The picture of the provincial Soviet press is melancholy enough. We journalists are particularly “up against it” when we endeavor to expose the shortcomings of the local Soviet rule and the local Soviet officials. Immediately we are met with threats of arrest and banishment, threats which are often carried out. In Kaluga a Soviet editor was nearly shot for a remark about a drunken communist.
Under such conditions as are indicated in this protest the evidence we have cited was published. What the record would have been if only there was freedom for the opposition press can only be imagined. In the light of such a mass of authoritative evidence furnished by the Bolsheviki themselves, of what use is it for casual visitors to Russia, like Mr. Goode and Mr. Lansbury, for example, to attempt to throw dust into our eyes and make it appear that acts of terrorism and tyranny are no more common in Russia than in countries like England, France, and America? And how, in the light of such testimony, shall we explain the ecstatic praise of Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki by men and women who call themselves Socialists and Liberals, and who profess to love freedom? It is true that the abolition of the death penalty has now been decreed, the decree going into effect on January 22, 1920. Lenin has declared that this date marks the passing of the policy of blood, and that only a renewal of armed intervention by the Allies can force a return to it. We shall see. This is not the first time the death penalty has been “abolished” by decree during the Bolshevist régime. Some of us remember that on November 7, 1918, the Central Executive Committee in Moscow decreed the abolition of the death penalty and a general amnesty. After that murder, by order of the Extraordinary Commissions, went on worse than before.[23]
[23] As proofs of these pages are being revised, word comes that the death penalty has been revived—Vide London Times, May 26, 1920.
In Odessa an investigation was made into the workings of the Chresvychaika and a list of fifteen classes of crimes for which the death penalty had been imposed and carried out was published. The list enumerated various offenses, ranging from espionage and counter-revolutionary agitation to “dissoluteness.” The fifteenth and last class on the list read, “Reasons unknown.” Perhaps these words sum up the only answer to our last question.
VIII
INDUSTRY UNDER SOVIET CONTROL
For the student of the evolution of Bolshevism in Russia there is, perhaps, no task more difficult than to unravel the tangled skein of the history of the first few weeks after the coup d’état. Whoever attempts to set forth the development of events during those weeks in an ordered and consecutive narrative, and to present an accurate, yet intelligible, account of the conditions that prevailed, must toil patiently through a bewildering snarled mass of conflicting testimony, charges and counter-charges, claims and counter-claims. Statements concerning apparently simple matters of fact, made by witnesses whose competence and probity are not to be lightly questioned, upon events of which they were witnesses, are simply irreconcilable. Moreover, there is a perfect welter of sweeping generalizations and an almost complete lack of such direct and definite information, statistical and other, as can readily be found relating to both the earlier and the later stages of the Revolution.
Let us first set down the facts concerning which there is substantial agreement on the part of the partizans of the Bolsheviki and the various factions opposed to them, ranging from the Constitutional-Democrats to such factions as the Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left and the “Internationalist” section of the Menshevist Social Democrats, both of which were quite closely allied to the Bolsheviki in sympathy and in theory. At the time when the Bolsheviki raised the cry, “All power to the Soviets!” in October, 1917, arrangements were well under way for the election, upon the most democratic basis imaginable, of a great representative constitutional convention, the Constituent Assembly. Not only had the Bolsheviki nominated their candidates and entered upon an electoral campaign in advocacy of their program; not only were they, in common with all other parties, pledged to the holding of the Constituent Assembly; much more important is the fact that they professed to be, and were by many regarded as, the special champions and defenders of the Constituent Assembly, solicitous above all else for its convocation and its integrity. From June onward Trotsky, Kamenev, and other Bolshevist leaders had professed to fear only that the Provisional Government would either refuse to convoke the Constituent Assembly or in some manner prevent its free action. No small part of the influence possessed by the Bolsheviki immediately prior to the overthrow of Kerensky was due to the fact that, far from being suspected of hostility to the Constituent Assembly, they were widely regarded as its most vigorous and determined upholders. To confirm that belief the Council of the People’s Commissaries issued this, its first decree:
In the name of the Government of the Russian Republic, chosen by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies with participation of peasant deputies, the Council of People’s Commissars decrees:
1. The elections for the Constituent Assembly shall take place at the date determined upon—November 12th.
2. All electoral commissions, organs of local self-government, Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, and soldiers’ organizations on the front should make every effort to assure free and regular elections at the date determined upon.
In the name of the Government of the Russian Republic,
The President of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Ulianov—Lenin.
That was in November, 1917—and the Constituent Assembly has not yet been convoked. In Pravda, December 26, 1917, Lenin published a series of propositions to show that the elections, which had taken place since the Bolsheviki assumed power, did not give a clear indication of the real voice of the masses! The elections had gone heavily against the Bolsheviki, and that fact doubtless explains Lenin’s disingenuous argument. Later on Lenin was able to announce that no assembly elected by the masses by universal suffrage could be accepted! “The Soviet Republic repudiates the hypocrisy of formal equality of all human beings,” he wrote in his Letter to American Workmen.
It is quite certain that the political power and influence of the Soviets was never so small at any time since the birth of the Revolution in March as it was when the Bolsheviki raised the cry, “All power to the Soviets!” The reasons for this, if not obvious, are easily intelligible: the mere facts that the election of a thoroughly democratic constitutional convention at an early date was assured, and that the electoral campaign had already begun, were by themselves sufficient to cause many of those actively engaged in the revolutionary struggle to turn their interest from the politics of the Soviets to the greater political issues connected with the campaign for the Constituent Assembly elections. There were other factors at work lessening the popular interest in and, consequently, the political influence of, the Soviets. In the first place, the hectic excitement of the early stages of the Revolution had passed off, together with its novelty, and life had assumed a tempo nearer normal; in the second place, city Dumas and the local Zemstvos, which had been elected during the summer, upon a thoroughly democratic basis, were functioning, and, naturally, absorbing much energy which had hitherto been devoted to the Soviets.