Decree of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Council of Defense on the First Revolutionary Labor Army
1. The Third Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army is to be utilized for labor purposes. This army is to be considered as a complete organization; its apparatus is neither to be disorganized nor split up, and it is to be known under the name of the First Revolutionary Labor Army.
2. The utilization of the Third Red Army for labor purposes is a temporary measure. The period is to be determined by a special regulation of the Council of Defense in accordance with the military situation as well as with the character of the work which the army will be able to carry out, and will especially depend on the practical productivity of the labor army.
3. The following are the principal tasks to which the forces and means of the third army are to be applied:
First:
(a) The preparation of food and forage in accordance with the regulation of the People’s Commissariat for Food, and the concentration of these in certain depots:
(b) The preparation of wood and its delivery to factories and railway stations;
(c) The organization for this purpose of land transport as well as water transport;
(d) The mobilization of necessary labor power for work on a national scale;
(e) Constructive work within the above limits as well as on a wider scale, for the purpose of introducing, gradually, further works.
Second:
(f) For repair of agricultural implements;
(g) Agricultural work, etc.
4. The first duty of the Labor Army is to secure provisions, not below the Red Army ration, for the local workers in those regions where the army is stationed; this is to be brought about by means of the army organs of supply in all those cases where the President of the Food Commissariat of the Labor Army Council (No. 7) will find that no other means of securing the necessary provisions for the above-mentioned workers are to be had.
5. The utilization of the labor of the third army in a certain locality must take place in the locality in which the principal part of the army is stationed; this is to be determined exactly by the leading organs of the army (No. 6) with a subsequent confirmation by the Council of Defense.
6. The Revolutionary Council of the Labor Army is the organ in charge of work appointed, with the provision that the locality where the services of the Labor Army are to be applied is to be the same locality where the services of the Revolutionary Council of the Labor Army enjoys economic authority.
7. The Revolutionary Council of the Labor Army is to be composed of members of the Revolutionary War Council and of authorized representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Food, the Supreme Council for Public Economy, the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, the People’s Commissariat for Communication, and the People’s Commissariat for Labor.
An especially authorized Council of Defense which is to enjoy the rights of presidency of the Council of the Labor Army is to be put at the head of the above Council.
8. All the questions concerning internal military organizations and defined by regulations of internal military service and other military regulations are to be finally settled upon by the Revolutionary War Council which introduces in the internal life of the army all the necessary changes arising in consequence of the demands of the economic application of the army.
9. In every sphere of work (food, fuel, railway, etc.) the final decision in the matter of organizing this work is to be left with the representative of the corresponding sphere of the Labor Army Council.
10. In the event of radical disagreement the case is to be transferred to the Council of Defense.
11. All the local institutions, Councils of Public Economy, Food Committees, land departments, etc., are to carry out the special orders and instructions of the Labor Army Council through the latter’s corresponding members either in its entirety or in that sphere of the work which is demanded by the application of the mass labor power.
12. All local institutions (councils of public economy, food committees, etc.) are to remain in their particular localities and carry out, through their ordinary apparatus, the work which falls to their share in the execution of the economic plans of the Labor Army Council; local institutions can be changed, either in structure or in their functions, on no other condition except with the consent of the corresponding departmental representatives who are members of the Labor Army Council, or, in the case of radical changes, with the consent of the corresponding central department.
13. In the case of work for which individual parts of the army can be utilized in a casual manner, as well as in the case of those parts of the army which are stationed outside the chief army, or which can be transferred beyond the limits of this locality, the Army Council must in each instance enter into an agreement with the permanent local institutions carrying out the corresponding work, and as far as that is practical and meets with no obstacles, the separate military detachments are to be transferred to their temporary economic disposal.
14. Skilled workers, in so far as they are not indispensable for the support of the life of the army itself, must be transferred by the army to the local factories and to the economic institutions generally under direction of the corresponding representatives of the Labor Army Council.
Note: Skilled labor can be sent to factories under no other condition except with the consent of those economic organs to which the factory in question is subject. Members of trades-unions are liable to be withdrawn from local enterprises for the economic needs in connection with the problems of the army only with the consent of the local organs.
15. The Labor Army Council must, through its corresponding members, take all the necessary measures toward inducing the local institutions of a given department to control, in the localities, the army detachments and their institutions in the carrying out of the latter’s share of work without infringing upon the respective by-laws, regulations, and instructions of the Soviet Republic.
Note: It is particularly necessary to take care that the general state rate of pay is to be observed in the remuneration of peasants for the delivery of food, for the preparation of wood or other fuel.
16. The Central Statistical Department in agreement with the Supreme Council for Public Economy and the War Department is instructed to draw up an estimate defining the forms and period of registration.
17. The present regulation comes into force with the moment of its publication by telegraph.
President of the Council of Defense, V. Ulianov (Lenin). S. Brichkina, Secretary. Moscow, January 15, 1920.
(a) The preparation of food and forage in accordance with the regulation of the People’s Commissariat for Food, and the concentration of these in certain depots:
(b) The preparation of wood and its delivery to factories and railway stations;
(c) The organization for this purpose of land transport as well as water transport;
(d) The mobilization of necessary labor power for work on a national scale;
(e) Constructive work within the above limits as well as on a wider scale, for the purpose of introducing, gradually, further works.
(f) For repair of agricultural implements;
(g) Agricultural work, etc.
On January 18, 1920, the Krasnaya Gazeta published the following order by Trotsky to the First Labor Army:
Order to the First Revolutionary Labor Army
1. The First Army has finished its war task, but the enemy is not completely dispersed. The rapacious imperialists are still menacing Siberia in the extreme Orient. To the East the armies paid by the Entente are still menacing Soviet Russia. The bands of the White Guards are still at Archangel. The Caucasus is not yet liberated. For this reason the First Russian Army has not as yet been diverted, but retains its internal unity and its warlike ardor, in order that it may be ready in case the Socialist Fatherland should once more call it to new tasks.
2. The First Russian Army, which is, however, desirous of doing its duty, does not wish to lose any time. During the coming weeks and months of respite it will have to apply its strength and all its means to ameliorate the agricultural situation in this country.
3. The Revolutionary War Council of the First Army will come to an agreement with the Labor Council. The representatives of the agricultural institutions of the Red Republic of the Soviets will work side by side with the members of the Revolutionary Council.
4. Food-supplies are indispensable to the famished workmen of the commercial centers. The First Labor Army should make it its essential task to gather systematically in the region occupied by it such food-supplies as are there, as well as also to make an exact listing of what has been obtained, to rapidly and energetically forward them to the various factories and railway stations, and load them upon the freight-cars.
5. Wood is needed by commerce. It is the important task of the Revolutionary Labor Army to cut and saw the wood, and to transport it to the factories and to the railway stations.
6. Spring is coming; this is the season of agricultural work. As the productive force of our factories has lessened, the number of new farm implements which can be delivered has become insufficient. The peasants have, however, a tolerably large number of old implements which are in need of repair. The Revolutionary Labor Army will employ its workshops as well as its workmen in order to repair such tools and machinery as are needed. When the season arrives for work in the fields, the Red cavalry and infantry will prove that they know how to plow the earth.
7. All members of the army should enter into fraternal relations with the professional societies[69] of the local Soviets, remembering that such organizations are those of the laboring people. All work should be done after having come to an understanding with them.
[69] i.e., trades-unions.
8. Indefatigable energy should be shown during the work, as much as if it were a combat or a fight.
9. The necessary efforts, as well as the results to be obtained, should be carefully calculated. Every pound of Soviet bread, and every log of national wood should be tabulated. Everything should contribute to the foundation of the Socialist activities.
10. The Commandants and Commissars should be responsible for the work of their men while work is going on, as much as if it were a combat. Discipline should not be relaxed. The Communist Societies should during the work be models of perseverance and patience.
11. The Revolutionary Tribunals should punish the lazy and parasites and the thieves of national property.
12. Conscientious soldiers, workmen, and revolutionary peasants should be in the first rank. Their bravery and devotion should serve as an example to others and inspire them to act similarly.
13. The front should be contracted as much as possible. Those who are useless should be sent to the first ranks of the workers.
14. Start and finish your work, if the locality permits it, to the sound of revolutionary hymns and songs. Your task is not the work of a laborer, but a great service rendered the Socialist Fatherland.
15. Soldiers of the Third Army, called the First Revolutionary Army of Labor. Let your example prove a great one. All Russia will rise to your call. The Radio has already spread throughout the universe all that the Third Army intends in being transposed into the First Army of Labor. Soldier Workmen! Do not lower the red standard!
The President of the War Council of the
Revolutionary Republic, [Signed] Trotsky.
