THE
TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA
By
ARTHUR RANSOME
PRICE THREEPENCE.
THE WORKERS' SOCIALIST FEDERATION,
400, OLD FORD ROAD, E 3.
TRUTH ABOUT RUSSIA
Reprinted from "The New Republic," U.S.A.
THE MARCH REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA.
Revolutions are not definite political acts carried out by the
majority in a nation who are unanimous in desiring a single
definite object. Revolutionaries and their historians often try
to give them that character afterwards, but that is only an
illustration of man's general tendency to supply his instinctive
acts with family pedigrees of irreproachable orderly reasoning.
It would be less dignified but more honest to admit that revolution
is a kind of speeding up of the political flux, during
which tendencies that in ordinary times would perhaps only
become noticeable in the course of years, reach a full fruition
in a few weeks or days. Revolution turns the slow river of
political development into a rapid, in which the slightest action
has an immediate effect, and the canoe of government answers
more violently to a paddle dipped for a moment than in more
ordinary times to the organised and prolonged effort of its
whole crew.
Those servants of the autocracy who fomented disorder in
Petrograd in March, 1917, believed that by creating and suppressing
an artificial premature revolt they could forestall and
perhaps altogether prevent the more serious revolt against themselves
which they had good reason to expect in the future.
They were wrong, precisely for the reason suggested in the first
paragraph. They were wrong because revolution is not an act
of political life, but a state of political life. Hoping to crush
a political act, they created the state in which the old means of
control slipped from their hands, and they became incapable of
the suppression of any acts whatsoever.
Their immediate political opponents made the same mistake
as the servants of the autocracy. They believed that the autocracy
could carry out its plan, and therefore did their best to
prevent the revolution. Thus in the days before the revolution
wrestling with the bourgeoisie, both far removed from the
actual people, both gambling with the lives of the people, with
entirely different objects. The autocracy was trying to create
a revolution which should fail. The bourgeoisie was trying to
prevent the autocracy from creating a revolution at all. Looking
back over a year, it is almost laughable to think that it was
the autocracy that arrested the whole Labour Group of the
Central War Industries Committee because that group of
patriotic socialists had shown themselves capable of preventing
trouble with the workmen. It is more laughable to remember
that Miliukov, the Cadet leader, sent a statement to the papers
alleging that someone pretending to be Miliukov had heen
urging the workmen to come out into the streets, but that
actually he begged the workmen, for their own sakes, to do
nothing of the kind.
This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of
the methods whereby the autocracy prepared the artificial
fireworks which, unfortunately for them, turned into a very
genuine volcano. It is enough to say that for several months
before the revolution they had been running kindergarten
classes for policemen in the use of machine guns just outside
Petrograd, that armoured cars had been kept back from the
front with a view to moving target practice in the streets of the
capital, and that weeks before the actual disorders Petrograd
had been turned into a fortified battleground, with machine-gun
embrasures in the garrets of the houses at strategical
vantage points Meanwhile the food shortage, already serious
in the preceding September, had been steadily emphasised.
The whole labour of the country had been mobilised, put in
uniforms, armed, and taken from the land, thus insuring
starvation for the nation as a whole in the not distant future.
Starvation in the present was assured by the complete breakdown
of the always inadequate transport. Dissatisfaction
with the Government was common to every class of the population,
although it had different causes. Thus the bourgeoisie
were dissatisfied with the Government because it put difficulties
in the way of a successful waging of the war that was to give
Constantinople to Russia. The aristocracy were dissatisfied
with the Tsar on account of his inability to keep his family in
order, or to hide the fact that it was in disorder The folk,
the great bulk of the nation, were dissatisfied with the Government
because they held the Government responsible for their
increasingly difficult conditions. They were dissatisfied with
the Government for waging the war, while the classes above
them were dissatisfied with the Government for not waging it
well enough.
For one moment these various discontents were united and
in one matter. When the revolution had begun, when the flux
had already gathered speed, when the banks of the hitherto
placid stream were already crumbling under pressure of the
torrent, there was not a single class in the nation that was not dissatisfied
with the Tsar. The Tsar, accordingly left the stage as
politely as he could, as painlessly as a person in a play. And,
seeing the bloodless character of his removal, and mistaking
his removal for the object and end of the revolution, English,
Americans, and French united in applauding the most moderate,
the biggest, the most surprising revolution in the world.
