Certainly, the destructive phase of the revolution in Russia is over. Constructive work has begun.
We saw this everywhere. And we saw order, and though we inquired for them, we heard of no disorders. Prohibition is universal and absolute. Robberies have been reduced in Petrograd below normal of large cities. Warned against danger before we went in, we felt safe. Prostitution has disappeared with its clientele, who have been driven out by the "no-work-no-food law," enforced by the general want and the labor-card system. Loafing on the job by workers and sabotage by upper-class directors, managers, experts and clerks have been overcome. Russia has settled down to work.
The soviet form of government, which sprang up so spontaneously all over Russia, is established.
This is not a paper thing; not an invention. Never planned, it has not yet been written into the forms of law. It is not even uniform. It is full of faults and difficulties; clumsy, and in its final development it is not democratic. The present Russian Government is the most autocratic government I have ever seen. Lenin, head of the Soviet Government, is farther removed from the people than the Tsar was, or than any actual ruler in Europe is.
The people in a shop or an industry are a soviet. These little informal Soviets elect a local soviet; which elects delegates to the city or country (community) soviet; which elects delegates to the government (State) soviet. The government Soviets together elect delegates to the All-Russian Soviet, which elects commissionaires (who correspond to our Cabinet, or to a European minority). And these commissionaires finally elect Lenin. He is thus five or six removes from the people. To form an idea of his stability, independence, and power, think of the process that would have to be gone through with by the people to remove him and elect a successor. A majority of all the Soviets in all Russia would have to be changed in personnel or opinion, recalled, or brought somehow to recognize and represent the altered will of the people.
No student of government likes the soviet as it has developed. Lenin himself doesn't. He calls it a dictatorship, and he opposed it at first. When I was in Russia in the days of Milyoukov and Kerensky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were demanding the general election of the constituent assembly. But the Soviets existed then; they had the power, and I saw foreign ambassadors blunder, and the world saw Milyoukov and Kerensky fall, partly because they would not, or could not, comprehend the nature of the soviet; as Lenin did finally, when, against his theory, he joined in and expressed the popular repudiation of the constituent assembly and went over to work with the soviet, the actual power in Russia. The constituent assembly, elected by the people, represented the upper class and the old system. The soviet was the lower class.
The soviet, at bottom, is a natural gathering of the working people, of peasants, in their working and accustomed groupings, instead of, as with us, by artificial geographical sections.
Labor unions and soldiers' messes made up the Soviets in the cities; poorer peasants and soldiers at the village inn were the first Soviets in the country; and in the beginning, two years ago, these lower class delegates used to explain to me that the "rich peasants" and the "rich people" had their own meetings and meeting places. The popular intention then was not to exclude the upper classes from the government, but only from the Soviets, which were not yet the same. But the Soviets, once in existence, absorbed in their own class tasks and their own problems, which the upper class had either not understood or solved, ignored—no; they simply forgot the council of empire and the Duma. And so they discovered (or, to be more exact, their leaders discovered) that they had actually all the power. All that Lenin and the other Socialist leaders had to do to carry through their class-struggle theory was to recognize this fact of power and teach the Soviets to continue to ignore the assemblies and the institutions of the upper classes, which, with their "governments," ministries, and local assemblies, fell, powerless from neglect.
The Soviet Government sprouted and grew out of the habits, the psychology, and the condition of the Russian people. It fitted them. They understand it. They find they can work it and they like it. Every effort to put something else in its place (including Lenin's) has failed. It will have to be modified, I think, but not in essentials, and it can not be utterly set aside. The Tsar himself, if he should come back, would have to keep the Russian Soviet, and somehow rule over and through it.
The Communist Party (dubbed "Bolshevik") is in power now in the Soviet Government.