XI
BOLSHEVISM
What is Bolshevism? A generic term that stands for a number of things which have little in common. It varies with the countries where it appears. In Russia it is the despotism of an organized and unscrupulous group of men in a disorganized community. It might also be termed the frenzy of a few epileptics running amuck among a multitude of paralytics. It is not so much a political doctrine or a socialist theory as a psychic disease of a section of the community which cannot be cured without leaving permanent traces and perhaps modifying certain organic functions of the society affected. For some students at a distance who make abstraction from its methods—as a critic appreciating the performance of "Hamlet" might make abstraction from the part of the Prince of Denmark—it is a modification of the theory of Karl Marx, the newest contribution to latter-day social science. In Russia, at any rate, the general condition of society from which it sprang was characterized not by the advance of social science, but by a psychic disorder the germs of which, after a century of incubation, were brought to the final phase of development by the war. In its origins it is a pathological phenomenon.
Four and a half years of an unprecedented campaign which drained to exhaustion the financial and economic resources of the European belligerents upset the psychical equilibrium of large sections of their populations. Goaded by hunger and disease to lawless action, and no longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness. Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made them insensible to the less immediate restraints of a religious character. These phenomena are not unusual concomitants of protracted wars. History records numerous examples of the homecoming soldiery turning the weapons destined for the foreign foe against political parties or social classes in their own country. In other European communities for some time previously a tendency toward root-reaching and violent change was perceptible, but as the state retained its hold on the army it remained a tendency. In the case of Russia—the country where the state, more than ordinarily artificial and ill-balanced, was correspondingly weak—Fate had interpolated a blood-stained page of red and white terror in the years 1906-08. Although fitful, unorganized, and abortive, that wild splutter was one of the foretokens of the impending cataclysm, and was recognized as such by the writer of these pages. During the foregoing quarter of a century he had watched with interest the sowing of the dragon's teeth from which was one day to spring up a race of armed and frenzied men. Few observers, however, even in the Tsardom, gaged the strength or foresaw the effects of the anarchist propaganda which was being carried on suasively and perseveringly, oftentimes unwittingly, in the nursery, the school, the church, the university, and with eminent success in the army and the navy. Hence the widespread error that the Russian revolution was preceded by no such era of preparation as that of the encylopedists in France.
Recently, however, publicists have gone to the other extreme and asserted that Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and a host of other Russian writers were apostles of the tenets which have since received the name of Bolshevism, and that it was they who prepared the Russian upheaval just as it was the authors of the "Encyclopedia" who prepared the French Revolution. In this sweeping form the statement is misleading. Russian literature during the reigns of the last three Tsars—with few exceptions, like the writings of Leskoff—was unquestionably a vehicle for the spread of revolutionary ideas. But it would be a gross exaggeration to assert that the end deliberately pursued was that form of anarchy which is known to-day as Bolshevism, or, indeed, genuine anarchy in any form. Tolstoy and Gorky may be counted among the forerunners of Bolshevism, but Dostoyevsky, whom I was privileged to know, was one of its keenest antagonists. Nor was it only anarchism that he combated. Like Leskoff, he was an inveterate enemy of political radicalism, and we university students bore him a grudge in consequence. In his masterly delineation[273] of a group of "reformers," in particular of Verkhovensky—whom psychic tendency, intellectual anarchy, and political crime bring under the category of Bolshevists—he foreshadowed the logical conclusion, and likewise the political consummation, of the corrosive doctrines which in those days were associated with the name of Bakunin. In the year 1905-06, when the upshot of the conflict between Tsarism and the revolution was still doubtful, Count Witte and I often admired the marvelous intuition of the great novelist, whose gallery of portraits in the "Devils" seemed to have become suddenly endowed with life, and to be conspiring, shooting, and bomb-throwing in the streets of Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa, and Tiflis. The seeds of social revolution sown by the novelists, essayists, and professional guides of the nation were forced by the wars of 1904 and 1914 into rapid germination.
As far back as the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs all the poison of Europe and then gives it off in greater quantity and deadlier intensity. When we admit Russia, we admit the cholera, dissolution, death. That is the meaning of Russian propaganda. Yesterday she said to us, 'I am Christianity.' To-morrow she will say, 'I am socialism.' It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still reach and slay.
"It might commove Europe and bespatter it with blood, but that would not hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the abysmal ooze of definite dissolution."
Russia, then, led by domiciled aliens without a fatherland, may be truly said to have been wending steadily toward the revolutionary vortex long before the outbreak of hostilities. Her progress was continuous and perceptible. As far back as the year 1906 the late Count Witte and myself made a guess at the time-distance which the nation still had to traverse, assuming the rate of progress to be constant, before reaching the abyss. This, however, was mere guesswork, which one of the many possibilities—and in especial change in the speed-rate—might belie. In effect, events moved somewhat more quickly than we anticipated, and it was the World War and its appalling concomitants that precipitated the catastrophe.
As circumstances willed it, certain layers of the people of central Europe were also possessed by the revolutionary spirit at the close of the World War. In their case hunger, hardship, disease, and moral shock were the avenues along which it moved and reached them. This coincidence was fraught with results more impressive than serious. The governments of both these great peoples had long been the mainstays of monarchic tradition, military discipline, and the principle of authority. The Teutons, steadily pursuing an ideal which lay at the opposite pole to anarchy, had risked every worldly and well-nigh every spiritual possession to realize it. It was the hegemony of the world. This aspiration transfigured, possessed, fanaticized them. Teutondom became to them what Islam is to Mohammedans of every race, even when they shake off religion. They eschewed no means, however iniquitous, that seemed to lead to the goal. They ceased to be human in order to force Europe to become German. Offering up the elementary principles of morality on the altar of patriotism, they staked their all upon the single venture of the war. It was as the throw of a gambler playing for his soul with the Evil One. Yet the faith of these materialists waxed heroic withal, like their self-sacrifice. And in the fiery ardor of their enthusiasm, hard concrete facts were dissolved and set floating as illusions in the ambient mist. Their wishes became thoughts and their fears were dispelled as fancies. They beheld only what they yearned for, and when at last they dropped from the dizzy height of their castles in cloudland their whole world, era, and ideal was shattered. Unavailing remorse, impotent rage, spiritual and intense physical exhaustion completed their demoralization. The more harried and reckless among them became frenzied. Turning first against their rulers, then against one another, they finally started upon a work of wanton destruction relieved by no creative idea. It was at this time-point that they endeavored to join hands with their tumultuous Eastern neighbors, and that the one word "Bolshevism" connoted the revolutionary wave that swept over some of the Slav and German lands. But only for a moment. One may safely assert, as a general proposition, that the same undertaking, if the Germans and the Russians set their hands to it, becomes forthwith two separate enterprises, so different are the conceptions and methods of these two peoples. Bolshevism was almost emptied of its contents by the Germans, and little left of it but the empty shell.