future state ownership of land to prevent it from falling into wrong hands, but does not condemn the principle of landownership, nor the injustice of present ownership, and for that reason elaborates a method of compensation for compulsorily alienated land through universal taxation.
To avoid excessive burden to the impoverished peasant the compensation is to be in the shape of bonds representing the average value of the land in each particular case, only the interest on these bonds to be paid yearly from universal taxes—a topsy-turvy mortgage system, as it were, in which the state becomes the proprietor and mortgagor of the land, while its present owners are turned into forced mortgagees. Under this system the peasants will get all land available, but 90 per cent will have to pay for what is owned by a small fraction of even the remaining 10 per cent of the entire population. The proposed scheme proved to be too radical for the tsar's government in 1906 and caused the downfall of the first Duma. It provoked at the time bitter comment in Germany also, where the conservative and national-liberal press accused the Russian Constitutional Democratic party of putting forward impossible demands and of attacking the very principle of property ownership. Yet the principle underlying the proposed reform is unquestionably capitalistic and is the chief cause of the hatred and contempt which the party enjoys on the part of Social-Democrats.
In the beginning of the sixties the conservative land committee appointed by Alexander II, composed of hereditary landowners, avowed enemies of any economic liberation of peasants, out of fear that private ownership of land might enrich the peasants and make them dangerous to the established order, devised a scheme of communal ownership of land and unconsciously taught the peasants the principles of socialism. In 1907 Constitutional Democrats opposed the bill of the Government for the dissolution of land communities and substitution of private for communal land ownership at the request of individual peasants. The objection raised was on the ground that peasants suddenly possessed of a chance to get ready money would sell their land to a few exploiters and being unable to put it to good use would rapidly become paupers. The best men in the Duma opposed Stolypin's bill, and the law was introduced by stealth and promulgated during a forced recess of the Duma. Contrary to expectation the law neither led to the results desired by the Government, nor to those feared by Constitutional Democrats. It remained a dead letter. Few members of peasant communities applied for separation. The Government tried to boost its scheme by building at its own expense model, fake peasant homes. The peasants had already their own idea as to remedies in regard to land shortage and did not want any substitute.
The difficulty of making the peasant respect the principle of private ownership of land is due to many causes. The most liberal minded landowners were usually those who spent their winters in various occupations in large cities and used their estates as summer homes and a partial source of income. The work of supervision was only too often intrusted to utterly unscrupulous and uneducated managers belonging to the peasant class, while the neighboring peasants were employed as day laborers in the field and garden. This kind of labor was already available, because peasants were unable to derive sufficient income from their own land to pay the heavy taxes and to support their families. Scarcely any landowners understood anything of agriculture and few paid any attention to it. I know splendid estates which brought in miserable incomes, not normal even under the antiquated system of four year crop rotation and quite absurd if measured by standards of modern American farming, yet sufficient to place at the disposal of the owners a splendid mansion in Moscow or Petrograd and a no less splendid summer home on their estate. There, during the hot summer days, the owners were enjoying their comfort in idleness and talking of reforms necessary for the benefit of the peasants, while peasant women were cutting the wheat for them with sickles, stooping and sweating under the scorching rays of the sun. The superintendents of those estates enriched themselves at the expense of the blind or careless and carefree owners under the very eyes of the peasants who hated the superintendents, pitied or despised the liberal owners, as the case might be, and gloomily compared their own poverty and labor with the ease and wealth of their employers.
The more thrifty and less liberal owners, who remained the greater part of the year on their estates, were perhaps more respected but still less liked. Any attempt at careful management of the estate was invariably considered to be a sign of stinginess or of hardheartedness. The idea of property is not clearly defined in the mind of the average peasant who considers plants that are not planted but grow wild to be a gift of God. In disputes involving such cases the line between rightful possession and theft is difficult to draw, and men who took the controversy to court were invariably hated. A glaring example of this kind was an otherwise liberal minded landowner, a well known professor of sociology, who spent three-quarters of a year in lecturing at a foreign university of which he was a member and who was finally murdered on his own estate.
The home life of even liberal intellectuals was another barrier between them and the masses. Not only was coarse food considered to be good enough for domestics, but they seldom, if ever, had a decent corner for themselves in the house and their miserable wages were out of all proportion with the long hours of service required. Many families had guests almost daily, the company sitting around a samovar, discussing and conversing until one or two in the morning, while the sleepy domestics were stealing a nap in the anteroom, ready to appear at the call of the mistress. The table had to be cleared after the guests and the family retired for the night and the breakfast had to be prepared, boots polished, stoves heated, rooms cleaned in the early morning. For the master might rest until ten or eleven, but the children have to be at school by eight and the servants must be ready to serve them. And though many families kept professional servants, the country homes depended almost entirely in winter as well as in summer on local help.