There is not the slightest doubt where Lenin and Trotsky found the model for the foregoing orders and the inspiration of the entire scheme. Almost exactly a century earlier, that is to say in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Count Arakcheev, a favorite of Alexander I, introduced into Russia the militarization of agricultural labor. Peasant conscripts were sent to the “military settlements,” formed into battalions under command of army officers, marched in proper military formation to their tasks, which they performed to martial music. The arable lands were divided among the owner-settlers according to the size of their families. Tasks were arbitrarily set for the workers by the officers; resignation or withdrawal was, of course, impossible; desertion was punished with great severity. Elaborate provisions were made by this monarchist autocrat for the housing of the conscript-settlers, for medical supervision, and for the education of the children. Everything seems to have been provided for the conscripts in these settlements except freedom.
Travelers gave most glowing accounts of Arakcheev’s Utopia, just as later travelers did of the Russia of Nicholas II, and as the Ransomes, Goodes, Lansburys, and other travelers of to-day are giving of Bolshevist Russia. But the people themselves were discontented and unhappy, a fact evidenced by the many serious uprisings. Robbed of freedom, all initiative taken from them, so that they became abject and cowed and almost devoid of will power, like dumb beasts yet under the influence of desperate and daring leaders, they rose in revolt again and again with brutal fury. Arakcheev’s Utopia was not intended to be oppressive or unjust, we may well believe. There are evidences that it was conceived in a noble and even generous spirit. It inevitably became cruel and oppressive, however, as every such scheme that attempts to disregard the variations in human beings, and to compel them to conform to a single pattern or plan, must do. At a meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Petrograd Trotsky protested that only the “petty bourgeois intellectuals” could liken his system of militarized labor to Arakcheev’s, but the facts speak for themselves. And in all Russia’s tragic history there are no blacker pages than those which record her great experiments with militarized labor.
Addressing the joint meeting of the third Russian Congress of Soviets of National Economy, the Moscow Soviet of Deputies and the Administrative Boards of the Trades-Unions, on January 25, 1920, Trotsky made a report which required more than two hours for its delivery. Defining labor conscription, he said:
We shall succeed if qualified and trained workers take part in productive labor. They must all be registered and provided with work registration books. Trades-unions must register qualified workmen in the villages. Only in those localities where trades-union methods are inadequate other methods must be introduced, in particular that of compulsion, because labor conscription gives the state the right to tell the qualified workman who is employed on some unimportant work in his villages, “You are obliged to leave your present employment and go to Sormova or Kolomna, because there your work is required.”
Labor conscription means that qualified workmen who leave the army must take their work registration books and proceed to places where they are required, where their presence is necessary to the economic system of the country. Labor conscription gives the Labor State the right to order a workman to leave the village industry in which he is engaged and to work in state enterprises which require his services. We must feed these workmen and guarantee them the minimum food ration. A short time ago we were confronted by the problem of defending the frontiers of the Soviet Republic, now our aim is to collect, load, and transport a sufficient quantity of bread, meat, fats, and fish to feed the working-class. We are not only confronted by the question of the industrial proletariat, but also by the question of utilizing unskilled labor.
There is still one way to the reorganization of national economy—the way of uniting the army and labor and changing the military detachments of the army into labor detachments of a labor army. Many in the army have already accomplished their military task, but they cannot be demobilized as yet. Now that they have been released from their military duties, they must fight against economic ruin and against hunger; they must work to obtain fuel, peat, and inflammable slate; they must take part in building, in clearing the lines of snow, in repairing roads, building sheds, grinding flour, and so on. We have already got several of these armies. These armies have already been allotted their tasks. One must obtain foodstuffs for the workmen of the district in which it was formerly stationed, and there also it will cut down wood, cart it to the railways, and repair engines. Another will help in the laying down of railway lines for the transport of crude oil. A third will be used for repairing agricultural implements and machines, and in the spring for taking part in working the land. At the present time among the working masses there must be the greatest exactitude and conscientiousness, together with responsibility to the end; there must be utter strictness and severity, both in small matters and in great. If the most advanced workmen in the country will devote all their thoughts, all their will, and all their revolutionary duty to the cause of regulating economic affairs, then I have no doubt that we shall lead Russia on a new free road, to the confounding of our enemies and the joy of our friends.
Going into further details concerning the scheme, Trotsky said, according to Izvestia, January 29, 1920:
Wherein lies the meaning of this transformation? We possess armies which have accomplished their military tasks. Can we demobilize them? In no case whatever. If we have learned anything in the civil war it is certainly circumspection. While keeping the army under arms, we may use it for economic purposes, with the possibility of sending it to the front in case of need.
Such is the present condition of the Third Soviet Army at Ekaterinburg, some units of which are quartered in the direction of Omsk. It numbers no less than 150,000 men, of whom 7,000 are Communists and 9,000 are sympathizers. Such an army is class-conscious to a high degree. No wonder it has offered itself for employment for labor purposes. The labor army must perform definite and simple tasks requiring the application of mass force, such as lumbering operations, peat-cutting, collecting grain, etc. Trades-unions, political and Soviet organizations must, of course, establish the closest contact with the Labor Army. An experienced and competent workman is appointed as chief of staff of this army, and a former chief of staff, an officer of the general staff, is his assistant. The Operative Department is renamed the Labor-Operative Department, and controls requisitions and the execution of the labor-operative orders and the labor bulletins.
A great number of labor artels, with a well-ordered telegraph and telephone system, is thus at our disposal. They receive orders and report on their execution the same day. This is but the beginning of our work. There will be many drawbacks at first, much will have to be altered, but the basis itself cannot be unsound, as it is the same on which our entire Soviet structure is founded.
In this case we possess several thousand Ural workmen, who are placed at the head of the army, and a mass of men under the guidance of these advanced workmen. What is it? It is but a reflection on a small scale of Soviet Russia, founded upon millions upon millions of peasants, and the guiding apparatus is formed of more conscious peasants and an overwhelming majority of industrial workers. This first experiment is being made by the other armies likewise. It is intended to utilize the Seventh Army, quartered at the Esthonian frontier, for peat-cutting and slate-quarrying. If these labor armies are capable of extracting raw materials, of giving new life to our transport, of providing corn, fuel, etc., to our main economic centers, then our economic organism will revive.
This experiment is of the most vital moral and material importance. We cannot mobilize the peasants by means of trades-unions, and the trades-unions themselves do not possess any means of laying hold of millions of peasants. They can best be mobilized on a military footing. Their labor formations will have to be organized on a military model—labor platoons, labor companies, labor battalions, disciplined as required, for we shall have to deal with masses which have not passed through trades-union trading. This is a matter of the near future. We shall be compelled to create military organizations such as exist already in the form of our armies. It is therefore urgent to utilize them by adapting them to economic requirements. That is exactly what we are doing now.
At the ninth Congress of the Communist Party in March, according to Izvestia of March 21, 1920, Trotsky made another report on the militarization of labor, in which he said:
At the present time the militarization of labor is all the more needed in that we have now come to the mobilization of peasants as the means of solving the problems requiring mass action. We are mobilizing the peasants and forming them into labor detachments which very closely resemble military detachments. Some of our comrades say, however, that even though in the case of the working power of mobilized peasantry it is necessary to apply militarization, a military apparatus need not be created when the question involves skilled labor and industry because there we have professional unions performing the function of organizing labor. This opinion, however, is erroneous.
At present it is true that professional unions distribute labor power at the demand of social-economic organizations, but what means and methods do they possess for insuring that the workman who is sent to a given factory actually reports at that factory for work?
We have in the most important branches of our industry more than a million workmen on the lists, but not more than eight hundred thousand of them are actually working, and where are the remainder? They have gone to the villages, or to other divisions of industry, or into speculation. Among soldiers this is called desertion, and in one form or another the measures used to compel soldiers to do their duty should be applied in the field of labor.
Under a unified system of economy the masses of workmen should be moved about, ordered and sent from place to place in exactly the same manner as soldiers. This is the foundation of the militarization of labor, and without this we are unable to speak seriously of any organization of industry on a new basis in the conditions of starvation and disorganization existing to-day....
In the period of transition in the organization of labor, compulsion plays a very important part. The statement that free labor—namely, freely employed labor—produces more than labor under compulsion is correct only when applied to feudalistic and bourgeois orders of society.
It is, of course, too soon to attempt anything in the nature of a final judgment upon this new form of industrial serfdom. In his report to the ninth Congress of the Communist Party, already quoted, Trotsky declared that the belief that free labor is more productive than forced labor is “correct only when applied to feudalistic and bourgeois orders of society.” The implication is that it will be otherwise in the Communistic society of the future, but of that Trotsky can have no knowledge. His declaration springs from faith, not from knowledge. All that he or anybody else can know is that the whole history of mankind hitherto shows that free men work better than men who are not free. Arakcheev’s militarized peasants were less productive than other peasants not subject to military rule. So far as the present writer’s information goes, no modern army when engaged in productive work has equaled civilian labor in similar lines, judged on a per-capita basis. Slaves, convicts, and conscripts have everywhere been notoriously poor producers.