The bourgeois classes in the fighting countries and those of the
labouring classes, who, by reading newspapers had been tamed
to a happy acquiescence in bourgeois ideas were a little
troubled lest the disturbance in Russia should affect their war,
they having forgotten that they were fighting for democracy
and that the enfranchisement of 180 million souls was in itself
a greater victory than they had set out to gain; so that, from
that moment on, the main object of the war should have been
to save that victory.
But, if the bourgeois classes in the Allied
countries were a little troubled, their disquiet was as nothing
in comparison with the helpless terror of the bourgeois classes
of Russian They had taken no part in the actual starting of
the revolution. Miliukov, as he openly confessed to his party,
had seen from his window the soldiers pouring out into the
street with red flags to fight for the people instead of for their
masters, and he said to himself: "There goes the Russian
Revolution, and it will be crushed in a quarter of an hour."
A little later, he had seen more soldiers in the streets, and
decided that it would not be crushed so easily. It was only
when the risks had already been taken by plain soldiers and
workmen, by Cossacks who refused to fire on them; it was only
when the revolution had begun, that the already existing organ
of the bourgeoisie, the Duma, threw itself into line, and, foam
on the crest of an irresistible wave, tried vainly to pretend that
it had the power to control and direct the wave itself.
Already a newer more vital organ was forming. While
Miliukov was formulating his ideas about the preservation of
the dynasty, or, in other words, the transfer of the autocracy
to the bourgeoisie, the Soviet of Workmen's Deputies, at first
merely a small group of Duma Labour Members, had formulated
quite other ideas, had declared that the revolution
belonged to those who made it, not to those who stood aside
and then sought to profit by it, and had stated that neither
Miliukov nor the outworn Duma had the right to decide their
future for those who had won their freedom by risking their
lives, but that that task would be undertaken by a Constituent
Assembly which should represent all Russia. Subsequent
history illustrated the necessary opportunism of all parties in
a time of revolution, since within a few weeks Miliukov and his
party had declared for a republic, and, when the Constituent
Assembly met, it had already earned for itself a place like
that of the Duma among the relics of the past, and was gently
set aside by the Soviet, which had been the first cause of its
summoning.
There were thus formed two bodies, each of which claimed
to represent the revolutionary nation. The first of these was
the Provisional Government, which was appointed by an
executive committee of the Duma, and so did indirectly represent
that body, which, never fully representative of the people,
had lost in the course of the war any claim to stand for anything
except the bourgeois and privileged classes. The second
of these was the Soviet of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies.
Each thousand workmen had the right to send one member to
the Soviet, and each company of soldiers. From the very first
there could be no sort of doubt in the mind of an unprejudiced
observer as to which of these two bodies best represented the
Russian people. I do not think I shall ever again be so happy
in my life as I was during those first days when I saw working
men and peasant soldiers sending representatives of their class
and not of mine. I remembered Shelley's
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many they are few,
and wondered that this thing had not come to pass before.
And I thought how applicable to revolution are Sir Thomas
Browne's words on the Flood, when he wrote: "That there was
a Deluge once seems not to me so great a Miracle as that there
is not one always."
Immediately there became visible a definite fissure, soon a
wide gulf, between the ideals of these two bodies, the Government
and the representatives of the people. The people, the
working classes, the peasants, who suffered most from the war,
demanded that steps should be taken to secure peace. They
did not want to fight to get territory for the sake of some
phantasmagoric gain which did not affect them, which they did
not understand. They were starving already, and saw worse
starvation ahead. The Government, on the other hand, was,
if anything, except for the presence in it of Kerensky, the
labour member, more definitely imperialistic than the autocracy
whose place it had taken.
The gulf between the working classes and the Government
became suddenly deeper when it was realised that the future
of the revolution depended on the possession of the army. If
the army were not to be swept into the revolution, if it were
allowed to remain apart from politics, it would be a passive
weapon in the, hands of the Government, which would thus be
able to suppress the Soviets, and so the true expression of the
people's will, whenever it should think fit. If the Government
had been able to retain possession of the army, then Miliukov
might have had his way and the bourgeoisie would have
secured the profits of the revolytion of the masses.
This, however, was not to be, and immediately the contradiction
between a revolution and war of the imperialistic
kind became evident. The army, which at that time meant
practically the whole of the younger peasantry, took the share
in politics it had a right to take. From that moment the future
of the Soviets was assured, and the bourgeois Government was
doomed to be a government only by the good will of the
Soviets, who, within a few days of the beginning of the revolution,
were the only real power in the country.
