Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy

by John Spargo

THE BOLSHEVIK WAR AGAINST DEMOCRACY

I

The defenders and supporters of the Bolsheviki have made much of the fact that there was very little bloodshed connected with the successful Bolshevik uprising in Petrograd. That ought not to be permitted, however, to obscure the fundamental fact that it was a military coup d'état, the triumph of brute force over the will of the vast majority of the people. It was a crime against democracy. That the people were passive, worn out, and distracted, content to wait for the Constituent Assembly, only makes the Bolshevik crime appear the greater. Let us consider the facts very briefly. Less than three weeks away was the date set for the Constituent Assembly elections. Campaigns for the election of representatives to that great democratic convention were already in progress. It was to be the most democratic constitutional convention that ever existed in any country, its members being elected by the entire population, every man and woman in Russia being entitled to vote. The suffrage was equal, direct, universal, and secret.

Moreover, there was a great democratic reconstruction of the nation actually in progress at the time. The building up of autonomous democratic local governing bodies, in the shape of a new type of zemstvos, was rapidly progressing. The old-time zemstvos had been undemocratic and did not represent the working-people, but the new zemstvos were composed of representatives nominated and elected by universal suffrage, equal, secret, and direct. Instead of being very limited in their powers as the old zemstvos were, the new zemstvos were charged with all the ordinary functions of local government. The elections to these bodies served as an admirable practical education in democracy, making it more certain than would otherwise have been the case that the Russian people would know how to use their new political instrument so as to secure a Constituent Assembly fully representing their will and their desire.

At the same time active preparations for holding the election of members to the Constituent Assembly were actually under way. The Socialist parties were making special efforts to educate the illiterate voters how to use their ballots correctly. The Provisional Government, on its part, was pushing the preparations for the elections as rapidly as possible. All over the country special courts were established, in central places, to train the necessary workers so that the elections might be properly conducted. Above all, the great problem of the socialization of the land which had been agitated for so many years had now reached the stage at which its solution might almost have been said to be complete. The National Soviet of Peasants, together with the Socialist Revolutionary party, had formulated a law on the subject which represented the aspiration and the best thought of the leaders of the peasants' movement. That law had been approved in the Council of Ministers and was ready for immediate promulgation. Peasant leaders like Chernov, Rakitnikov, Vikhiliaev, and Maslov had put an immense amount of work into the formulation of this law, which aimed to avoid anarchy, to see to it that instead of an individualistic scramble by the peasants for the land, in small and unorganized holdings, the problem should be scientifically dealt with, lands being justly distributed among the peasant communes, and among the peasants who had been despoiled, and large estates co-operatively organized and managed.

All this the Bolsheviki knew, for it was common knowledge. There is no truth whatever in the claim set up by many of the apologists for the Bolsheviki that they became enraged and resorted to desperate tactics because nothing effective was being done to realize the aims of the Revolution, to translate its ideals into fact. Quite the contrary is true. The Bolshevik insurrection was precipitated by its leaders precisely because they saw that the Provisional Government was loyally and intelligently carrying out the program of the Revolution, in co-operation with the majority of the working-class organizations and their leaders.

The Bolsheviki did not want the ideals of the Revolution to be realized, for the very simple reason that they were opposed to those ideals. In all the long struggle from Herzen to Kerensky the revolutionary movement of Russia had stood for political democracy first of all. Now, at the moment when political democracy was being realized, the Bolsheviki sought to kill it and to set up something else—namely, a dictatorship of a small party of less than two hundred thousand over a nation of one hundred and eighty millions. There can be no dispute as to this aim; it has been stated by Lenine with great frankness. "Just as one hundred and fifty thousand lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the one hundred and thirty millions of Russian peasants, so two hundred thousand members of the Bolshevik party are imposing their proletarian will on the mass, but this time in the interest of the latter."[23]

Lenine's figures probably exaggerate the Bolshevik numbers, but, assuming them to be accurate, can anybody in his right mind, knowing anything of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, believe that the substitution of a ruling class of one hundred and fifty thousand by one of two hundred thousand, to govern a nation of one hundred and eighty millions, was the end to which so many lives were sacrificed? Can any sane and sincere person believe that the class domination described by the great arch-Bolshevik himself comes within measurable distance of being as much of a realization of the ideals of the Revolution as did the Constituent Assembly plan with its basis of political democracy, universal, equal, direct, secret, all-determining suffrage? We do not forget Lenine's statement that this new domination of the people by a ruling minority differs from the old régime in that the Bolsheviki are imposing their will upon the mass "in the interest of the latter." What ruling class ever failed to make that claim? Was it not the habit of the Czars, all of them, during the whole revolutionary epoch, to indulge in the pious cant of proclaiming that they were motived only by their solicitude for the interests and well-being of the peasants?

It is a curious illustration of the superficial character of the Bolshevist mentality that a man so gifted intellectually as Lenine undoubtedly is should advance in justification of his policy a plea so repugnant to morality and intelligence, and that it should be quietly accepted by men and women calling themselves radical revolutionists. Some years ago a well-known American capitalist announced with great solemnity that he and men like himself were the agents of Providence, charged with managing industry "for the good of the people." Naturally, his naïve claim provoked the scornful laughter of every radical in the land. Yet, strange as it may seem, whenever I have pointed out to popular audiences that Lenine asserted the right of two hundred thousand proletarians to impose their rule upon Russia, always, without a single exception, some defender of the Bolsheviki—generally a Socialist or a member of the I.W.W.—has entered the plea, "Yes, but it is for the good of the people!"

If the Bolsheviki had wanted to see the realization of the ideals of the Revolution, they would have found in the conditions existing immediately prior to their insurrection a challenge calling them to the service of the nation, in support of the Provisional Government and the Preliminary Parliament. They would have permitted nothing to imperil the success of the program that was so well advanced. As it was, determination to defeat that program was their impelling motive. Not only did they fear and oppose political democracy; they were equally opposed to democracy in industry, to that democracy in the economic life of the nation which every Socialist movement in the world had at all times acknowledged to be its goal. As we shall see, they united to political dictatorship industrial dictatorship. They did not want democracy, but power; they did not want peace, even, as they wanted power.