Will it be better if the conscription is done by the Bolsheviki, and if the workers sing revolutionary songs, instead of the hymns to the Czar sung by Arakcheev’s conscript settlers, or the religious melodies sung by the negro slaves in our Southern States? Those whose only guide to the future is the history of the past will doubt it; those who, like Trotsky, see in the past no lesson for the future confidently believe that it will. The thoughtful and candid mind wonders whether the following paragraph, published by the Krasnaya Gazeta in March, may not be regarded as a foreshadowing of Bolshevist disillusionment:
The attempts of the Soviet power to utilize the Labor Army for cleansing Petrograd from mud, excretions, and rubbish have not met with success. In addition to the usual Labor Army rations, the men were given an increased allowance of bread, tobacco, etc. Nevertheless, it was found impossible to get not only any intensive work, but even, generally speaking, any real work at all out of the Labor Army men. Recourse, therefore, had to be had to the usual means—the men had to be paid a premium of 1,000 rubles for every tramway-truck of rubbish unloaded. Moreover, the tramway brigade had to be paid 300 rubles for every third trip.
In hundreds of statements by responsible Bolshevist officials and journals the wonderful morale of the Petrograd workers has been extolled and held up to the rest of Russia for emulation. If these things are possible in “Red Peter” at the beginning, what may we not expect elsewhere—and later? The Novaya Russkaya Zhizn, published at Helsingfors, is an anti-Bolshevist paper. The following quotation from its issue of March 6, 1920, is of interest and value only in so far as it directs attention to a Bolshevist official report:
In the Soviet press we find a brilliant illustration (in figures) of the latest “new” tactics proclaimed by the Communists of the Third International on the subject of soldiers “stacking their rifles and taking to axes, saws, and spades.”
“The 56th Division of the Petrograd Labor Army, during the fortnight from 1st to 14th February, loaded 60 cars with wood-fuel, transported 225 sagenes,[70] stacked 43 cubic sagenes, and sawed up 39 cubic sagenes.” Besides this, the division dug out “several locomotives” from under the snow.
[70] One sagene equals seven feet.
In Soviet Russia a regiment is about 1,000 strong, and a division is about 4,000. In the course of a fortnight the division worked twelve days. According to our calculation this works out, on an average, at a fraction over one billet of wood per diem per Red Army man handled by him in one way or another.
Thus it took 4,000 men a fortnight to do what could, in former days, be easily performed by ten workmen.
Unfortunately, the Bolsheviks have not yet calculated the cost to the Workmen’s and Peasants’ Government of the wood-fuel which was loaded, transported, stacked, and sawn up by the 56th Division of the Labor Army in the course of a fortnight.
These quotations are not offered as proof of the uneconomical character of compulsory labor. It is useless to argue that question further than we have already done. But there is a question of vastly greater importance than the volume of production—namely, the effect upon the human elements involved, the producers themselves. It is quite clear that this universal conscription of the laborers cannot be carried out without a large measure of adscription to the jobs assigned them, however modified in individual cases. It is equally certain that under the conditions described by Lenin and Trotsky in the official utterances we have quoted, nothing worthy the name of personal freedom can by any possibility exist. The condition of the workers under such a system cannot be fundamentally different from that of the natives of Paraguay in the theocratic-communist régime established by the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, or from that of Arakcheev’s militarized serfs. External and superficial differences there may be, but none of fundamental importance. The Bolshevist régime may be less brutal and more humane than Arakcheev’s, but so was the Jesuit rule in Paraguay. Yet in the latter, as in the former, the workers were reduced to the condition of mere automatons until, led by daring spirits, they rose in terrible revolt of unparalleled brutality.
Such is the militarization of labor in the Bolshevist paradise, and such is the light that history throws upon it. We do not wonder that Pravda had to admit, on March 28, 1920, that mass-meetings to protest against the new system were being held in all parts of Soviet Russia. That the Russian workers will submit for long to the new tyranny is, happily, unthinkable.
XIV
LET THE VERDICT BE RENDERED
The men and women of America are by the force of circumstance impaneled as a jury to judge the Bolshevist régime. The evidence submitted in these pages is before them. It is no mere chronicle of scandal; neither is it a cunningly wrought mosaic of rumors, prejudiced inferences, exaggerated statements by hostile witnesses, sensational incidents and utterances, selected because they are calculated to provoke resentment. On the contrary, the most scrupulous care has been taken to confine the case to the well-established and acknowledged characteristic features of the Bolshevist régime. The bulk of the evidence cited comes from Bolshevist sources of the highest possible authority and responsibility. The non-Bolshevist witnesses are, without exception, men of high character, identified with the international Socialist movement. There is not a reactionist or an apologist for the capitalist order of society among them. In each case special attention has been directed to their anti-Bolshevist views, so that the jury can make full allowance therefor. Moreover, in no instance has the testimony of witnesses of anti-Bolshevist views been cited without ample corroborative evidence from responsible and authoritative Bolshevist sources. The jury must now pass upon this evidence and render its verdict.
It is urged by the Bolsheviki and by their defenders that the time for passing judgment has not yet arrived; that we are not yet in possession of sufficient evidence to warrant a decision. Neither the Bolsheviki nor their defenders have the right to make this plea, for the simple reason that they themselves have long since demanded that, with less than a thousandth part of the testimony now before us, we pass judgment—and, of course, give our unqualified approval to Bolshevism and its works. It is a matter of record and of common knowledge that soon after the Bolshevist régime was instituted in Russia a vigorous, systematic propaganda in its favor and support was begun in all the western nations, including the United States. By voice and pen the makers of this propaganda called upon the people of the western nations to adopt Bolshevism. They presented glowing pictures of the Bolshevist Utopia, depicting it, not as an experiment of uncertain outcome, to be watched with sympathetic interest, but as an achievement so great, so successful and beneficent, that to refrain from copying it was both stupid and wrong. In this country, as in the other western nations, pamphlets extolling the merits of the Soviet régime were extensively circulated by well-organized groups, while certain “Liberal” weeklies devoted themselves to the task of presenting Bolshevism as a great advance in political and economic practice, a triumph of humanitarian idealism. Organizations were formed for the purpose of molding our public opinion in favor of Bolshevism.
It was not until this pro-Bolshevist propaganda was well under way that anything in the nature of a counter-propaganda was begun. For a considerable period of time this counter-propaganda in defense of existing democratic forms of government was relatively weak, and even now it has to be admitted that the pro-Bolshevist books and pamphlets in circulation in this country greatly outnumber those on the other side. In view of these facts, the defenders of Bolshevism have no moral right to demand suspension of judgment now. They themselves rushed to the bar of public opinion with a flimsy case, composed in its entirety of ex parte and misleading statements by interested witnesses, many of them perjured, and demanded an instant verdict of approval. Upon what intellectual or moral grounds, then, shall others be denied the right to appear before that same court of public opinion, with a much more complete case, composed mainly of unchallenged admissions and records of the Bolsheviki themselves, and to ask for a contrary verdict?
There is not the slightest merit in the claim that we do not possess sufficient evidence to warrant a conclusive verdict in the case. Whether the Soviet form of government, basing suffrage upon occupation and economic functioning, is better adapted for Russia than the types of representative parliamentary government familiar to us in the western nations, does not enter into the case at all. The issue is not Sovietism, but Bolshevism. It is the tragic failure of Bolshevism with which we are concerned. It has failed to give the people freedom and failed to give them bread. We know that there is no freedom in Russia, and, what is more, that freedom can never be had upon the basis of the Bolshevist philosophy. Whether in Russia or in this country, government must rest upon the consent of the governed in order to merit the designation of free government; upon any other basis it must be tyrannical. It is as certain now as it will be a generation or a century hence, as certain as that yesterday belongs to the past and is irrevocable, that Bolshevism is government by a minority imposed upon the majority by force; that its sanctions are not the free choice and consent of the governed.
We know as much now as our descendants will know a couple of centuries hence concerning the great fundamental issues involved in this controversy. More than seven centuries have elapsed since the signing of Magna Charta at Runnimede. Upon every page of the history of the Anglo-Saxon people, from that day in June, 1215, to the present, it is plainly written that government which does not rest upon the consent of the governed cannot satisfy free men. Throughout that long period the moral and intellectual energy of the race has been devoted to the attainment of the ideal of universal and equal suffrage as the basis of free government. There are many persons who do not believe in that ideal, and it is possible to bring against it arguments which do not lack plausibility or force. Czar Nicholas II did not believe in that ideal; George III did not believe in it; Nicolai Lenin does not believe in it. Lincoln did believe in it; Marx believed in it; the American people believe in it. At this late day it is not necessary to argue the merits of democratic government. The consensus of the opinion of mankind, based upon long experience, favors government resting upon the will of the majority, with proper safeguards for the rights of the minority, as against government by minorities however constituted. Bolshevism, admittedly based upon the theory of rule by a minority of the people, thus runs counter to the experience and judgment of civilized mankind in every nation. In Russia a democratic government conforming to the experience and judgment of civilized and free peoples was being set up when the Bolsheviki by violence destroyed the attempt.