Attempts to improve the condition of peasants were numerous and in some respects successful, but found an obstacle on the one hand in the attitude of the Government and on the other in the conservatism and suspicion of the peasants themselves. Fire insurance and cooperative enterprises helped to a certain degree, but an almost complete absence of expert agriculturists in the ranks of the landowners prevented them from demonstrating on their own estates the value of applied knowledge as well as from teaching the peasants how to increase the productivity of the land through intensive farming. Thus it came to pass that the vast majority of landowners, both conservative and liberal, remained strangers to the people among whom they lived, whose labor they employed, and for whose welfare many were in earnest concerned. The Constitutional Democratic party is strong in the cities. In the country it has no followers and in the sweeping incendiary fires of 1905-06 estates were burned which belonged in several cases to men who spent their life in fighting for freedom against the tsar's government.
No less unfortunate is the party in its relation to the class of factory workers. That part of its program which relates to the labor question embraces a number of important reforms meeting almost all demands of the working class. The barrier between them is the capitalistic principle. A perusal of the lists of Constitutional Democrats who have subscribed large sums for the Russian liberty loan will show why workmen speak of them as capitalists even though the party has accepted the principle of progressive income taxation. There is a feeling of intense hatred toward all Constitutional Democrats on the part of all workmen.
Nothing is more instructive than the rapid change in the position which the Constitutional Democratic party occupied in the eyes of the people after the revolution. Before the outbreak of hostilities all parties were against war. But soon, under the influence of the German methods of warfare in Belgium, France, and Russia, the feeling changed. Even the Mensheviki among the Social-Democrats declared themselves in favor of war and the only party remaining firm in condemning all war was that of the Bolsheviki. The entrance of the Turks into the war was almost considered a godsend by the Constitutional Democrats, Octoberists, and Conservatives in the Duma because it cleared the way for a final settlement of the Balkan problem and promised the elimination of Turkey from Europe. Long after Sazonov was removed, when the consent of England and France to give Russia free hand in Constantinople and the Straits was read in a telegram before the Duma, a general outburst of enthusiasm took place, the members demanding to know why Sazonov, who was justly credited with this achievement, was in retirement and not in charge of the foreign office which he should have held by right. Miliukov's speeches and writings on the future settlement of the Balkan problem were jokingly spoken of as his dissertation for the degree of foreign secretary. At home the party was pursuing a policy of patient endurance, postponing strife for the future until the crimes of the tsar's government made further silence impossible. At that time the whole tissue of treason was not yet known, but enough was in evidence to demand vigorous protest. Not being a revolutionary party the Constitutional Democrats abstained from any action not strictly within the law and merely condemned the activity of the Government. They desired amelioration of the fundamental laws, but even that they would have preferred to accomplish by persuasion rather than by force. In fact they considered socialist demands unreasonable, socialization of Russia premature, and any violent overthrow unwise and hazardous. For the latter opinion they found support in the failure of the uprising of the working class in 1905-06, when the punitive expeditions proved the loyalty of the army to the throne. Consequently the attitude of the army in the memorable days of the March revolution was a great surprise to them. At the same time they attributed to themselves the lion share in the overthrow, presumably on the ground that masses follow leaders and the Constitutional \ Democrats were the only ones who had a chance for open protest in the Duma and made use of it. This delusion led to a series of tactical errors and cost them dearly. In all elections they polled a comparatively small vote. Trying to save Russia for the Allies they failed to meet the Russian Socialists on their own ground and were forced to explain away differences of opinion much too thoroughgoing to be explained away. In a country which is in the throes of the most remarkable revolution ever witnessed, they tried to apply non-revolutionary methods and drew on themselves the suspicion of the masses of being counter-revolutionists. From the very moment when Miliukov announced the passing of the supreme power from the Tsar to Grand Duke Michail, when his words were answered by angry shouts in favor of a democratic republic, the position of the party became precarious. They had either to revise their own program and to catch up with the rush of the progressive current, or else to find themselves in the rôle of inundated rocks over which the waters flow. The announcement that the party would support a demand for a republic was too late to change the first impression, while the proposition to accept unconditional expropriation of land in place of the compensation plan was defeated in heated debate at the party convention. Under normal circumstances the party would have probably been steadily losing support, but the arrest and imprisonment of the best and highly honored leaders by the Bolsheviki is bound to put fresh vigor into their efforts and give new life to their cause.
