The permanent achievements of the French Revolution afford no justification for the Reign of Terror. The Revolution succeeded in spite of the Terror, not because of it, and the success was attended by evils which might easily have been averted. To condemn the Terror is not to decry the Revolution. Similarly, the Russian Revolution will succeed, we may well believe, not because of the Red Terror or of the Bolsheviki, but in spite of them. The bitterest opponents of the Bolsheviki are the most stalwart defenders of the Revolution. No appeal to the history of the French Revolution can extenuate or palliate the crimes of the Bolsheviki. Perhaps their greatest crime, the one which history will regard as most heinous, is their wanton disregard of all the lessons of that great struggle. They could not have entertained any rational hope of making their terrorism more complete or more fearful than was the Reign of Terror, which utterly failed to maintain the power of the proletariat. They could not have been unaware of the fierce resistance the Terror provoked and evoked, the counter-terror and the reaction—the Ninth Thermidor, the Directory, the coup d’état of the Eighteenth Brumaire, the Empire. They could not have been ignorant of the fact that the Reign of Terror divided and weakened the revolutionary forces. That they embarked upon their mad and brutal adventure in the face of the plain lessons of the French Revolution is the unpardonable crime of the Bolsheviki.
Despite their copying of the vices of the worst elements in the French Revolution, the Bolsheviki are most closely connected in their ideals and their methods with those cruel and adventurous social rebels of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose exploits, familiar to every Russian, are practically unknown to the rest of the world. Upon every page of the record of the Bolshevist régime there are reminders of the revolt of Bogdan Khnielnitski (1644-53) and that of Stenka Razin (1669-71). These cruel and bloodthirsty men, and others of the same kind who followed them, appealed only to the savage hatred and envy of the serfs, encouraged them to wanton destruction and frightful terror. Quite justly does the Zionist organ, Dos Yiddishce Volk,[71] say:
[71] July 11, 1919.
The slogans of Bolshevist practice are, in fact, the old Russian slogans with which the Volga bands of Pubachev and Razin ambushed the merchant wagon-trains and the Boyars. It is very characteristic that the Central Committee of the Communist Party has seen fit to unveil, on May 1st, at Moscow, a monument to the Ataman Stenka Razin, the hero of the Volga robber raids in the seventeenth century. Razin, indeed, is the legitimate father of Bolshevist practice.
Here we may as well give attention to another appeal which the Bolsheviki and their champions make to French history. They are fond of citing the Paris Commune of 1871, and claiming it as the model for their tactics. This claim, which is thoroughly dishonest, has often been made by Lenin himself. In the “Theses on Bourgeois and Proletarian Democracies,” published in Pravda, March 8, 1919, Lenin says: “Precisely at the present moment when the Soviet movement, covering the whole world, continues the work of the Paris Commune before the eyes of the whole world, the traitors to Socialism forget concrete experiences and the concrete lessons of the Paris Commune, repeating the old bourgeois rubbish about ‘democracy in general.’ The Commune was not a parliamentary institution.” On many occasions Lenin has made similar references to the Commune of 1871. The official Bolshevist press constantly indulges in such statements. The Krasnaya Gazeta, for example, published an article on the subject on December 17, 1919, parrot-like repeating Lenin’s sophistries.
The simple facts are that (1) the Paris Commune had nothing to do with Communism or any other social theory. It was an intensely nationalistic movement, inspired by resentment of a peace which it regarded as dangerous and humiliating to France. It was a movement for local independence; (2) it was not a class movement, but embraced the bourgeoisie as well as the proletariat; (3) it was a “parliamentary institution,” based upon universal, equal suffrage; (4) the first act of the revolutionists in 1871 was to appeal to the will of the people, through popular elections, in which all parties were free and voting was, as stated, based on equal and universal suffrage; (5) within two weeks the elections were held, with the result that sixty-five revolutionists were chosen as against twenty-one elected by the opposition parties. The opposition included six radical Republicans of the Gambetta school and fifteen reactionaries of various shades. In the majority were representatives of every Socialist group and faction; (6) the Communards never attempted to set up a minority dictatorship, but remained true to the principles of democracy. This Karl Marx himself emphasized in his The Civil War in France. Bolshevist “history” is as grotesque as Bolshevist economics! No matter what we may think of the Commune of 1871, it cannot justly be compared to the cruel betrayal of Russian democracy by the Bolsheviki. The Communards were democrats in the fullest sense of the term and their brief rule had the sanction of a popular majority.
The Bolsheviki and their defenders are never tired of contending that most of the sufferings of the Russian people during the Bolshevist régime have been due, not to those responsible for that régime, but to the “blockade” imposed by the Allies upon Russian trade with foreign nations. Perhaps no single argument has won so much sympathy from sentimental and ill-informed people as this. Yet the falsity of the contention has been demonstrated many times, even by those Russians opposed to the blockade. A brief summary of the salient facts will show that this claim has been used as a peg upon which to hang a propaganda remarkable for its insincerity and its trickery.
The blockade was declared in November, 1917, shortly after the Bolsheviki seized the machinery of government. It was already quite apparent that they would make a separate peace with Germany, and that Germany would be the dictator of the peace. There was great danger that supplies furnished to Russia under these conditions would be used by the Germans. As a policy, therefore, the blockade was dictated by military considerations of the highest importance and was directed against the Central Empires, and not primarily against the Bolsheviki. It was, of course, inevitable that it would inflict hardship upon Russia, our former ally, and not merely upon the Bolsheviki. So long as the Central Empires were in a position to carry on the fight, however, and especially after the Brest-Litovsk Peace gave Germany such a command over the life of Russia, the maintenance of the blockade seemed to be of the highest importance from a military point of view. That it entailed hardship and suffering upon people who were our friends was one of the numerous tragedies of the war, not more terrible, perhaps—except as regards the number of people affected—than many of the measures taken in those parts of France occupied by the enemy or in the fighting-zone.
After the armistice and the cessation of actual fighting the question at once took on a new aspect. Many persons—the present writer among the number—believed and urged that the blockade should then be lifted entirely. The issue was blurred, however, by the fact that while this would certainly give aid to the Bolsheviki there was no assurance that it would in any degree benefit the people in Russia who were opposed to them. The discrimination in favor of the Bolsheviki practised in the distribution of food and everything else was responsible for this. It must be borne in mind that the blockade did not cut off from Russia any important source of food-supply. Russia had never depended upon other nations for staple foods. On the contrary, she was a food-exporting country. She practically fed the greater part of western Europe. Cutting off her imports did not lessen the grain she had; cutting off her exports certainly had the effect of increasing the stores available for home consumption. All this is as plain as the proverbial pikestaff.
The starvation of the Russian people was not caused by the blockade, which did not lessen the amount of staple foods available, but, on the contrary, increased it. The real causes were these: the breakdown of the transportation system, which made it impossible to transport the grain to the great centers of population; the stupid policy of the Bolsheviki toward the peasants and the warfare consequent thereon; the demoralization of industry and the resulting inability to give the peasants manufactured goods in exchange for their grain. It may be objected, in reply to this statement, that but for the blockade it would have been possible to import railway equipment, industrial machinery, and so on, and that therefore the blockade was an indirect cause of food shortage. The fallacy in this argument is transparent: as to the industrial machinery, Soviet Russia had, and according to Rykov still has, much more than could be used. As regards large importations of manufactured goods and railway equipment, what would have been exported in exchange for such imports? The available stocks of raw materials, especially flax and hides, were exceedingly small and would have exchanged for very little. We have the authority of Rykov for this statement also.