While the mobs broke windows, smashed wine cellars, and pillaged buildings to express their rage, their leaders directed their efforts to the annihilation of the system itself. They pulled down the Tsar and his officers; they abolished the courts, which had been used to oppress them; they closed shops, stopped business generally, and especially all competitive and speculative business; and they took over all the great industries, monopolies, concessions, and natural resources. This was their purpose. This is their religion. This is what the lower-class culture has been slowly teaching the people of the world for 50 years: that it is not some particular evil, but the whole system of running business and railroads, shops, banks, and exchanges, for speculation and profit that must be changed. This is what causes poverty and riches, they teach, misery, corruption, vice, and war. The people, the workers, or their State, must own and run these things "for service."
Not political democracy, as with us; economic democracy is the idea; democracy in the shop, factory, business. Bolshevism is a literal interpretation, the actual application of this theory, policy, or program. And so, in the destructive period of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik leaders led the people to destroy the old system, root and branch, fruit and blossom, too. And apparently this was done. The blocks we saw in Petrograd and Moscow of retail shops nailed up were but one sign of it. When we looked back of these dismal fronts and inquired more deeply into the work of the revolution we were convinced that the Russians have literally and completely done their job. And it was this that shocked us. It is this that has startled the world; not the atrocities of the revolution, but the revolution itself.
The organization of life as we know it in America, in the rest of Europe, in the rest of the world, is wrecked and abolished in Russia.
The revolution didn't do it. The Tsar's Government had rotted it. The war broke down the worn-out machinery of it; the revolution has merely scrapped it finally.
The effect is hunger, cold, misery, anguish, disease—death to millions. But worse than these—I mean this—was the confusion of mind among the well and the strong. We do not realize, any of us—even those of us who have imagination—how fixed our minds and habits are by the ways of living that we know. So with the Russians. They understood how to work and live under their old system; it was not a pretty one; it was dark, crooked, and dangerous, but they had groped around in it all their lives from childhood up. They could find their way in it. And now they can remember how it was, and they sigh for the old ways. The rich emigres knew whom to see to bribe for a verdict, a safe-conduct, or a concession; and the poor, in their hunger, think now how it would be to go down to the market and haggle, and bargain, from one booth to another, making their daily purchases, reckoning up their defeats and victories over the traders. And they did get food then. And now—it is all gone. They have destroyed all this, and having destroyed it they were lost, strangers in their own land.
This tragedy of transition was anticipated by the leaders of the revolution, and the present needs were prepared for in the plans laid for reconstruction.
Lenin has imagination. He is an idealist, but he is a scholar, too, and a very grim realist. Lenin was a statistician by profession. He had long been trying to foresee the future of society under socialism, and he had marked down definitely the resources, the machinery, and the institutions existing under the old order, which could be used in the new. There was the old Russian communal land system, passing, but standing in spots with its peasants accustomed to it. That was to be revived; it is his solution of the problem of the great estates. They are not to be broken up, but worked by the peasants in common. Then there was the great Russian Cooperative (trading) Society, with its 11,000,000 families before the war; now with 17,000,000 members. He kept that. There was a conflict; it was in bourgeoise hands but it was an essential part of the projected system of distribution, so Lenin compromised and communist Russia has it. He had the railroads, telegraph, telephone already; the workers seized the factories, the local Soviets the mines; the All-Russian Soviet, the banks. The new government set up shops—one in each neighborhood—to dole out not for money, but on work tickets, whatever food, fuel, and clothing this complete government monopoly had to distribute. No bargaining, no display, no advertising, and no speculation. Everything one has earned by labor the right to buy at the cooperative and soviet shops is at a fixed, low price, at the established (too small.) profit—to the government or to the members of the cooperative.
Money is to be abolished gradually. It does not count much now. Private capital has been confiscated, most of the rich have left Russia, but there are still many people there who have hidden away money or valuables, and live on them without working. They can buy food and even luxuries, but only illegally from peasants and speculators at the risk of punishment and very high prices. They can buy, also, at the government stores, at the low prices, but they can get only their share there, and only on their class or work tickets. The class arrangement, though transitory and temporary—the aim is to have but one class—is the key to the idea of the whole new system.
There are three classes. The first can buy, for example, 1-1/2 pounds of bread a day; the second, three-quarters of a pound; the third, only one-quarter of a pound; no matter how much money they may have. The first class includes soldiers, workers in war, and other essential industries, actors, teachers, writers, experts, and Government workers of all sorts. The second class is of all other sorts of workers. The third is of people who do not work—the leisure class. Their allowance is, under present circumstances, not enough to live on, but they are allowed to buy surreptitiously from speculators on the theory that the principal of their capital will soon be exhausted, and, since interest, rent, and profits—all forms of unearned money—are abolished, they will soon be forced to go to work.
The shock of this, and the confusion due to the strange details of it, were, and they still are, painful to many minds, and not only to the rich. For a long time there was widespread discontent with this new system. The peasants rebelled, and the workers were suspicious. They blamed the new system for the food shortage, the fuel shortage, the lack of raw materials for the factories. But this also was anticipated by that very remarkable mind and will—Lenin. He used the State monopoly and control of the press, and the old army of revolutionary propagandists to shift the blame for the sufferings of Russia from the revolutionary government to the war, the blockade, and the lack of transportation. Also, he and his executive organization were careful to see that, when the government did get hold of a supply of anything, its arrival was heralded, and the next day it appeared at the community shops, where everybody (that worked) got his share at the low government price. The two American prisoners we saw had noticed this, you remember. "We don't get much to eat," they said, "but neither do our guards or the other Russians. We all get the same. And when they get more, we get our share."