I think it will stay there a long time. What I have shown of the machinery of change is one guaranty of communist dominance. There are others. All opposition to the communist government has practically ceased inside of Russia.
There are three organized opposition parties: Mencheviks, Social Revolutionary Right, and Social Revolutionary Left. The anarchists are not organized. The Social Revolutionary Left is a small group of very anarchistic leaders, who have hardly any following. The Mencheviks and the Social Revolutionaries Right are said to be strong, but there is no way of measuring their strength, for a very significant reason.
These parties have stopped fighting. They are critical, but they are not revolutionary. They also think the revolution is over. They proposed, and they still propose eventually, to challenge and oust the Communist Party by parliamentary and political methods, not by force. But when intervention came upon distracted Russia, and the people realized they were fighting many enemies on many fronts, the two strong opposing parties expressed their own and the public will to stand by the party in power until the menace of foreign invasion was beaten off. These parties announced this in formal statements, uttered by their regular conventions; you have confirmation of it in the memoranda written for you by Martov and Volsky, and you will remember how one of them put it to us personally:
"There is a fight to be made against the Bolsheviks, but so long as you foreigners are making it, we Russians won't. When you quit and leave us alone, we will take up our burden again, and we shall deal with the Bolsheviks. And we will finish them. But we will do it with our people, by political methods, in the Soviets, and not by force, not by war or by revolution, and not with any outside foreign help."
This is the nationalistic spirit, which we call patriotism, and understand perfectly; it is much stronger in the new than it was in the old, the Tsar's, Russia. But there is another force back of this remarkable statement of a remarkable state of mind.
All Russia has turned to the labor of reconstruction; sees the idea in the plans proposed for the future; and is interested—imaginatively.
Destruction was fun for a while and a satisfaction to a suppressed, betrayed, to an almost destroyed people. Violence was not in their character, however. The Russian people, sober, are said to be a gentle people. One of their poets speaks of them as "that gentle beast, the Russian people," and I noticed and described in my reports of the first revolution how patient, peaceable, and "safe" the mobs of Petrograd were. The violence came later, with Bolshevism, after the many attempts at counterrevolution, and with vodka. The Bolshevik leaders regret and are ashamed of their red terror. They do not excuse it. It was others, you remember, who traced the worst of the Russian atrocities and the terror itself to the adoption by the counter-revolutionists of the method of assassination (of Lenin and others), and most of all to the discovery by the mobs of wine cellars and vodka stills. That the Russian drunk and the Russian sober are two utterly different animals, is well known to the Jews, to the Reactionaries, and to the Russians themselves. And that is why this people lately have not only obeyed; they have themselves ruthlessly enforced the revolutionary prohibition decrees in every part of Russia that we would inquire about and hear from.
The destructive spirit, sated, exhausted, or suppressed, has done its work. The leaders say so—the leaders of all parties.
There is a close relationship between the Russian people and the new Russian leaders, in power and out. New men in politics are commonly fresh, progressive, representative; it's the later statesmen that damp the enthusiasm and sober the idealism of legislators. In Russia all legislators, all, are young or new. It is as if we should elect in the United States a brand-new set of men to all offices, from the lowest county to the highest Federal position, and as if the election should occur in a great crisis, when all men are full of hope and faith. The new leaders of the local Soviets of Russia were, and they still are, of the people, really. That is one reason why their autocratic dictatorship is acceptable. They have felt, they shared the passion of the mob to destroy, but they had something in mind to destroy.
The soviet leaders used the revolution to destroy the system of organized Russian life.