More conclusive, however, is the moral judgment of the conduct of the Bolsheviki as exemplified by their attitude toward the Constituent Assembly: During the summer of 1917, the period immediately preceding the coup d’état of November, while the Provisional Government under Kerensky was engaged in making preparations for the holding of the Constituent Assembly, the Bolsheviki professed to believe that the Provisional Government was not loyal to the Constituent Assembly, and that there was danger that this instrument of popular sovereignty would be crippled, if not wholly destroyed, unless Kerensky and his associates were replaced by men and women more thoroughly devoted to the Constituent Assembly than they. It was as champions and defenders of the Constituent Assembly that the Bolsheviki obtained the power which enabled them to overthrow the Provisional Government. As late as October 25th Trotsky denounced Kerensky, charging him with conspiring to prevent the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. He demanded that the powers of government be taken over by the Soviets, which would, he said, convoke the Assembly on December 12th, the date assigned for it. Immediately after the coup d’état, the triumphant Bolsheviki, at the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, announced that “pending the calling together of the Constituent Assembly, a Provisional Workers’ and Peasants’ Government is to be formed, which is to be called the Council of People’s Commissaries.” On the day following the coup d’état, November 8, 1917, Lenin made this very positive and explicit statement at the Soviet Congress:
As a democratic government, we cannot disregard the will of the masses, even though we disagree with it. In the fires of life, applying the decree in practice, carrying it out on the spot, the peasants will themselves understand where the truth is. And even if the peasants will continue to follow the Socialists-Revolutionists, and even if they will return a majority for that Party in the elections to the Constituent Assembly, we shall still say—let it be thus! Life is the best teacher, and it will show who was right. And let the peasants from their end, and us from ours, solve this problem. Life will compel us to approach each other in the general current of revolutionary activity, in the working out of new forms of statehood. We should keep abreast of life; we must allow the masses of the people full freedom of creativeness.
On that same day the “land decree” was issued. It began with these words: “The land problem in its entirety can be solved only by the national Constituent Assembly.” Three days after the revolt Lenin, as president of the People’s Commissaries, published a decree, stating:
1. That the elections to the Constituent Assembly shall be held on November 25th, the day we set aside for this purpose.
2. All electoral committees, all local organizations, the Councils of Workmen’s, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Delegates and the soldiers’ organizations at the front are to bend every effort toward safeguarding the freedom of the voters and fair play at the elections to the Constituent Assembly, which will be held on the appointed date.
If language has any meaning at all, by these declarations the Bolsheviki were pledged to recognize and uphold the Constituent Assembly.
As the electoral campaign proceeded and it became evident that the Bolsheviki would not receive the support of the great mass of the voters, their organs began to adopt a very critical attitude toward the Constituent Assembly. There was a thinly veiled menace in the following passages from an article published in Pravda on November 18, 1917, while the electoral campaign was in full swing:
To expect from the Constituent Assembly a painless solution of all our accursed problems not only savors of parliamentary imbecility, but is also dangerous politically.... The victory of the Petrograd proletariat and garrison in the November revolution furnishes the only possible guaranty of the convocation of the Constituent Assembly, and, what is not less important, assures success to such a solution of our political and social problems which the War and the Revolution have made the order of the day. The convocation of the Constituent Assembly stands or falls with the Soviet power.
The elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in a large majority of electoral districts on the 12th, 19th, and 26th of November, 1917—that is, after the coup d’état, in the full tide of Bolshevist enthusiasm. The Bolsheviki were in power, and there is abundant evidence that they resorted to almost every known method of coercion and intimidation to secure a result favorable to themselves. Of 703 deputies elected in 54 out of a total of 81 election districts, only 168 belonged to the Bolshevist Party. At the same time the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists proper, not reckoning the organizations of the same party among other nationalities of Russia, won twice that number of seats—namely, 338. Out of a total of 36,257,960 votes cast in 54 election districts the Bolshevist Party counted barely 25 per cent. The votes cast for their candidates amounted to 9,023,963, whereas the Socialists-Revolutionists polled 20,893,734—that is, 58 per cent. of all the votes cast.
When the election results were known Pravda and Izvestia both took the position that the victorious people did not need a Constituent Assembly; that a new instrument, greatly superior to the old and “obsolete” democratic instrument, had been created. On December 1, 1917, Pravda said: “If the lines of action of the Soviets and the Constituent Assembly should diverge, if there should arise between them any disagreements, the question will arise as to who expresses better the will of the masses. We think it is the Soviets who through their peculiar organization express more clearly, more correctly, and more definitely the will of the workers, soldiers, and peasants.... This is why the Soviets will have to propose to the Constituent Assembly to adopt as the constitution of the Russian Republic, not that political system which forms the basis of its convocation (i.e., Democracy), but the Soviet system, the constitution of the Republic of Workers’, soldiers’, and Peasants’ Soviets.” On December 7, 1917, the Executive Committee of the Soviet power published a resolution which indicated that this self-constituted authority, despite the most solemn pledges, was already tampering with the newly elected Constituent Assembly. The resolution asserted that the Soviet power had the right to issue writs for new elections where a majority of the voters expressed themselves as dissatisfied with the result of the elections already held. In other words, notwithstanding the fact that the elections for the Constituent Assembly had been held in November, while the Bolsheviki were in power, and the first meeting of that body was scheduled for December 12th, new elections might be ordered by the Soviet power in response to a request from the majority of the electorate. That the elections had gone so overwhelmingly against the Bolsheviki, most of their candidates being badly defeated, throws a sinister light upon this decision. Pravda demanded that the leading members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party be arrested, including those elected to the Constituent Assembly, and on December 13, 1917, it published this decree of the Council of People’s Commissaries: “The leading members of the Constitutional-Democratic Party, as a party of enemies of the people, are to be arrested and brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunals.”
On December 26, 1917, Lenin published in Pravda a series of nineteen “theses” concerning the Constituent Assembly. He therein set forth the doctrine that although the elections had taken place after the Bolshevist coup d’état, and under the authority and protection of the temporary Soviet power, yet the elections gave no clear indication of the real mind of the masses of the people, because, forsooth, the Socialists-Revolutionists Party, whose candidates had been elected in a majority of the constituencies, had divided into a Right Wing and a Left Wing subsequent to the elections. That the differences between these factions would be fully threshed out in the Constituent Assembly was obvious. Nevertheless, Lenin announced that the Constituent Assembly just elected was not suitable. Again we are compelled to connect this announcement with the fact that the Bolsheviki had not succeeded in winning the support of the electorate. In these tortuous logomachies we encounter the same immoral doctrine that we have noticed in Lenin’s discussion of the demand for freedom of speech, publication, and assemblage. The demand for the convocation of the Constituent Assembly had been “an entirely just one in the program of revolutionary Social-Democracy” in the past, but now with the Bolsheviki in power it was a different matter! Whereas the Soviets had been declared to be the loyal protectors of the Constituent Assembly, Lenin’s new declaration was, “The Soviet Republic represents not only a higher form of democratic institutions (in comparison with the middle-class republic and the Constituent Assembly as its consummation), it is also the sole form which renders possible the least painful transition to Socialism.”
When the Constituent Assembly finally convened on January 18, 1918, there were sailors and Lettish troops in the hall armed with rifles, hand-grenades, and machine-guns, placed there to intimidate the elected representatives of the people. The Bolshevist delegates demanded the adoption of a declaration by the Assembly which was tantamount to a formal abdication. One of the paragraphs in this declaration read: “Supporting the Soviet rule and accepting the orders of the Council of People’s Commissaries, the Constituent Assembly acknowledges its duty to outline a form for the reorganization of society.” When the Constituent Assembly, which represented more than thirty-six million votes, declined to adopt this declaration, the Bolsheviki withdrew and later, by force of arms, dispersed the Assembly. It was subsequently promised that arrangements for the election of a new Constituent Assembly would be made, but, as all the world knows, no such elections have been held to this time.
At the Congress of the Bolshevist Party—now Communist Party—held in February, 1918, Lenin set forth a brand-new set of principles for adoption as a program. He declared that the transition to Socialism necessarily presupposes that there can be “no liberty and democracy for all, but only for the exploited working-classes, for the sake of their liberation from exploitation”; that it requires “the automatic exclusion of the exploiting classes, and of the rich representatives of the petty bourgeoisie” and “the abolition of parliamentary government.” On the basis of these principles the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic was developed.
To say that we are not yet in a position to judge such a record as this is an insult to the intelligence. A century hence the record will stand precisely as it is and the base treachery and duplicity of the Bolsheviki will be neither more nor less obvious. The betrayal of the Constituent Assembly by the Bolsheviki constitutes one of the blackest crimes in the history of politics and is incapable of defense by any honest democrat. It is only necessary to imagine a constitutional convention representing the free choice of the electorate in any state of the Union thus dealt with by a political faction representing only a small minority of the population to arrive at a just estimate of its infamous character. As the evidence drawn from official Bolshevist sources shows, the Bolsheviki have not respected the integrity of the Soviet any more than they respected that of the Constituent Assembly. When Soviet elections have gone against them they have not hesitated to suppress the Soviets. Is there any room for rational doubt what the verdict of decent liberty-loving and law-respecting men and women ought to be? The Bolshevist régime was conceived in dishonor and born in infamy.