That they had been right in fearing retention of the army
by the bourgeoisie was proved again and again, by Kerensky.
Kornilov, Kaledin, Alexeiev, Dutov, at subsequent periods of
the revolution, each one in turn basing his resistance to the
Soviets on some part of the army which had been kept free
from the contagion of free political expression.
Then began the long struggle of the summer. The Soviets,
in which the moderates, who, mistrusting their own abilities,
desired to keep the Government as a sort of executive organ,
were in a majority, exerted all their influence on the Government
in the direction of peace. The Government made its
representations to the Allies, but, at any rate at first, gambled
in the future, and pretended that things were not so bad, and
that Russia could still take an active part in the war. There
was a decisive moment when Miliukov wrote a note to the
Allies calculated to lull them to believe that the changes in
Russia meant nothing and that Russia stood by her old claims.
The soldiers and people poured into the streets in protest, and
that lie had to be publicly withdrawn.
Already there was serious opposition to the Moderate party
in the Soviets from the Bolsheviki, who urged that coalition
with the bourgeoisie was merely postponing peace and bringing
starvation and disaster nearer. The Moderates proposed a
Stockholm conference, at which the socialist groups of all
countries should meet and try to come to a common understanding.
This was opposed by the Allied Governments and
by the Bolsheviki, on the ground that the German Majority
Socialists would be the agents of the German Government.
One deadlock followed another. Each successive deadlock
strengthened the heart of the Bolsheviki, who held that the
Provisional Government was an incubus and that all authority
should belong to the Soviets.
The Bolshevik leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, had come from
exile in western countries not merely to take their share in a
Russian revolution, but to use Russia in kindling the world
revolution. They called for peace, but peace, for them, was
not an end in itself. They could say, with Christ, that they
brought not peace but a sword. For they hoped that in stirring the
working classes of the world to demand peace from their
governments, they would be putting into their hands the sword
that was necessary for the Social Revolution, in which cause
they had both, like many of their friends, spent the best years
of their lives.
In their own country, at any rate, they have proved that
they were right in their calculation. The struggle for peace,
the failure to obtain it, shook the Government into the disastrous
adventure of the Galician advance, shook it again with
the Galician retreat, weakened it with every telegram from
Allied countries that emphasised the continuance of the war.
Each shock to the Government was also a shock for the Moderate
party in the Soviets. The struggle in Russia became, as
the Bolsheviki wished it should become, a struggle between the
classes, a struggle in which the issue became ever clearer
between the working and the privileged classes. The Government
went to Moscow for moral support, and came back without it.
The Kornilov mutiny, a definite attempt against the
Soviets by a handful of the privileged classes, merely
strengthened the organisations it was intended to overthrow.
Within the Soviets the Moderate party, which had already
come by force of events to be a sort of annex of the bourgeoisie,
grew weaker and weaker. Just as the Government
went to Moscow to seek support in a conference, so the Moderate
party, feeling support slipping from under it, knowing
that the next meeting of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets
would find it in a minority, treacherously sought new foothold
in an artificial democratic assembly. Not even the tactics of
the Moderate party shook the actual fabric of the Soviets, and
when, in October, first Petrograd, then Moscow, showed a huge
Bolshevik majority, the Bolshevik leaders were so confident
that they had the country behind them that they made every
single arrangement for the ejection of the Government openly
over the telephone, and, notwithstanding, neither the Government
nor the old Moderates (now in a minority) could muster
authority to prevent them.
The point that I wish to make is this: that, from the first
moment of the revolution to the present day the real authority
of the Soviets has been unshaken. The October revolution did
not give authority to the Soviets. That had always been theirs,
by their very nature. It was merely a public open illustration
of the change of opinion brought about in the Soviets themselves
by the change of opinion in the working men and soldiers
who elected them. The October revolution cleared away the
waste growths that hid the true government of Russia from the
world, and, as the smoke of the short struggle died away, it
was seen that that Government had merely to formulate an
authority it already possessed.
