EDUCATION AND LAW

We come to Education. Here they have persecuted the teachers who would not acknowledge their power, and put them on the street to starve. In some Siberian towns they have declared that education makes people bourgeois, and that, therefore, all schooling must cease at the age of sixteen. At Vladivostok they are openly inciting their supporters to murder all students and professors. Everybody knows that if they were returned to power in Vladivostok not a single member of the Oriental Institute would be left alive. At the same time they are trying to make the stage and the cinematograph organs of Bolshevism. No play and no film is to be allowed that is not Bolshevistic in tendency. It is true that at Irkutsk they used to give “evenings” at cheap prices with the idea of providing the people with good intellectual fare. Mozart, Molière, and the classic Russians used to figure on the programme. But all they have done has been too one-sided and special. Education demands freedom, and that is the one thing they will not give.

One of the strangest Bolshevik novelties was their reform of judicial procedure. Laws, lawyers, and judges were abolished at one blow. You might be prosecuted for treason. Your judges would be chosen from the people to officiate for this occasion only, perhaps even they would not be able to read or write. The prosecuting counsel would be a man of the same type. You instructed whoever you liked to appear for you. The court had to make law and find on the fact at the same time. Having established what you had done, they would proceed to deliberate as to whether it came within their idea of a crime. The public were invited to help them, and any one who chose might speak as long as he liked. Even schoolboys joined in. The proceedings were not so terrible for the defendant as might appear. He usually got a real lawyer to defend him, who could put his case skilfully. The representative of the Soviet was no match for him as a rule. Judges were lenient except to other Socialists and the Press. You were not always certain of being tried. The Bolsheviks would arrest a group of people on a charge of conspiracy and shoot them the same day. The absence of laws hit the Press very hard. All the organs obnoxious to the Bolsheviks were suppressed one by one. It was only too easy to convict a newspaper of sedition, if you made up the law on the subject afresh for each case.

THE ROCK OF DESTRUCTION

These are just a few aspects of Bolshevik rule. In conclusion, I should like to give a concrete instance of how extreme Socialism works. A professional man at Irkutsk had by his talents and industry attained a distinguished position. Come the Bolsheviks, commandeer nearly all his rooms, and threaten to turn him out on the street and supplant him by one of their own men. When he protests, they jeer and tell him he will still be able to work with his hands. That was not the worst. He had a wife and family, for whom he had saved some money. If he died, the Bolsheviks would immediately step in and take all he possessed, including even the insurance. His wife might get some sort of a pension; his daughters would have to stop going to school and become servants or waitresses; his son, perhaps, would also have to give up his education and might manage to get a job as a cab-driver. The Socialist says how splendid! The children of rich and poor on an equality at last! Yes, the lazy and extravagant placed on exactly the same level as the industrious and the thrifty. Whether you spend what you earn, or whether you save it, it is all the same for those who come after you. On this rock the artificial restrictions of Bolshevism are sure to split. You will never persuade a man that the State will look after those dear to him as well as he himself can. You cannot take from him the right of providing with the fruits of his labour for wife and child. He will resent, with the deepest and bitterest anger of which he is capable, any endeavour to rob him of these privileges, and to make the State sole arbiter of the destiny of his children.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] The author is not yet aware of the fact, that, though there was a lucky misunderstanding, there was also a campaign led by a member of the Society of Friends, to secure his release. This Friend, who is still unknown to him, secured the interest, first of our Foreign Office, and then of the Moscow Soviet, in his behalf, and made his escape possible.

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