We are as fully competent to judge the Red Terror organized and maintained by the Bolsheviki as our descendants will be. The civilized world has long since made up its mind concerning the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. Contemporary foreign opinion became the judgment of posterity. That it did not help the cause of freedom and democracy, which the Revolution as a whole served, is so plainly apparent and so universally admitted that it need not be argued. It rendered aid only to the reaction. When the leaders of the Bolsheviki proclaimed their intention of copying the methods of the Reign of Terror it was already possible to form a just judgment of the spirit of their undertaking. The civilized world had no difficulty in judging the conduct of the Germans in shooting innocent hostages during the war. Neither has it any difficulty in making up its mind concerning the wholesale shooting of innocent hostages by the Bolsheviki. From their own records we have read their admissions that hundreds and thousands of such hostages—men, women, and children—who were not even accused of crime, were shot down in cold blood. To say that we lack sufficient evidence to pronounce judgment upon such crimes is tantamount to a confession of lacking elemental moral sense.
It is sometimes said that these things are but the violent birth pangs which inevitably accompany the birth of a new social order. With such flimsy evasions it is difficult to have patience. This specious defense utterly lacks moral and intellectual sincerity. It is a craven coward’s plea. If we are to use the facts and the language of obstetrics to illustrate the great Russian tragedy, at least let us be honest and use them with some regard to the essential realities. In terms of obstetrics, Russia in 1917 was like unto a woman in the agony of her travail. From March onward she labored to give birth to her child, the long-desired democratic freedom. She was carefully watched and tenderly cared for by the accoucheur, the Provisional Government. At the critical moment of her delivery a ruthless brute drove the accoucheur away from her side, brutally maltreated her, strangled her newly born infant, and in its place substituted a hideous monstrosity. That is the only true application of the obstetrical simile to the realities of the Russian tragedy. The sufferings of Russia under the Bolsheviki have nothing to do with the natural birth pains of the Russian Revolution. Nobody ever expected the Russian Revolution to be accomplished without suffering and hardship; revolutions do not come that way. For all the natural and necessary pains of such a profound event as the birth of a new social order every friend of Russian freedom was prepared. What was not foreseen or anticipated by anybody was that when the agony of parturition was practically at an end, and the birth of the new order an accomplished fact, such a brutal assault would be made upon the maternal body of Russia. It is upon this crime, infamous beyond infamy, that the great jury of civilized public opinion is asked to pronounce its condemnation.
There is absolutely no justification for the view that the evils of the Bolshevist régime, and especially its terroristic features, should be regarded as the inevitable incidental evil accompaniments of a great beneficent process. Neither is any useful purpose served by dragging in the French Revolution. The champions of Bolshevism cite that great event and assert that everybody now acknowledges that it was a great liberating force, a notable advance in the evolution of freedom and democracy, and that nobody now condemns it on account of the Reign of Terror.
This argument is the result of a lamentable misreading of history, where it is not a deliberate and carefully studied deception. No honest parallel can be drawn between the French Revolution and the Bolshevist Counter-Revolution. That there are certain similarities between the revolutionary movement of eighteenth-century France and that of twentieth-century Russia is fairly obvious. In both cases the revolutions were directed against corrupt, inefficient, and oppressive monarchical absolutism. In France in 1789 the peasantry formed about 75 per cent. of the population, the bourgeoisie about 20 per cent., the proletariat about 3 per cent., and the “privileged” class about 1 per cent. In Russia in 1917 the peasantry amounted to something over 85 per cent. of the population, the bourgeoisie—the merchants, manufacturers, tradesmen, and investors—to about 9 per cent., the proletariat to about 3 per cent., and the nobility and clergy to 1 per cent. Both in France and in Russia the peasantry was identified with the struggle against monarchical absolutism, being motivated by great agrarian demands.
Moreover, the similarities extend to the moral and psychological factors involved. In the French Revolution, precisely as in the Russian, we see a great mass of illiterate peasants led by a few intellectuals, abstract thinkers wholly without practical experience in government or economic organization. In both cases we find a naïve Utopianism, a conviction that a sudden transformation of the whole social order could be easily effected. What the shibboleths of Karl Marx are to the Bolsheviki the shibboleths of Rousseau were to many of the leaders of the French Revolution. And just as in 1789 there was a pathetic dependence upon anarchie spontanée, a conviction, wholly non-rational and exclusively mystical, that in the chaos and disorder creative powers latent in the masses would be discovered—itself an evidence of the purely abstract character of their thinking—so it was in Russia in 1917. The revolution which overthrew the absolutism of Nicholas II of Russia repeated many of the characteristic features of that which overthrew the absolutism of Louis XVI of France.
Yet the true parallel to the French Revolution is not the Bolshevist coup d’état, but the Revolution of March, 1917. It was not the Bolshevist revolution that overturned the throne of the Romanovs and destroyed czarism. That was done by the March Revolution. Whereas the French Revolution was a revolution against a corrupt and oppressive monarchy, the Bolshevist revolt was a counter-revolution against democracy. The Bolsheviki had played only a very insignificant part in the revolution against czarism. They rose against the Provisional Government of the triumphant people. This Provisional Government represented the forces that had overthrown czarism; it was not a reactionary body of aristocrats and monarchists, but was mainly composed of Socialists and radicals and was thoroughly devoted to republicanism and democracy. It had immediately adopted as its program all that the French Revolution attained, and more: it had placed suffrage upon an even more generous basis, and dealt much more thoroughly with the land problem. The Directory put Gracchus Babeuf to death for advocating the redistribution of the land in 1795, but the Provisional Government of Russia did not hesitate to declare for that in 1917 and to create the machinery for carrying it into effect. At the very moment when it was overthrown by the Bolsheviki it was engaged in bringing about the election of the Constituent Assembly, the most democratic body of its kind in history.
Finally, just as the French Revolution was characterized by a passionate national consciousness and pride, so that it is customary to speak of it as the birth of French nationalism, so the Provisional Government represented a newly awakened Russian nationalism. Bolshevism, on the contrary, in its early stages, at any rate, represented the opposite, a violent antagonism to the ideology and institutions of nationalism. The French in 1793, and throughout the long struggle, were zealous for France and in her defense; the Bolsheviki cared nothing for Russia and would sacrifice her upon the altar of world revolution. In view of all these facts, it is simply absurd to liken the Bolshevist phase of the Russian Revolution, the counter-revolutionary phase of it, to the French Revolution.
There were phases of the French Revolution which can be fairly likened to the Bolshevist phase of the Russian Revolution. There is a striking analogy between the Reign of Terror instituted in 1793 and the Red Terror which began in Russia early in 1918. The Montagnards and the Bolsheviki are akin; the appeal of the former to the sansculottes and of the latter to the proletariat are alike. In both cases we see a brutal and desperate attempt to establish the dictatorial rule of a class comprising only 3 per cent. of the population. There is an equally striking analogy between the struggle of the Girondins against the Jacobins in France and the struggle of the Socialists-Revolutionists and Social Democrats against the Bolsheviki. In Russia at the beginning of 1920 the significant term “Thermidorians” began to be used. To compare Bolshevism to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution is quite a different matter from comparing it to the Revolution as a whole.
The permanent achievements of the French Revolution afford no justification for the Reign of Terror. The Revolution succeeded in spite of the Terror, not because of it, and the success was attended by evils which might easily have been averted. To condemn the Terror is not to decry the Revolution. Similarly, the Russian Revolution will succeed, we may well believe, not because of the Red Terror or of the Bolsheviki, but in spite of them. The bitterest opponents of the Bolsheviki are the most stalwart defenders of the Revolution. No appeal to the history of the French Revolution can extenuate or palliate the crimes of the Bolsheviki. Perhaps their greatest crime, the one which history will regard as most heinous, is their wanton disregard of all the lessons of that great struggle. They could not have entertained any rational hope of making their terrorism more complete or more fearful than was the Reign of Terror, which utterly failed to maintain the power of the proletariat. They could not have been unaware of the fierce resistance the Terror provoked and evoked, the counter-terror and the reaction—the Ninth Thermidor, the Directory, the coup d’état of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Empire. They could not have been ignorant of the fact that the Reign of Terror divided and weakened the revolutionary forces. That they embarked upon their mad and brutal adventure in the face of the plain lessons of the French Revolution is the unpardonable crime of the Bolsheviki.
Despite their copying of the vices of the worst elements in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviki are most closely connected in their ideals and their methods with those cruel and adventurous social rebels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose exploits, familiar to every Russian, are practically unknown to the rest of the world. Upon every page of the record of the Bolshevist régime there are reminders of the revolt of Bogdan Khnielnitski (1644-53) and that of Stenka Razin (1669-71). These cruel and bloodthirsty men, and others of the same kind who followed them, appealed only to the savage hatred and envy of the serfs, encouraged them to wanton destruction and frightful terror. Quite justly does the Zionist organ, Dos Yiddishce Volk,[71] say:
[71] July 11, 1919.