The actual formulation of the Soviet constitution was a
matter of practice in a developing democratic revolutionary
power. There have been a number of small formal changes,
of readjustments of interdependent parts in the machine, but
I do not think either opponents or supporters of the Soviet
Government can quarrel very seriously with the following
statement:
Every workman, every peasant, in Russia has the right to
vote in the election of deputies to his local Soviet, which is
made up of a number of deputies corresponding to the number
of electors. The local Soviets choose their delegates to an
All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. This All-Russian Assembly
elects its Central Executive committee on a basis of approximately
one in five of the delegates to the Assembly. This
central executive committee controls, appoints and dismisses
the People's Commissaries who are the actual government. All
decrees of State importance are passed by the Central Executive
Committee before being issued as laws by the Council of
People's Commissaries.
At each successive All-Russian Assembly of Soviets the
executive committee automatically resigns, and the Assembly
as a whole expresses its approval or disapproval of what has
been done by its representatives and by the Council of Commissaries
during the period since the previous All-Russian
Assembly, and, electing a new Executive Committee, which in
political character accurately corresponds to the party colouring
of the Assembly, insures that the controlling organ shall
accurately reflect the feeling of the electorate.
No limit is set to local re-election. Deputies are withdrawn
and others substituted for them whenever this seems necessary
to the local electorate. Thus the country is freed from the
danger of finding itself governed by the ghosts of its dead
opinions, and, on the other hand, those ghosts find themselves
expeditiously laid in their graves as soon as, becoming
ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule.
Just as the Soviet constitution insures that the actual law
insures that in deed instead of in amiable theory, the people
shall be their own lawgivers, so also it provides for inter-communication
in a contrary direction. The remotest atom on the
periphery is not without its influence on the centre. So
also the centre through the Soviets affects the atoms on the
periphery. The institution of Soviets means that every
minutest act of the Council of People's Commissaries is judged
and interpreted in accordance with its own local conditions
by each local Soviet. No other form of government could give
this huge diverse entity of Russia, with its varying climates
and races, with its plains, its steppes, its wild mountains, the
free local autonomy of interpretation which it needs. The
shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack from the Urals, and the
fisherman from the Yenisei can sit together in the All-Russian
Assembly, and know that the laws whose principles they
approve are not steel bands too loose for one and throttling
another, but are instruments which each Soviet can fashion out
in its own way for the special needs of its own community.
This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is
also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It
affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and
such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect from
members of the class that is being ousted from its place of
domination whole-hearted assistance in its own undoing. Those
democrats in other countries and in Russia who do not understand
what is happening under their eyes exclaim at the
unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They
forget, or have never realised, that the object of the social
revolution is to put an end to the existence of a bourgeois, or
exploiting class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploitation
is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and
the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from the government is
merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the
transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the
more honourable position of equality with his fellow workers.
Once the conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation
have been destroyed, the old divisions of the class struggle will
automatically have disappeared.
By the nature of things it has so happened that practically
all the foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged to
the privileged classes in their respective countries, and have
been accustomed to associate with the privileged classes in
Russia. They have consequently found it difficult to escape
from their class in judging the story happening before their
eyes. Those working men sent from the Allied countries less
with the idea of studying the revolution, but of telling it to do
what the Allies wanted, have also been men specially chosen,
and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open
mind they should have had. Socialists especially, who had
long dreamed of revolution, found it particularly difficult to
recognise in this cloudy, tremendous struggle the thing which
their dreams had softened for them into something more
docile, less self-willed. Nothing has been more remarkable or
less surprising than the fact that of all the observers sent
here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who
by their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest
from the revolutionary movement.
I do not propose to recapitulate the programme of the Soviet
Government, nor to spend minutes, when I have so few, in
discussing in detail their efforts towards an equitable land
settlement, or their extrardinarily interesting work in building
up, under the stress of famine and of war, an economic industrial
organisation which shall facilitate the eventual socialisation of Russia.
That is material for many letters and here I
have not time for one. I therefore take the two events which
have been most misused in blackening the Soviet Government
to those who should have been its friends. These were the
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the negotiations
which ended, temporarily at least, in a separate peace between
Russia and the Central Empires. I take these two events, and
try to show what happened in each case, and why the reproaches
flung at the Soviets on account of them were due either to
misunderstanding or to malice.