The leaders of the Bolsheviki themselves have fallen into error of a different kind. Being primarily a party of the wage earning day laborers, the program of the Bolsheviki puts the interest of the proletariat above everything else. From insufficient observation of peasant life and the fact that peasants want socialization of land, they jump to the conclusion that the country is ready for complete socialization. Only the more educated leaders among them realize that such a conclusion is premature. But to bring about the necessary change in as near a future as possible, the leaders of the Bolsheviki have fanned hatred of the proletariat toward the "bourgeois" classes. One must give them credit in this respect. They know the value of simple language when they put this hatred into words. Listen to the Russian Marseillaise: "Rise, brothers, all at once against the thieves, the curs—the rich ones! Against the vampire Tsar! Beat them, kill them—the cursed evil-doers! Glow, dawn of better life!" The simple ideology, the easy catch phrases in which the language of this ideology is couched, the primeval character of the passion aroused, contribute to the success which the party enjoys among working people and homeless paupers. Therein lies the power of the Bolsheviki. But reaction is bound to come and here again the peasants will play the chief rôle. All accounts of conversations with peasants tend to show that they have very vague ideas of socialism. In fact the Social-Democrats have not taken the trouble to acquaint the peasants with the principles of their teaching, leaving that field almost entirely to the influence of socialist-revolutionists.
Among the intellectuals none have come nearer to the understanding of peasant psychology than those men and women who from the first espoused the cause of the peasant. Realizing the space separating educated men from their less fortunate brothers, they gave up their life as intellectuals and "went among the people." They donned peasant garb and acquired peasant tongue. From this group of workers for freedom later the Socialist-revolutionary party developed. "All land for the peasant" is their slogan, while their promise to expropriate all land without any compensation naturally meets with approval on the part of the land-hungry peasants. Moreover, their program does not demand immediate complete socialization of Russia, leaving that to a gradual process of evolution and change of existing conditions. In the ten years preceding the first revolution thousands of young intellectuals joined the party and fought the tsar's regime. They showed a degree of self-abnegation found only in people whose heart is kindled with the true spirit of devotion to a great cause. The revolution of 1905 would never have taken place but for their organized "terror from below." The high regard held for them by the widest circles has caused their rise in power during the first two months of the revolution of 1917. But tactical errors committed by the leaders of the party as well as dissensions within the party itself contributed to a rather rapid change of sentiment toward them on all sides. In a measure as the Constitutional Democrats vigorously objected to their policy to put into life as soon as possible the agrarian reforms promised by them, the Social-Democrats on their part attacked them for their moderation in other demands. For some reason not yet clear, Kerensky was slighted in the very beginning of his political career when his nomination to the executive council of the Socialist-revolutionist party was opposed by a large majority. Just as the Constitutional Democrats made a series of tactical errors due to the fact that they thought themselves representative of the spirit of the Russian people, whereas in reality they stood sponsors only for a relatively small minority, even so the Socialist-revolutionists misjudged the attitude of other parties toward themselves. They overrated the ability of the masses to distinguish between their attitude toward war in general and the necessity to continue the present war. They overrated the ability of the soldiers to distinguish between slavish obedience and military discipline. They tried to play the rôle of a center. They tried to mediate between Social-Democrats and Constitutional Democrats and naturally failed in this attempt. Some of their leaders, notably Mr. Tschernov, were accused by Constitutional Democrats of being pro-German if not actual German agents. Others, including Kerensky himself and even Mme. Breshkovsky, were accused by the Bolsheviki of having been almost bribed by the capitalistic interests of America, England, and France. Needless to say that the accusations had no basis whatever in actual facts and represent simply an ugly outgrowth of misguided jealousy of the masses to guard their dearly won right to a social revolution against those whom they consider the worst enemies of socialism, and the desire of unscrupulous leaders to profit by it. Thus the Socialist-revolutionists were gradually relegated in the mind of the extremists to the great body of the hated "bourgeois." Only in their rightful element, among the peasants, they continue to enjoy a great deal of popularity, and the returns to the Constituent Assembly show that theirs will be the absolute majority even though they lost some of their popularity.
The progress of the Russian Revolution presents a sad spectacle of an almost complete failure on the part of the majority of intellectuals to understand the spirit of the times and to guide the masses through the labyrinth of errors. In days past the Russian intellectuals were the forefighters for freedom and the Russian people will ever be indebted to them for this. They prepared the soil for the revolution by spreading ideas of freedom by all means at their disposal. They weakened the tsar's power and thus contributed to its overthrow by persistent attacks upon the system of autocratic government. They helped to awaken the spirit of self-consciousness in the masses. But they did not evolve new principles. They did not open wide avenues for the development of a new order of social organization. They misunderstood the masses and consequently were unable to control the forces set loose. And if Russia is going to be saved from utter ruin amidst the clamor and strife of party leaders and to evolve a new democratic system, it will be due not to the intellectuals, but to the great spirit of the dark masses of the Russian peasants.