The slogans of Bolshevist practice are, in fact, the old Russian slogans with which the Volga bands of Pubachev and Razin ambushed the merchant wagon-trains and the Boyars. It is very characteristic that the Central Committee of the Communist Party has seen fit to unveil, on May 1st, at Moscow, a monument to the Ataman Stenka Razin, the hero of the Volga robber raids in the seventeenth century. Razin, indeed, is the legitimate father of Bolshevist practice.
Here we may as well give attention to another appeal which the Bolsheviki and their champions make to French history. They are fond of citing the Paris Commune of 1871, and claiming it as the model for their tactics. This claim, which is thoroughly dishonest, has often been made by Lenin himself. In the “Theses on Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracies,” published in Pravda, March 8, 1919, Lenin says: “Precisely at the present moment when the Soviet movement, covering the whole world, continues the work of the Paris Commune before the eyes of the whole world, the traitors to Socialism forget concrete experiences and the concrete lessons of the Paris Commune, repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about ‘democracy in general.’ The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.” On many occasions Lenin has made similar references to the Commune of 1871. The official Bolshevist press constantly indulges in such statements. The Krasnaya Gazeta, for example, published an article on the subject on December 17, 1919, parrot-like repeating Lenin’s sophistries.
The simple facts are that (1) the Paris Commune had nothing to do with Communism or any other social theory. It was an intensely nationalistic movement, inspired by resentment of a peace which it regarded as dangerous and humiliating to France. It was a movement for local independence; (2) it was not a class movement, but embraced the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat; (3) it was a “parliamentary institution,” based upon universal, equal suffrage; (4) the first act of the revolutionists in 1871 was to appeal to the will of the people, through popular elections, in which all parties were free and voting was, as stated, based on equal and universal suffrage; (5) within two weeks the elections were held, with the result that sixty-five revolutionists were chosen as against twenty-one elected by the opposition parties. The opposition included six radical Republicans of the Gambetta school and fifteen reactionaries of various shades. In the majority were representatives of every Socialist group and faction; (6) the Communards never attempted to set up a minority dictatorship, but remained true to the principles of democracy. This Karl Marx himself emphasized in his The Civil War in France. Bolshevist “history” is as grotesque as Bolshevist economics! No matter what we may think of the Commune of 1871, it cannot justly be compared to the cruel betrayal of Russian democracy by the Bolsheviki. The Communards were democrats in the fullest sense of the term and their brief rule had the sanction of a popular majority.
The Bolsheviki and their defenders are never tired of contending that most of the sufferings of the Russian people during the Bolshevist régime have been due, not to those responsible for that régime, but to the “blockade” imposed by the Allies upon Russian trade with foreign nations. Perhaps no single argument has won so much sympathy from sentimental and ill-informed people as this. Yet the falsity of the contention has been demonstrated many times, even by those Russians opposed to the blockade. A brief summary of the salient facts will show that this claim has been used as a peg upon which to hang a propaganda remarkable for its insincerity and its trickery.
The blockade was declared in November, 1917, shortly after the Bolsheviki seized the machinery of government. It was already quite apparent that they would make a separate peace with Germany, and that Germany would be the dictator of the peace. There was great danger that supplies furnished to Russia under these conditions would be used by the Germans. As a policy, therefore, the blockade was dictated by military considerations of the highest importance and was directed against the Central Empires, and not primarily against the Bolsheviki. It was, of course, inevitable that it would inflict hardship upon Russia, our former ally, and not merely upon the Bolsheviki. So long as the Central Empires were in a position to carry on the fight, however, and especially after the Brest-Litovsk Peace gave Germany such a command over the life of Russia, the maintenance of the blockade seemed to be of the highest importance from a military point of view. That it entailed hardship and suffering upon people who were our friends was one of the numerous tragedies of the war, not more terrible, perhaps—except as regards the number of people affected—than many of the measures taken in those parts of France occupied by the enemy or in the fighting-zone.
After the armistice and the cessation of actual fighting the question at once took on a new aspect. Many persons—the present writer among the number—believed and urged that the blockade should then be lifted entirely. The issue was blurred, however, by the fact that while this would certainly give aid to the Bolsheviki there was no assurance that it would in any degree benefit the people in Russia who were opposed to them. The discrimination in favor of the Bolsheviki practised in the distribution of food and everything else was responsible for this. It must be borne in mind that the blockade did not cut off from Russia any important source of food-supply. Russia had never depended upon other nations for staple foods. On the contrary, she was a food-exporting country. She practically fed the greater part of western Europe. Cutting off her imports did not lessen the grain she had; cutting off her exports certainly had the effect of increasing the stores available for home consumption. All this is as plain as the proverbial pikestaff.
The starvation of the Russian people was not caused by the blockade, which did not lessen the amount of staple foods available, but, on the contrary, increased it. The real causes were these: the breakdown of the transportation system, which made it impossible to transport the grain to the great centers of population; the stupid policy of the Bolsheviki toward the peasants and the warfare consequent thereon; the demoralization of industry and the resulting inability to give the peasants manufactured goods in exchange for their grain. It may be objected, in reply to this statement, that but for the blockade it would have been possible to import railway equipment, industrial machinery, and so on, and that therefore the blockade was an indirect cause of food shortage. The fallacy in this argument is transparent: as to the industrial machinery, Soviet Russia had, and according to Rykov still has, much more than could be used. As regards large importations of manufactured goods and railway equipment, what would have been exported in exchange for such imports? The available stocks of raw materials, especially flax and hides, were exceedingly small and would have exchanged for very little. We have the authority of Rykov for this statement also.
What, then, was there available for export? The answer is—food grains! In almost every statement issued by the Bolsheviki in their propaganda against the blockade wheat figured as the most important available exportable commodity. The question arises, therefore, how could the export of wheat from Russia help to feed her starving people? If there was wheat for export, hunger was surely an absurdity! Victor Kopp, representative of the Soviet Government in Berlin, in a special interview published in the London Daily Chronicle, February 28, 1920, made this quite clear, pointing out that the hope that Russia would be able to send food grains to central Europe in exchange for manufactured goods was entirely unfounded, because Russia sorely needed all her foodstuffs of every kind. Krassin, head of the department of Trade and Commerce in the Soviet Government, told Mr. Copping—that most useful of phonographs!—that the shattered condition of transportation “leaves us temporarily unable to get adequate supplies of food for our own cities, and puts entirely out of the question any possibility, at present, of assembling goods at our ports for sending abroad.”[72] As a matter of fact, the raising of the blockade, if, and in so far as, it led to an export of wheat and other food grains in return for manufactured goods, would have increased the hunger and underfeeding of the Russian people.
[72] Daily Chronicle, London, February 26, 1920.
The Bolsheviki knew this quite well and did not want the blockade raised. They realized that the propaganda in other countries against the blockade was an enormous asset to them, whereas removal of the blockade would reveal their weakness. Support is given to this contention by the following passage from Rykov’s report in January of this year:
It is the greatest fallacy to imagine that the lifting of the blockade or conclusion of peace is able in any degree to solve our raw-material crisis. On the contrary, the lifting of the blockade and conclusion of peace, if such should take place, will mean an increased demand for raw materials, as these are the only articles which Russia can furnish to Europe and exchange for European commodities. The supplies of flax on hand are sufficient for a period of from eight months to a year. But we shall not be able to export large quantities of flax abroad, and the catastrophic decline in flax production as compared with 1919 raises the question whether the flax industry shall not experience in 1920 a flax shortage similar to the one experienced by the textile industry in cotton.
In the spring of 1919 Mr. Alexander Berkenheim, one of the managers of the “Centrosoyuz,” with other well-known Russian co-operators, represented to the British Government that the blockade of Russia was inflicting hardship and famine only, or at least mainly, upon the innocent civil population. They argued that if the blockade were lifted the Bolsheviki would see to the feeding of the general population. Berkenheim and his friends applied for permission for their association to send a steamer to Odessa laden with foodstuffs, medicines, and other supplies, to be distributed exclusively among children and sick and convalescing civilians. Backed by influential British supporters, Berkenheim and his friends gave guaranties that not a single pound of such supplies would reach the Red Army. All was to be distributed by the co-operatives without any interference by the authorities. The Bolshevist Government gave a similar guaranty, stated in very definite and unequivocal terms. Accordingly, the British Government consented to allow the steamer to sail, and in June, 1919, the steamer, with a cargo of tea, coffee, cocoa, and rice, consigned to the “Centrosoyuz,” arrived at Odessa. But no sooner had the steamer entered the port than the whole cargo was requisitioned by the Soviet authorities and handed over to the organization supplying the Red Army.
This treachery was the principal cause of the continuance of the blockade. That it was intended to have precisely that effect is not improbable. On January 16, 1920, the Supreme Council of the League of Nations, at its first meeting, upon the proposal of the British Government, decided to so greatly modify the blockade as to amount to its practical abandonment. Trade was to be opened up with Russia through the co-operatives, it was announced. The co-operatives were to act as importing and exporting agencies, receiving clothing, machinery, medicines, railroad equipment, and so on, and exporting the “surplus” grain, flax, hides, and so on, in return.