I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of
the Constituent Assembly was one of the events that best served
the people who were anxious to persuade public opinion that the
Soviet Government was a government of usurpation holding its
own by force, and not representing the will of the people. I
think that, without any special pleading, it will he possible to
bring together facts which put an entirely different light on
that event. The mere fact that the parties opposed to the
Bolsheviki had spent eight months in murdering the Constituent
Assembly, putting it off day by day in hopes that the
country would change, and that the revolution would come
crawling home asking for a quiet life, leaving the gentlemen to
do the work of the Government should be set against the short
speech of the sailor who told the Assembly it had talked
enough, that its guards were tired, and that really it was time
to go to bed; it should he remembered that the Constituent
Assembly was for neither party an end in itself. For each
party it represented a political instrument, not a political aim.
It was a tool, not a task. It was thrown away when further
use of it would have damaged the purpose for which it was
invented. Look back, for a moment, on its history. The very
idea of a constituent assembly was first put forward by the
Soviet, by the very body which, in the end, opposed its realisation.
The Soviet, in those exhilarating days of March, 1917,
declared that without such an assembly the future of Russia
could not be decided. The effect of this declaration was to
make impossible Miliukov's plan of choking the revolution at
birth. Miliukov, in the first days of the revolution, tried by
means of quick jugglery with abdications, a regency and a
belated constitution, to profit by the elemental uprising of the
masses to secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of
the Tsar's bureaucracy into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For
him, the revolution was to be a tramcar which would stop conveniently
at the point where the Cadet party wished to alight.
The idea of the Constituent Assembly was like a good big
label on that tramcar showing that it had a further destination.
It became clear at once that the car would not stop at the point
that Miliukov had chosen. The next hope of the bourgeoisie
was to keep it moving to prevent it stopping anywhere else until
the passengers should be so tired of moving that they would be
glad to stop anywhere and would be amenable and peaceable
on alighting. The bourgeois parties deliberately postponed
the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, since it was clear
that, were it to meet at once, its members would be practically
identical with those of the Soviet, so that the voice of the
bourgeoisie would be unheard in the roar of the waking masses.
The aim of the bourgeoisie was (1) to postpone the elections
until the electors had wearied of the Soviets, and (2) to postpone
such reforms as most concerned the destruction of their
own privileges (such as the land reforms) until they could
summon a Constituent Assembly whose character would be
agreeable to themselves. While the bourgeoisie held this
attitude it was natural that the Soviets, and most of all the left
party in the Soviets, should use the Constituent Assembly as a
means of showing up the duplicity of their bourgeois opponents.
Gradually circumstances changed. The bourgeoisie lost hope,
and transferred their allegiance to the moderate majority of
the Soviets, since they began to realise that the marked increase
of Bolshevism heralded something from their point of view
even worse than the Constituent Assembly as it would have
been in April or May. The extremely flexible representation
of the Soviets showed that the masses were coming nearer and
nearer to the position of the Bolsheviki, or rather to a readiness
to support the Bolshevik leaders in view of the manifest failure
of the Coalition Government to get peace or indeedd anything
else that the masses desired. The Constituent Assembly
became now the last hope of the original moderate members of
the Soviet executive, who felt the ground of real support in the
active political mass slipping from beneath their feet. At
this point came the October revolution, when the Coalition,
already a ghost, and a discredited ghost, was laid in its grave.
Immense Bolshevik majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow
Soviets, and then in the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets,
proved that the mass of active political opinion in the country
fully approved of the step that had been taken.
Then followed the elections to the Constituent Assembly
(organised and canvassed before the October Revolution), in
which there was a majority against the Bolsheviki. The
explanation of this is perfectly simple. It lies in the fact that
a revolution is a very uncomfortable thing for everybody who
takes part in it, and that great numbers of people, during the
preceding eight months had come to look forward to the Constituent
Assembly much as children look forward to the word
FINIS at the end of a difficult lesson-book. The Constituent
Assembly meant for these people an end to political debate, an
end even to political life, an end anyhow to revolution. In
every country it is only a small minority that really concerns
itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big unconscious
voting material, which does not concern itself with active
politics, and asks nothing from its Government except to be
let alone. This indifferent mass, which took very little part in
the living politics of the Soviets, was ready to vote for the
Constituent Assembly in a sort of dim belief that those elections
mean a return to quiet life, and should therefore be
encouraged. It voted much as rich men give alms to a charity.
It voted much in the spirit of the rich man who is willing to
give alms to a deserving charity for which he would be most
unwilling to do any real work. It knew vaguely that the bourgeoisie
were fairly bad. and it had also heard that the Bolsheviki
were terrible people. It therefore put its votes on the
side of those people against whom, it had heard nothing in
particular. And the result was that the live part of the nation
was faced almost at the moment of coming into their own with
a legacy in the form of an assembly, the majority in which was
made up of the very men whom they had just overthrown.
