“The Bolshevist Party,” said he, “was not born only a year or two ago. Our party has behind it more than one decade of glorious activity. The best workers of the world called themselves Communists with pride.... The party is not a peculiar sect, it is not an aristocracy of labour. It also consists of workers and peasants—only more organized, more developed, knowing what they want and with a fixed programme. The Communists are not the masters, in the bad sense of that word, of the workers and peasants, but only their elder comrades, able to point out the right path.... Recently we have purged our ranks. We have ejected those who in our opinion did not merit the great honour of being called Communists. They were mostly not workers but people more or less of the privileged classes who tried to ‘paste’ themselves on to us because we are in power.... Having done this we open wide the door of the party to the ranks of labour.... All honest labourers may enter it. If the party has defects let us correct them together.... We warn everyone that in our party there is iron discipline. You must harden yourself and at the call of the party take up very hard work. Our call is addressed to all who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the working class. Strengthen and help the only party in the world that leads the workers to liberty!”
With all formalities, such as probationary stages, removed, and diffident candidates magnanimously assured that if only they would join they could learn later what it was all about, the membership of the party in the northern capital rose in three months to 23,000. This was slightly less than could have been mustered, prior to the purging, by combining members, sympathizers, candidates, and the Union of Communist Youth. The figures in Moscow were approximately the same.
The above remarks apply to the rank and file. Intellectuality in the party has always been represented largely, though by no means exclusively, by Jews, who dominate the Third International, edit the Soviet journals, and direct propaganda. It must never be forgotten, however, that there are just as many Jews who are opposed to Bolshevism, only they cannot make their voices heard. I find that those who utter warnings of a coming pogrom of Jews as a result of the evils of Bolshevism are liable to meet with the reception of a Cassandra. But I fear such an occurrence to be inevitable if no modifying foreign influence is at hand, and it will be promoted by old-régimists the world over. It will be a disaster, because Jews who have become assimilated into the Russian nation may play a valuable part in the reconstruction of the country. There are many who have already played leading rôles in Russia’s democratic institutions, such as the co-operative societies and land and town unions, which the Bolsheviks have suppressed.
The higher orders of the party, whether Jew or Russian, consist of the same little band of devotees, a few hundred strong, who before the Revolution were, still are, and presumably ever will be the Bolshevist party proper. They in their turn are subjected to the rigid dictatorship of the central party committee, which rules Russia absolutely through the medium of the Council of People’s Commissars.
As it became increasingly evident that the only people who would join the party of their own free will and in considerable numbers were “undesirables,” while a large proportion of the workers who had been coaxed into it were but indifferent Communists, the tendency grew to make of the party a closed corporation subject to merciless discipline. Members, though enjoying material privileges, should have no will of their own; undesirables should be deterred from joining by imposing arduous duties upon all members. Such is the position in the capitals at the present time. The “iron party discipline” is needed for another reason besides that of barring out black sheep. With demoralization, famine, and misery on the increase, insubordinate whisperings and questions are arising, even within the party, especially since the factor of war has disappeared. These questionings are growing in force and affect the highest personages in the State. Trotzky, for instance, no longer able to satisfy his insatiable ambition, is showing an inclination to branch out on a line of his own in opposition to the moderate and compromising tendencies of Lenin. The tension between them has been relieved temporarily by assigning to Trotzky a dominant rôle in the promotion of the world revolution, while Lenin controls domestic affairs. But the arrangement is necessarily temporary. The characters of the two men, except under stress of war, are as incompatible as their respective policies of violence and moderation.
The number of Communists being relatively so infinitesimal, how is it that to-day on every public and supposedly representative body there sits an overwhelming and triumphant Communist majority? I will very briefly describe the method of election and a single meeting of the Soviet of Petrograd, whose sittings I attended.
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A Meeting outside the Tauride Palace