Immediately after that arrangement was announced the Bolsheviki adopted an entirely new attitude. They began to raise hitherto unheard-of objections. They could not permit trade with the co-operatives on the conditions laid down; the co-operatives were not independent organizations, but a part of the Soviet state machinery; trade must accompany recognition of the Soviet Government, and so on. Thus the “diplomatic” arguments went. In Russia itself the leaders took the position expressed by Rykov in the speech already quoted.
To sum up: the blockade was a natural military measure of precaution, rendered necessary by the actions of the Bolsheviki; it was directed primarily against the Germans; it was not at any time a primary cause of the food shortage in Russia. When efforts were made to ameliorate the condition of the civil population by raising the blockade the Bolsheviki treacherously defeated such efforts. The prolonged continuation of the blockade was mainly due to the policy of obstruction pursued by the Bolsheviki. No large volume of trade could have been had with Russia at any time during the Bolshevist régime. The Bolsheviki themselves did not want the blockade removed, and finally confessed that such removal would not help them. Certainly, the Allies and the United States made many mistakes in connection with the blockade; but, when that has been fully admitted, and when all that can fairly be said against that policy has been said, it remains the fact that the Bolsheviki were responsible for creating the conditions which made the blockade necessary and inevitable, and that their treachery forced its continuation long after the Allies had shown themselves ready and even anxious to abandon it. At every step of their fatal progress in the devastation and spoliation of Russia the treachery of the Bolsheviki, their entire lack of honor and good faith, appear.
Herein lies the real reason why no civilized government can with safety to its own institutions—to say nothing of regard for its own dignity and honor—enter into any covenant with the Bolshevist Government of Russia or hold official relations with it. At the root of Bolshevism lies a negation of everything of fundamental importance to the friendly and co-operative relations of governments and peoples. When the leaders of a government that is set up and maintained by brute force, and does not, therefore, have behind it the sanction of the will of its citizens, being subject to no control other than its own ambitions, declare that they will sign agreements with foreign nations without feeling in the slightest degree obligated by such agreements, they outlaw themselves and their government.
Not only have the Bolsheviki boasted that this was their attitude, but they have gone farther. Their responsible leaders and spokesmen—Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and others—have openly declared that they are determined to use any and all means to bring about revolts in all other civilized countries, to upset their governments and institute Bolshevist rule. They have declared that only by such a universal spread of its rule can Bolshevism be maintained in Russia. “Soviet Russia by its very existence is a ferment and a propagator of the inevitable world revolution,” wrote Radek in Maximilian Harden’s Zukunft, in February, 1920. Referring to the Spartacist uprisings in Germany, he said: “You are afraid of Bolshevist propaganda penetrating into Germany with other goods. You recall an experiment already carried out by Germany. Yes, I glory in the results of our work.” “One does not demand a patent for immortality from the man to whom one sells a suit of underclothing ... and our only concern is trade,” said Radek in the same article. When Radek wrote that he knew that he was lying. He knew that, far from being their “only concern,” trade was the least of the concerns of the Bolsheviki. Upon this point the evidence leaves no room for doubt. In The Program of the Communist Party, Chapter XIX, Bucharin says, “The program of the Communist Party is not alone a program of liberating the proletariat of one country; it is the program of liberating the proletariat of the world.” Lenin wrote in The Chief Tasks of Our Times: “Only a madman can imagine that the task of overthrowing international imperialism can be fulfilled by Russians alone. While in the west the revolution is maturing and is making appreciable progress, the task before us is as follows: We who in spite of our weakness are in the forefront must do all in our power to retain the occupied positions.... We must strain every nerve in order to remain in power as long as possible, so as to give time for a development of the western revolution, which is growing much more slowly than we expected and wished.” Zinoviev wrote in Pravda, November 7, 1919, that “in a year, in two years, the Communist International will rule the world.” Kalinin, president of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Power, in his New-Year’s greeting for 1920, published in the Krasnaya Gazeta, January 1, 1920, declared that, “Western European brothers in the coming year should overthrow the rule of their capitalists and should join with the Russian proletariat and establish the single authority of the Soviets through the entire world under the protection of the Third International.” Many other statements of a similar character could be quoted to show that the Russian Bolsheviki’s chief concern is not trade, but world-wide revolt on Bolshevist lines.
That the Bolsheviki would use the privileges and immunities accorded to diplomatic representatives to foster Bolshevist agitation and revolt is made manifest by their utterances and their performances alike. “We have no desire to interfere in the internal affairs of any country,” said Kopp, in the interview already quoted, and the Soviet Government has repeatedly stated its willingness to give assurances of non-interference with the political or economic system of other countries. But of what use are assurances from men who boast that they are willing to sign agreements without the slightest intention of being bound by them? Take, for example, Trotsky’s statement, published at Petrograd, in February, 1918: “If, in awaiting the imminent proletarian flood in Europe, Russia should be compelled to conclude peace with the present-day governments of the Central Powers, it would be a provisional, temporary, and transitory peace, with the revision of which the European Revolution will have to concern itself in the first instance. Our whole policy is built upon the expectation of this revolution.” Precisely the same attitude toward the Allies was more bluntly expressed by Zinoviev on February 2, 1919, regarding the proposed Prinkipo Conference: “We are willing to sign an unfavorable peace with the Allies.... It would only mean that we should put no trust whatever in the bit of paper we should sign. We should use the breathing-space so obtained in order to gather our strength in order that the mere continued existence of our government would keep up the world-wide propaganda which Soviet Russia has been carrying on for more than a year.” Of the Third International, so closely allied with the Soviet Government, Zinoviev is reported by Mr. Lincoln Eyre as saying: “Our propaganda system is as strong and as far-reaching as ever. The Third International is primarily an instrument of revolution. This work will be continued, no matter what happens, legally or illegally. The Soviet Government may pledge itself to refrain from propaganda abroad, but the Third International, never.”[73]
[73] New York World, February 26, 1920.
Finally, there is the speech of Lenin before the Council of the People’s Commissaries during the negotiations upon the ill-starred Prinkipo Conference proposal, in which he said:
The successful development of the Bolshevist doctrine throughout the world can only be effected by means of periods of rest during which we may recuperate and gather new strength for further exertions. I have never hesitated to come to terms with bourgeois governments, when by so doing I thought I could weaken the bourgeoisie. It is sound strategy in war to postpone operations until the moral disintegration of the enemy renders the delivery of a mortal blow possible. This was the policy we adopted toward the German Empire, and it has proved successful. The time has now come for us to conclude a second Brest-Litovsk, this time with the Entente. We must make peace not only with the Entente, but also with Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine, and all the other forces which are opposing us in Russia. We must be prepared to make every concession, promise, and sacrifice in order to entice our foes into the conclusion of this peace. We shall know that we have but concluded a truce permitting us to complete our preparations for a decisive onslaught which will assure our triumph.
In view of these utterances, and scores of others like them, of what value are the “assurances of non-interference”—or any other assurances—offered by Chicherine, Lenin, and the rest? But we are not confined to mere utterances: there are deeds aplenty which fully bear out the inferences we have from the words of the Bolshevist leaders. In a London court, before Mr. Justice Neville, it was brought out that the Bolshevist envoy, Litvinov, had been guilty of using his position to promote revolutionary agitation. Not only had Litvinov committed a breach of agreement, said Mr. Justice Neville, but he had been guilty of a breach of public law. A circular letter to the British trades-unions was read by the justice, containing these words: “Hence it is that the Russian revolutionaries are summoning the proletarians of all countries to a revolutionary fight against their government.” Even worse was the case of the Bolshevist ambassador, Joffe, who was expelled from Berlin for using his diplomatic position to wage a propaganda for the overthrow of the German Government, and this notwithstanding the fact that the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in its second article specifically forbade “any agitation against the state and military institutions of Germany.”
In an official note to the German Foreign Office, published in Izvestia, December 26, 1918, Chicherine boasted that millions of rubles had been sent to Berlin for the purpose of revolutionary propaganda. The duplicity revealed by this note was quite characteristic of the Bolshevist régime and in keeping with the record of Chicherine himself in his relations with the British Government during his stay in London, where he acted as one of the representatives of the Russians in London who were seeking repatriation. Izvestia, on January 1, 1919, contained an article by Joffe on “Revolutionary Methods,” in which he said: “Having accepted this forcibly imposed treaty [Brest-Litovsk], revolutionary Russia of course had to accept its second article, which forbade ‘any agitation against the state and military institutions of Germany.’ But both the Russian Government as a whole and its accredited representative in Berlin never concealed the fact that they were not observing this article and did not intend to do so.” As a matter of fact, the agitation against the German Government by the Bolsheviki continued even after the so-called supplementary treaties of Brest-Litovsk, dated August 27, 1918, which, as pointed out by the United States Department of State, were not signed under duress, as was the original treaty, but were actively sought for and gladly signed by the Bolsheviki.