The question was a plain one. Should the conscious workers
of the country submit to the dead weight of the unconscious,
even if that dead weight were artfully fashioned by their
enemies into the form of the very tool with which they had
been successfully working ? The question was put at a moment
of extreme difficulty, when acceptance of the Constituent
Assembly would have relieved the Bolsheviki (at the New
Year) of tremendous responsibility. It would have been an
easy way out. For cowards. But the Bolsheviki were not afraid
of responsibility, were not looking for easy ways out, were
confident that the whole of the active, conscious population
was behind them, and swept the Assembly aside. Not anywhere
in Russia did the indifferent mass stir in protest. The
Assembly died like the Tsardom, and the coalition before it.
Not any one of the three showed in the manner of its dying
that it retained any right to live.
The day after the October revolution Lenin proposed and
the Assembly carried the declaration on peace with its promise
to do away with the secret diplomacy that had kept Russia in
the war beyond her strength, and allowed small groups to
gamble in the lives of nations. On that day, October 26th
(old style), the whole world was told that the new Russian
Government was ready to conclude peace itself, and invited all
the fighting countries to put an end to the war "without
annexation (that is, without the seizure of other people's land
and without the forced incorporation of other nationalities)
and without indemnity." The declaration was sent out by
radio on November 7th, o.s. Some governments prevented its
publication, others sought to disguise its true character and to
give it the appearance of an offer of separate peace. The Allies
replied to it with a threat conveyed to the Russian
Commander-in-Chief, Dukhonin, that further steps towards separate peace
would have serious consequences. It should, of course, be
remembered that the Allies were in a position of peculiar difficulty.
Practically all the Russians who were able to give direct
information to members of Allied Governments belonged to the
classes that had persistently fed themselves and others with
lies as to the character of the Bolsheviki. They believed that
the Soviets could hold authority only for a few days, and they
persuaded the Allied Governments to share that belief. The
next step of the Soviets was an agreement, made across the
front itself, stopping all military operations between the Black
Sea and the Baltic. This was followed by yet another invitation
to the Allies to join Russia in peace negotiations. Meanwhile
the German Government, with one eye on the military
party and the other on the feeling of German Labour, which
at that time was unrestful and excited by the Russian revolution,
was hesitating over its answer. I shall not here attempt
any detailed history of what followed. My only point is that
the Soviet Government cannot he accused of having sought and
obtained a separate peace. The first aim of the Bolsheviki
was, as it always will be, a Universal Social Revolution. They
hoped to illustrate to the workers of the world the possibility
of honourable peace, and nothing would have pleased them
better than to find that such a peace was rejected by all governments
alike, so that the workers, convinced of its possibility,
should rise and overthrow them. That was their general aim.
They, least of all governments in the world, were interested in
a German victory. Their proposal was for a general peace,
for the peace which Russia, in agony, had been awaiting for a year.
What followed? Step by step, they published every detail
of their negotiations over the armistice, every word of the
German replies. Then came the first German answer as to the
conditions of peace, in which Germany and her allies expressed
themselves ready to make the Russian formula the basis of
negotiation. The Bolsheviki believe that if the Allies had even
at that late hour joined them, so that in withdrawing from
that position the Germans would have been facing a continuance
of the war as a whole instead of merely a failure to
obtain peace with the weakest of the Allies, peace on the
Russian formula would have been attainable. The Allies left
them, unrecognised, ignored, to continue their struggle single-handed.
The Germans now took a bolder line, and the hand
outstretched in spurious friendship became a grasping claw.
The first Russian delegation came home to confer with the
Soviet Government as to what was to be done in this new situation,
when the peace they had promised their exhausted army,
their tortured working classes, seemed to be fading like a
mirage. Trotsky at the head of a reinforced delegation went
to Brest with one of the most daring plans with which any
David has sought to destroy his Goliath.
