With the argument I am not for the moment concerned; but I have indeed written foggily if it is not clear from my writing that I am hostile to Bolshevism as a political creed and system, and to its application to Russia only less than to its imposition upon England. The attempt to destroy an idea with guns is stupid at any time. To try to destroy it by force of arms in Russia was an unwarrantable cruelty on the part of the Allies, an impertinent interference in another country’s internal affairs, and the crowning act of folly of an Entente which has distinguished itself for acts of madness since the days of the Armistice.
Perhaps it would be as well to state once again some of the reasons which moved me to criticism of the Bolshevik leaders, their programme and their policy.
First, let it be admitted once more, and emphasized in a manner which can leave no doubt in the reader’s mind, that for the nameless sufferings of the Russian people from hunger, cold and disease, and for the state of war which has kept Europe restless, unsettled and distressed for the two and a half years since the Armistice, the Allied Governments must bear the chief burden of responsibility. During the whole of that time Russia was engaged gallantly beating off one military adventurer after another, equipped by the Allies with arms and stores. She did not want war. She desired above all things peace. With her wireless she filled the air with cries for peace even whilst she dealt triumphant blows to the right and left of her, as one foe succeeded another. These wireless waves struck upon the ears of the whole world and turned pitying hearts towards Russia who had no love for Russia’s Bolshevism. Still peace was denied. France, crazy with fear of a possible Russo-German alliance, supplied one adventurer after another with the necessary equipment, in pursuit of a policy which made for the very thing she dreaded. England with her ships blockaded Russia’s ports, sowing a deadly hatred for this country in the hearts of mothers and fathers of little children dead of hunger, and making inevitable a Russian policy in the East unfavourable to British interests.
But this fully granted, the Russian Bolsheviks must accept a very considerable part of the blame. These men and women are not fools. The chiefs are highly educated and widely read. They have an incomparable knowledge of world affairs. I very much doubt if there is a man living with a larger acquaintance with the foreign politics of the world than the brilliant Radek, or a woman who knows more of Socialist history and organization than Madame Balabanova. What outsider can judge with perfect fairness the act of a great man in the critical epochs of his country’s history? It may have seemed to the Bolshevik leaders, in order to stop the fatal disintegration of Russia’s economic life which was the first fruit of peace and the Revolution, of the first necessity to seize power and destroy the beginnings of democratic growth exemplified in the Zemstvo and the National Assembly. Their contempt for any democracy other than a Communist democracy may have sincerely justified itself in their eyes in the miserable circumstances of the time of the Second Revolution. I indict them much less for their swift deeds in the early days of the Revolution than for their settled policy after the Revolution was accomplished, although they must have known that both the one and the other would give the enemies of Russia in Western Europe the excuse for invading her for which they were looking.
No consideration was shown of the effect upon the Russian town populations of the attempt to carry out their complete party programme, with its consequent provocation of blockades, embargoes and wars, at a time when three years of war with Germany had used up even the vast Russian resources and worn her weary soldiers to the very bone and marrow of them. One noted Bolshevik met my remonstrances against the policy, which meant the wilful sacrifice of the entire population of Petrograd, with the words: “But the population of one city, what is that? Three-quarters of a million? Well, but there are plenty of millions left in Russia.”
This is the true militarist psychology. I almost imagined I heard Mr. Winston Churchill speak; or General Ludendorff; or Marshal Foch.
The inevitable consequence of forcing a programme upon a people unripe for it, or unwilling, is tyranny and terror. In Ireland it is the tyranny of the minority. In Russia it is the tyranny of the minority. In Russia it is called the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a mere phrase, apt as most clever phrases to enslave and corrupt. The dictatorship of the proletariat means, in Russia, the dictatorship of a handful of clever political economists, very few of whom are proletarians, over an immense mass of peasants and workmen. Their intelligent support they drew from the workmen of the towns, their tacit support from the peasants, whom they bribed with the promise of land. Indeed, they established a system of virtual peasant proprietorship, creating a thousand vested interests where one had existed before, and yielding up the first plank in their programme in the very first hour of their power!
I do not charge the Bolshevik leaders with wilfully contriving terror and torture. I do not suggest they wallowed delightedly in the blood of fellow creatures. Ignorant and lustful brutes, self-elevated to power in remote towns and villages, did deeds in the name of the Soviet which make distressing reading. The official Terror of the Government was aimed at their own firm establishment and not carried on for the mere pleasure of killing. But the Communist philosophy predicates terror, and advocates its ruthless use against the adversary in the supposed interests of a glorious eventuality. To such lengths does the policy that the end justifies the means bring men and women otherwise humane! To such dangers is a population brought which permits its minority to ride rough-shod over the majority as in Russia!
That Lenin and the others sincerely desired peace in the beginning I am convinced. At Brest-Litovsk they issued a manifesto to the world which, for the idealism of its language and the beauty of its appeal, has not been surpassed in the political and diplomatic history of mankind. It was a plea to all the nations and their governments to stop fighting and to make peace upon the basis of self-determination for the nations and without penal indemnities for the conquered, the programme afterwards professed by Allied statesmen in order to undermine the resistance of the German people. The crime of rejecting this proposal rests with Germans and Allies alike. Mutual fears, hates, mistrusts were too strong, too deeply ingrained, and the Russian idealists were despised and rejected of men!
The Trotsky who raised the banner of universal peace at Brest-Litovsk, the prince of pacifists, became the prince of militarists, the great war lord of a hundred and fifty millions of people stung to arms again. The marvellously revived and sternly disciplined armies of Trotsky have performed miracles of soldier-craft which have filled an astonished world with reluctant admiration, tossing aside their enemies, Judenitch, Petlura, Koltchak, Denikin, and Wrangel, like terriers in a barn full of rats. Such exploits and the sympathetic agitation they aroused in the Allied countries compelled the Allies to face facts, always a difficult thing for them to do; and the outstanding fact of the situation is that, whether Bolshevism be approved or not, Soviet Russia must be taken into account in the shaping of the foreign policies of the Western Powers by a statesman who does not wish to go down to posterity as the worst kind of detrimental.