Red Dusk and the Morrow: Adventures and Investigations in Red Russia

by Paul Dukes

CHAPTER XIV
CONCLUSION

As I put pen to paper to write the concluding chapter of this book the news is arriving of the affliction of Russia with one of her periodical famine scourges, an event which cannot fail to affect the country politically as well as economically. Soviet organizations are incompetent to cope with such a situation. For the most pronounced effect both on the workers and on the peasantry of the communistic experiment has been to eliminate the stimulus to produce, and the restoration of liberty of trading came too late to be effective. A situation has arisen in which Russia must make herself completely dependent for rescue upon the countries against which her governors have declared a ruthless political war.

The Communists are between the devil and the deep sea. To say “Russia first” is equivalent to abandoning hope of the world revolution, for Russia can only be restored by capitalistic and bourgeois enterprise. But neither does the prospect of refusing all truck with capitalists, preserving Russia in the position of world-revolutionary citadel, offer any but feeble hopes of world-revolutionary success. For the gulf between “the party” and the Russian people, or as Lenin has recently expressed it in a letter to a friend in France,[7] “the gulf between the governors and the governed,” is growing ever wider. Many Communists show signs of weakening faith. Bourgeois tendencies, as Lenin observes, “are gnawing more and more at the heart of the party.” Lastly and most terrible, the proletarians of the West, upon whom the Bolsheviks from their earliest moments based all their hopes, show no sign whatever of fulfilling the constantly reiterated Bolshevist prediction that they would rise in their millions and save the only true proletarian government from destruction.

Alas! there is but one way to bridge the gulf dividing the party from the people. It is for Russian Communists to cease to be first Communists and then Russians, and to become Russians and nothing else. To expect this of the Third International, however, is hopeless. Its adherents possess none of the greatness of their master, who, despite subsequent casuistic tortuosities, has demonstrated the ability, so rarely possessed by modern politicians, honestly and frankly to confess that the policy he had inaugurated was totally wrong. The creation of the Third International was perhaps inevitable, embodying as it does the essentials of the Bolshevist creed, but it was a fatal step. If the present administration lays any claim to be a Russian government, then the Third International is its enemy. Even in June, 1921, at the very time when the Soviet Government was considering its appeal to Western philanthropy, the Third International was proclaiming its insistence on an immediate world revolution and discussing the most effective methods of promoting and exploiting the war which Trotzky declared to be inevitable between Great Britain and France, and Great Britain and the United States! But there are Communists who are willing to put Russia first, over-shadowed though they often are by the International; and the extent to which the existing organized administration may be utilized to assist in the alleviation of suffering and a bloodless transition to sane government depends upon the degree in which Communist leaders unequivocally repudiate Bolshevist theories and become the nearest things possible to patriots.

There are many reasons why, in the event of a modification of régime, the retention of some organized machine, even that established by the Communists, is desirable. In the first place there is no alternative ready to supplant it. Secondly, the soviet system has existed hitherto only in name, the Bolsheviks have never permitted it to function, and there is no evidence to prove that such a system of popular councils properly elected would be a bad basis for at least a temporary system of administration. Thirdly, Bolshevist invitations to non-Bolshevist experts to function on administrative bodies, especially in the capitals, began at an early date as I have already pointed out. For one reason or other, sometimes under compulsion, sometimes voluntarily, many of these invitations have been accepted. Jealously supervised by the Communist Party, experts who are anything but Communists hold important posts in government departments. They will obviously be better versed in the exigencies of the internal situation than outsiders. To sweep away the entire apparatus means to sweep away such men and women with it, which would be disastrous. It is only the purely political organizations—the entire paraphernalia of the Third International and its department of propaganda, for instance, and, of course, the Extraordinary Commission—that must be consigned bag and baggage to the rubbish heap.

The Author with Russian Children

I have always emphasized the part silently and self-sacrificingly played by a considerable section of the intellectual class who have never fled from Russia to harbours of safety, but have remained to bear on their backs, together with the mass of the people, the brunt of adversity and affliction. These are the great heroes of the revolution, though their names may never be known. They will be found among teachers, doctors, nurses, matrons, leaders of the former co-operative societies, and so forth, whose one aim has been to save whatever they could from wreckage or political vitiation. Subjected at first to varying degrees of molestation and insult, they stuck it through despite all, and have never let pass an opportunity to alleviate distress. Their unselfish labours have even restored to a state of considerable efficiency some of the soviet departments, particularly such as are completely non-political in character. This is no indication of devotion to Bolshevism, but rather of devotion to the people despite Bolshevism. I believe the number of such disinterested individuals to be much larger than is generally supposed and it is to them that we must turn to learn the innermost desires and needs of the masses.

I will cite in this connection a single instance. There was formed just previous to the Great War an organization known as the League for the Protection of Children, which combined a number of philanthropic institutions and waged war on juvenile criminality. As a private non-State and bourgeois institution its activities were suppressed by the Bolsheviks, who sought to concentrate all children’s welfare work in Bolshevist establishments, the atmosphere of which was political and the objects propagandist. The state of these establishments varies, some being maintained by special effort in a condition of relative cleanliness, but the majority, according to the published statements of the Bolsheviks, are falling into a condition of desperate insanitation and neglect. In any case, toward the close of 1920, the Bolsheviks were constrained, in view of ever-increasing juvenile depravity and demoralization, to appeal to the remnants of the despised bourgeois League for the Protection of Children to investigate the condition of the children of the capitals and suggest means for their reclamation. The report submitted by the League was appalling in the extreme. I am unable to say whether the recommendations suggested were accepted by the rulers, but the significance lies in the fact that, notwithstanding persecution, the League has contrived to maintain some form of underground existence through the worst years of oppression, and its leaders are at hand, the moment political freedom is re-established, to recommence the work of rescuing the children or to advise those who enter the country from abroad with that benevolent object.

The fact that the Russian people, unled, unorganized, and coerced, are growing indifferent to politics, but that the better and educated elements amongst them are throwing themselves into any and every work, economic or humanitarian, that may stave off complete disaster, leads to the supposition that if any healthy influence from outside, in the form of economic or philanthropic aid, is introduced into Russia, it will rally round it corresponding forces within the country and strengthen them. This indeed has always been the most forceful argument in favour of entering into relations with Bolshevist Russia. The fact that warring against the Red régime has greatly fortified its power is now a universally recognized fact; and this has resulted not because the Red armies, as such, were invincible, but because the politics of the Reds’ opponents were selfish and confused, their minds seemed askew, and their failure to propose a workable alternative to Bolshevism served to intensify the nausea which overcomes the Russian intellectual in Petrograd and Moscow whenever he is drawn into the hated region of party politics. So great indeed is the aversion of the bourgeois intellectual for politics that he may have to be pushed back into it, but he must first be strengthened physically and the country aided economically.