The absence of the Allies had deprived him of the possibility
of exhibiting to the working classes of the world the
inability of their present governments to conclude a peace in
which should be neither conqueror nor conquered. He now
attempted to bring about a revolution, in Germany or to obtain
such a peace for Russia, by making the German Government
itself illustrate in their negotiations with him their utter disregard
or the expressed wishes of the German people. He did
actually succeed in causing huge strikes both in Austria and
in Germany, and it is impossible for anyone to say that he
would not have finally succeeded in hitting the Goliath of
Force opposed to him fairly between the eyes with his shining
pebble of an idea, which was the only weapon at his command,
if at the last moment his aim had not been deflected, and the
target shifted, by the treachery of the handful of men who in
the Ukraine were resisting by every means in their power the
natural development of the Soviets. These men, preferring to
sell their country to Germany than loose the reins of government
themselves, opened separate negotiations, thereby breaking the
unity of the ideal front which Trotsky opposed to the
Germans. The Germans saw that with part of that front they
could come immediately to terms. Instantly their
negotiations changed. They persuaded their own people that
the Russians were themselves to blame for not getting the peace
they required, and that a just peace was possible only with the
Ukraine. Meanwhile the soldiers and workers of the Ukraine
were gradually obtaining complete power over their own
country, so that when Germany actually concluded peace with
the Ukraine, the so-called government whose signatures were
attached to that treacherous agreement was actually in asylum
in German headquarters, and unable to return to its own
supposed capital except under the protection of German
bayonets. The Soviet triumphed in the Ukraine, and declared
its solidarity with Russia. The Germans, like the Allies, preferred
to recognise the better-dressed persons who were ready
to conclude peace with them in the name of a country which
had definitely disowned them. From that moment the Brest
peace negotiations were doomed to failure. Trotsky made a
last desperate appeal to the workers of Germany. He said,
"We will not sign your robber's peace, but we demobilise our
army and declare that Russia is no longer at war. Will the
German people allow you to advance on a defenceless revolution?"
The Germans did advance, not at first in regular regiments,
but in small groups of volunteers who had no scruples in the
matter. Many German soldiers, to their eternal honour, refused
to advance, and were shot. The demobilisation of the Russian
army meant little, because it had long ceased to be anything
but a danger to the peaceful population in its rear. The Soviet
had only the very smallest real force, and that, as yet,
unorganised, with enthusiasm but without confidence, utterly
unpracticed in warfare, consisting chiefly of workmen, who, as
was natural, were the first to understand what it was they had
to defend. It soon became clear that serious resistance was
impossible. The Soviet Government was faced with a choice:
to collapse in a quite unequal struggle; or to sign a shameful
peace. Many thought that the cause of revolution would be
best served by their deaths, and were ready to die. Lenin
doubted the efficacy of such a rhetorical gesture, and believed
that the secession of Russia from the war would insure the
continuation of the war by the imperialistic groups until such
time as other countries reached the same exhaustion as had
been reached by Russia, when, in his opinion, revolution would
be inevitable. He held that, for the future of the World
Revolution, the best that could be done would be the preservation
even in seriously limited territory. of the Soviet Government,
as a nucleus of revolution, as an illustration of the possibility
of revolution, until that moment when the workers of
Russia should be joined by the workers of the world. His
opinion carried the majority, first of the Executive Committee,
then of the fourth All-Russian Assembly. The Germans
replied to the Russian offer to sign peace with a statement
which was an ironic parody of the Russian declaration at
Brest: the Russians had said, "We will not sign peace, but
the war is ended." The Germans said, "We agree to peace,
but the war shall continue."
And, indeed, while the Soviet Government moved to
Moscow, the Germans, using in the south the pretext of the
Ukrainian Rada and in the north that of the bourgeois Finnish
Government, advanced through the Ukraine to the outlet of the
Don, and in the north to the very gates of Petrograd. The
matter stands so, as I write these lines. By the time you read
them much will have happened that it is impossible now to
foresee.
From the moment of the October revolution on, the best
illustration of the fact that the Soviet Government is the
natural government of the Russian people, and has deep roots
in the whole of the conscious responsible part of the working
classes and the peasantry, has been the attitude of the defeated
minorities who oppose it. Whereas the Bolsheviki worked
steadily in the Soviets when the majority was against them,
and made their final move for power only when assured that
they had an overwhelming majority in the Soviets behind them,
their opponents see their best hope of regaining power not in
the Soviets, not even in Russia itself, but in some extra-
ordinary intervention from without. By asking for foreign
help against the Soviet Government they prove that such help
should not be given, and that they do not deserve it. The
Soviet has stood for six months and more, absolutely unshaken
by any movement against it inside Russia. In the Ukraine the
anti-Soviet minority asked for intervention and received it.