In view of these indisputable facts, is there any honest and worthy reason for suspending judgment upon the character of the Soviet Government? Surely it must be plainly evident to every candid and dispassionate mind that Bolshevism is practically a negation of every principle of honor and good faith essential to friendly and co-operative relations among governments in modern civilization. The Bolsheviki have outlawed themselves and placed themselves outside the pale of the community of nations.
The merits of Sovietism as a method of government do not here and now concern us. But we are entitled to demand that those who urge us to adopt it furnish some evidence of its superiority in practice. Up to the present time, no such evidence has been offered by those who advocate the change; on the other hand, all the available evidence tends to show that Soviet government, far from being superior to our own, is markedly inferior to it. We are entitled, surely, to call attention to the fact that, so far as it has been tried in Russia, Sovietism has resulted in an enormous increase in bureaucracy; that it has not done away with corruption and favoritism in government; that it has shown itself to be capable of every abuse of which other forms of government, whether despotic, oligarchic, or democratic, have been capable. It has not given Russia a government one whit more humane or just, one whit less oppressive or corrupt than czarism. It seems to be inherently bureaucratic and therefore inefficient. Be that how it may, it is impossible to deny that it has failed and failed utterly. Even the Bolsheviki, whose sole excuse for their assault upon the rapidly evolving democracy of Russia was their faith in the superiority of Sovietism over parliamentary government, have found it necessary to abandon it, not only in government, but in industry and in military organization.
In industry Sovietism, so far as it has been tried in Russia, has shown itself to be markedly inferior to the methods of industrial organization common to the great industrial nations, and the so-called Soviet Government itself, which is in reality an oligarchy, has had to abandon it and to revert to the essential principles and methods of capitalist industry. This is not the charge of a hostile critic: it is the confession of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Krassin, of Rykov, and practically every acknowledged Bolshevist authority. We do not say that the Soviet idea contains nothing of good; we do not deny that, under a democratic government, Soviets might have aided, and may yet aid, to democratize Russian industrial life. What we do say is that the Bolsheviki have failed to make them of the slightest service to the Russian people; that Bolshevism has completely failed to organize the industrial life of Russia, either on Soviet lines or any other, and has had to revert to capitalism and to call upon the capitalists of other lands to come and rescue them from utter destruction. After ruthlessly exterminating their own capitalists, they have been compelled to offer to give foreign capitalists, in the shape of vast economic concessions, a mortgage upon the great heritage of future generations of the Russian people and the right to exploit their toil.
So, too, with the military organization of the country: Starting out with Soviet management in the army, the present rulers of Russia soon discovered that the system would not work. As early as January, 1918, Krylenko, Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the Bolsheviki, reported to the Central Executive Committee that the soldiers’ committees were “the only remnant of the army.” In May, 1919, Trotsky was preaching the necessity of “respect for military science” and of “a genuine army, properly organized and firmly ruled by a single hand.” Conscription was introduced, not by law enacted by responsible elected representatives of the people, but by decree. It was enforced with a brutality and savagery unknown to this age in any other country. Just as in industry the “bourgeois specialists” were brought back and compelled to work under espionage and duress, so the officers of the old imperial army were brought back and held to their tasks by terror, their wives and children and other relatives being held as hostages for their conduct. Izvestia published, September 18, 1918, Trotsky’s famous Order No. 903, which read: “Seeing the increasing number of deserters, especially among the commanders, orders are issued to arrest as hostages all the members of the family one can lay hands on: father, mother, brother, sister, wife, and children.” Another order issued by Trotsky in the summer of 1919 said, “In case an officer goes over to the enemy, his family should be made to feel the consequences of his betrayal.”
Pravda[74] published an article giving an account of the formation of a Red cavalry regiment. From that article we learn that every officer mobilized in the Red Army had to sign the following statement:
[74] No. 11, 1919.
I have received due notice that in the event of my being guilty of treason or betrayal in regard to the Soviet Government, my nearest relatives [names given] residing at [full address given] will be responsible for me.
What this meant is known from the many news items in the Bolshevist press relating to the arrest, imprisonment, and even shooting of the relatives of deserters. To cite only one example: the Krasnaya Gazeta, November 4, 1919, published a “preliminary list” of nine deserting Red Army officers whose relatives—including mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and wives—had been arrested. Izvestia printed a list of deserters’ relatives condemned to be shot, including children fourteen and sixteen years old.
At the Joint Conference on National Economy in Moscow, January, 1920, Lenin summed up the experience of the Bolsheviki with Soviet direction of the army, saying, “In the organization of the army we have passed from the principle of commanding by committee to the direct command of the chiefs. We must do the same in the organization of government and industry.” And again, “The experience of our army shows us that primitive organization based on the collectivist principle becomes transformed into an administration based upon the principle of individual power.” In the Program of the Communists we read that “The demand that the military command should be elective ... has no significance with reference to the Red Army, composed of class-conscious workmen and peasants.” In a pamphlet issued by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the latter part of 1918 we read that “Regimental Committees, acting as administrative organs, cannot exist in the Soviet Army.” These quotations amply prove that Sovietism in the army was found undesirable and unworkable by the Bolsheviki themselves and by them abandoned.
We remember the glowing promises with which the first Red Army was launched: volunteers considering it an honor to be permitted to fight for the Communist Utopia; the “collective self-discipline”; the direction of the whole military organization by soldiers’ committees, and all the rest of the wild vision. We compare it with the brutal reality, and the contrast between the hope and the reality is the measure of the ghastly failure of Bolshevism. The military system of the Bolsheviki is infinitely more brutal than the old Prussian system was. The Red Army is an army of slaves driven by terrorized slaves. Sovietism proved a fool’s fantasy. The old military discipline came back harsher than ever; the death penalty was restored; conscription and mobilization at the point of the bayonet were carried out with a ferocity never equaled in any modern nation, not even in Russia under Czar Nicholas II. Was there ever a more complete failure?
The mass of evidence we have cited from Bolshevist authorities warrants the judgment that Sovietism, as exemplified during the Bolshevist régime, in every department of the national life, is at best an utterly impracticable Utopian scheme. Certainly every fair-minded person of normal intelligence must agree that there is nothing in the record of the experiment—a record, be it remembered, made by the Bolsheviki themselves—to rouse enthusiastic hopes or to justify any civilized nation in throwing aside the existing machinery of government and industrial organization and immediately substituting Sovietism therefor.
As for Bolshevism, in contradistinction from Sovietism, there can be no hesitation in reaching a verdict upon the evidence supplied by its own accredited spokesmen and official records. We have not massed the isolated crimes of individuals and mobs and presented the result as a picture of Russian life. That would be as unjust as to list all the accounts of race riots, lynchings, and murders in this country and offering the list as a fair picture of American life. Ignoring these things completely, we have taken the laws and decrees of Soviet Russia; its characteristic institutions; the things done by its government; the writings and speeches of its statesmen and recognized interpreters; the cold figures of its own reports of industry and agriculture. The result is a picture of Bolshevism, self-drawn, more ugly and repellent than the most malicious imagination could have drawn.
On the other side there is no single worthy creative achievement to be recorded. There are almost innumerable “decrees,” some of them attractive enough, but there are no actual achievements of merit to be credited to the Bolsheviki. Even in the matter of education, concerning which we have heard so much, there is not a scintilla of evidence that will bear examination which tends to show that they have actually accomplished anything which Russia will gratefully remember or cherish in the days that are to come. The much-vaunted “Proletcult” of Soviet Russia is in practice little more than a means of providing jobs for Communists. The Bolshevist publicist, Mizkevich, made this charge in Izvestia, March 22, 1919. “The Proletcult is using up our not very numerous forces, and spending public money, which it gets from ... the Commissariat for Public Instruction, on the same work that is done by the Public Instruction departments ... opposes its own work for the creation of proletarian culture to the same work of the agents of the proletarian authority, and thus creates confusion in the minds of the proletarian mass.”
The Bolsheviki have published decrees and articles on education with great freedom, but they have done little else except harm. They have weakened the great universities and rudely interrupted the development of the great movement to improve and extend popular education initiated shortly before the Revolution by Count Ignatiev, the best friend of popular education that ever held office in Russia, compared to whom Lunacharsky is a cretin. They have imposed upon the universities and schools the bureaucratic rule of men most of whom know nothing of university requirements, are at best poorly educated and sometimes even illiterate.
Promising peace and freedom from militarism, they betrayed their Allies and played the game of their foes; they brought new wars upon the already war-weary nation and imposed upon it a militarism more brutal than the old. Promising freedom, they have developed a tyranny more brutal and oppressive than that of the Romanovs. Promising humane and just government, they instituted the Chresvychaikas and a vast, corrupt bureaucracy. Promising to so organize production that there should be plenty for all and poverty for none, they ruined industrial production, decreased agricultural production to a perilously low level and so that famine reigned in a land of plentiful resources, human and material. Promising to make the workers masters of the machines, free citizens in a great industrial democracy, they have destroyed the machines, forced the workers to take the places of beasts of burden, and made them bond-slaves.
The evidence is in: let the jury render its verdict.