Pravda[74] published an article giving an account of the formation of a Red cavalry regiment. From that article we learn that every officer mobilized in the Red Army had to sign the following statement:
[74] No. 11, 1919.
I have received due notice that in the event of my being guilty of treason or betrayal in regard to the Soviet Government, my nearest relatives [names given] residing at [full address given] will be responsible for me.
What this meant is known from the many news items in the Bolshevist press relating to the arrest, imprisonment, and even shooting of the relatives of deserters. To cite only one example: the Krasnaya Gazeta, November 4, 1919, published a “preliminary list” of nine deserting Red Army officers whose relatives—including mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and wives—had been arrested. Izvestia printed a list of deserters’ relatives condemned to be shot, including children fourteen and sixteen years old.
At the Joint Conference on National Economy in Moscow, January, 1920, Lenin summed up the experience of the Bolsheviki with Soviet direction of the army, saying, “In the organization of the army we have passed from the principle of commanding by committee to the direct command of the chiefs. We must do the same in the organization of government and industry.” And again, “The experience of our army shows us that primitive organization based on the collectivist principle becomes transformed into an administration based upon the principle of individual power.” In the Program of the Communists we read that “The demand that the military command should be elective ... has no significance with reference to the Red Army, composed of class-conscious workmen and peasants.” In a pamphlet issued by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in the latter part of 1918 we read that “Regimental Committees, acting as administrative organs, cannot exist in the Soviet Army.” These quotations amply prove that Sovietism in the army was found undesirable and unworkable by the Bolsheviki themselves and by them abandoned.
We remember the glowing promises with which the first Red Army was launched: volunteers considering it an honor to be permitted to fight for the Communist Utopia; the “collective self-discipline”; the direction of the whole military organization by soldiers’ committees, and all the rest of the wild vision. We compare it with the brutal reality, and the contrast between the hope and the reality is the measure of the ghastly failure of Bolshevism. The military system of the Bolsheviki is infinitely more brutal than the old Prussian system was. The Red Army is an army of slaves driven by terrorized slaves. Sovietism proved a fool’s fantasy. The old military discipline came back harsher than ever; the death penalty was restored; conscription and mobilization at the point of the bayonet were carried out with a ferocity never equaled in any modern nation, not even in Russia under Czar Nicholas II. Was there ever a more complete failure?
The mass of evidence we have cited from Bolshevist authorities warrants the judgment that Sovietism, as exemplified during the Bolshevist régime, in every department of the national life, is at best an utterly impracticable Utopian scheme. Certainly every fair-minded person of normal intelligence must agree that there is nothing in the record of the experiment—a record, be it remembered, made by the Bolsheviki themselves—to rouse enthusiastic hopes or to justify any civilized nation in throwing aside the existing machinery of government and industrial organization and immediately substituting Sovietism therefor.
As for Bolshevism, in contradistinction from Sovietism, there can be no hesitation in reaching a verdict upon the evidence supplied by its own accredited spokesmen and official records. We have not massed the isolated crimes of individuals and mobs and presented the result as a picture of Russian life. That would be as unjust as to list all the accounts of race riots, lynchings, and murders in this country and offering the list as a fair picture of American life. Ignoring these things completely, we have taken the laws and decrees of Soviet Russia; its characteristic institutions; the things done by its government; the writings and speeches of its statesmen and recognized interpreters; the cold figures of its own reports of industry and agriculture. The result is a picture of Bolshevism, self-drawn, more ugly and repellent than the most malicious imagination could have drawn.
On the other side there is no single worthy creative achievement to be recorded. There are almost innumerable “decrees,” some of them attractive enough, but there are no actual achievements of merit to be credited to the Bolsheviki. Even in the matter of education, concerning which we have heard so much, there is not a scintilla of evidence that will bear examination which tends to show that they have actually accomplished anything which Russia will gratefully remember or cherish in the days that are to come. The much-vaunted “Proletcult” of Soviet Russia is in practice little more than a means of providing jobs for Communists. The Bolshevist publicist, Mizkevich, made this charge in Izvestia, March 22, 1919. “The Proletcult is using up our not very numerous forces, and spending public money, which it gets from ... the Commissariat for Public Instruction, on the same work that is done by the Public Instruction departments ... opposes its own work for the creation of proletarian culture to the same work of the agents of the proletarian authority, and thus creates confusion in the minds of the proletarian mass.”
The Bolsheviki have published decrees and articles on education with great freedom, but they have done little else except harm. They have weakened the great universities and rudely interrupted the development of the great movement to improve and extend popular education initiated shortly before the Revolution by Count Ignatiev, the best friend of popular education that ever held office in Russia, compared to whom Lunacharsky is a cretin. They have imposed upon the universities and schools the bureaucratic rule of men most of whom know nothing of university requirements, are at best poorly educated and sometimes even illiterate.