German bayonets, German organisation, destroyed the Soviets
of the Ukraine, and then destroyed the mock government that
had invited their help. We, the Allies, supported that anti-Soviet
minority, and, in so far as our help was efficacious,
contributed our share in obtaining for Germany a victorious
progress from one end of the Black Sea coast to the other. In
helping the Ukranian minority we helped the Germans to
secure Ukrainian bread and coal and iron that would otherwise
have gone to help Russia to recuperate. In In Finland we repeated
the mistake. We gave at least moral help to the White Fins,
simply because they were opposed to the Red Fins, who were
supported by the Soviets. Now, too late, we realise that the
White Finns were the pawns of Germany, and that in the
defeat of the Red Finns we witnessed the defeat of the only
party in Finland which was bound, by its socialistic nature, to
be an enemy of imperialistic Germany. Do not let us make
the same mistake in Russia. If the Allies lend help to any
minority that cannot overturn the Soviets without their help,
they will be imposing on free Russia a government which will
be in perpetual need of external help, and will, for simple
reasons of geography, be bound to take that help, from Germany.
Remember that for the German autocracy, conscious of
the socialistic mass beneath it, the mere existence of the Soviet
Government of Russia is a serious danger. Remember that any
non-Soviet government in Russia would be welcomed by Germany
and, reciprocally, could not but regard Germany as its
protector. Remember that the revolutionary movement in
Eastern Europe, no less than the American and British Navies,
is an integral part of the Allied blockade of the Central
Empires.
And, apart from the immediate business of the war, remember
that Germany is seeking by every means, open and secret,
to obtain such command over Russia's resources as will in the
long run allow her to dictate her will to Russia's people.
Remember that the Soviet Government, fully aware of this,
would be glad of your help, of your co-operation, would be
glad even to give you control over some part of her resources,
if only to prevent that ominous ultimate dominion within
Russia of a single foreign Power.
Remember all these things, if indeed you need, as I think
you do not need, such selfish motives to prompt you to the
support of men who, if they fail, will fail only from having
hoped too much. Every true man is in some sort, until his
youth dies and his eyes harden, the potential builder of a New
Jerusalem. At some time or other every one of us has dreamed
of laying his brick in such a work. And even if this thing that
is being builded here with tears and blood is not the golden
city that we ourselves have dreamed, it is still a thing to the
sympathetic understanding of which each one of us is bound.
by whatever he owes to his own youth. And if each one of us,
then, all the more each nation by what it owes to those first
daring days of its existence, when all the world looked askance
upon its presumptuous birth. America was young once, and
there were men in America who would have brought in foreign
aid to re-establish their dominion over a revolted nation. Are
those the men to whom America now looks back with gratitude
and pride?
Well, writing at a speed to break my pen, and with the
knowledge that in a few hours the man leaves Moscow who is
to carry this letter with him to America, I have failed to say
much that I would have said. I write now with my messenger
waiting for my manuscript, and somehow or other, incoherent,
incomplete as it is, must bring it to an end. I will end with a
quotation from your own Emerson.
"What is the scholar,
what is the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought
of his time? Have you leisure, power, property, friends? You
shall be the asylum and patron of every new thought, every
unproven opinion, every untried project, which proceeds out of
good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, all the
tongues of today will of course at first defame what is noble;
but you who hold not of today, not of the Times, but of the
Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment
man ever receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised
and discredited angels."
No one contends that the
Bolsheviki are angels. I ask only that men shall look through
the fog of libel that surrounds them, and see that the ideal for
which they are struggling, in the only way in which they can
struggle, is among those lights which every man of young, and
honest heart sees before him somewhere on the road and not
among those other lights from which he resolutely turns away.
These men who have made the, Soviet Government in Russia,
if they must fail, will fail with clean shields and clean hearts,
having striven for an ideal which will live beyond them. Even
if they fail, they will none the less have written a page of
history more daring than any other which I can remember in
the story of the human race. They are writing it amid showers
of mud from all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours'
and in my own. But when the thing is over, and their enemies
have triumphed, the mud will vanish like black magic at noon,
and that page will be as white as the snows of Russia, and the
writing on it as bright as the gold domes that I used to see
glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in
Petrograd.
And when in after years men read that page they will judge
your country and mine, your race and mine, by the, help, or
hindrance they gave to the writing of it:
ARTHUR RANSOME.
The Utopia Press (T.U. and 48 hours), 44, Worship Street, London, E.C.
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