THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA
1920
By Arthur Ransome
TO WILLIAM PETERS
OF ABERDEEN
INTRODUCTION
THE characteristic of a revolutionary country is that change is a quicker
process there than elsewhere. As the revolution recedes into the past the
process of change slackens speed. Russia is no longer the dizzying
kaleidoscope that it was in 1917. No longer does it change visibly from
week to week as it changed in 19l8. Already, to get a clear vision of the
direction in which it is changing, it is necessary to visit it at
intervals of six months, and quite useless to tap the political barometer
several times a day as once upon a time one used to do.... But it is still
changing very fast. My journal of "Russia in 1919," while giving as I
believe a fairly accurate picture of the state of affairs in February and
March of 1919, pictures a very different stage in the development of the
revolution from that which would be found by observers today.
The prolonged state of crisis in which the country has been kept by
external war, while strengthening the ruling party by rallying even their
enemies to their support, has had the other effects that a national crisis
always has on the internal politics of a country. Methods of government
which in normal times would no doubt be softened or disguised by
ceremonial usage are used nakedly and justified by necessity. We have seen
the same thing in belligerent and non-revolutionary countries, and, for
the impartial student, it has been interesting to observe that, when this
test of crisis is applied, the actual governmental machine in every
country looks very much like that in every other. They wave different
flags to stimulate enthusiasm and to justify submission. But that is all.
Under the stress of war, "constitutional safeguards" go by the board "for
the public good," in Moscow as elsewhere. Under that stress it becomes
clear that, in spite of its novel constitution, Russia is governed much as
other countries are governed, the real directive power lying in the hands
of a comparatively small body which is able by hook or crook to infect
with its conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A
visitor to Moscow to-day would find much of the constitutional machinery
that was in full working order in the spring of 1919 now falling into rust
and disrepair. He would not be able once a week or so to attend
All-Russian Executive and hear discussions in this parliament of the
questions of the day. No one tries to shirk the fact that the Executive
Committee has fallen into desuetude, from which, when the stress slackens
enough to permit ceremonial that has not an immediate agitational value,
it may some day be revived. The bulk of its members have been at the front
or here and there about the country wrestling with the economic problem,
and their work is more useful than their chatter. Thus brutally is the
thing stated. The continued stress has made the muscles, the actual works,
of the revolution more visible than formerly. The working of the machine
is not only seen more clearly, but is also more frankly stated (perhaps
simply because they too see it now more clearly), by the leaders
themselves.
I want in this book to describe the working of the machine as I now see
it. But it is not only the machine which is more nakedly visible than it
was. The stress to which it is being subjected has also not so much
changed its character as become easier of analysis. At least, I seem to
myself to see it differently. In the earlier days it seemed quite simply
the struggle between a revolutionary and non-revolutionary countries. I
now think that that struggle is a foolish, unnecessary, lunatic incident
which disguised from us the existence of a far more serious struggle, in
which the revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are fighting on
the same side. They fight without cooperation, and throw insults and
bullets at each other in the middle of the struggle, but they are fighting
for the same thing. They are fighting the same enemy. Their quarrel with
each other is for both parties merely a harassing accompaniment of the
struggle to which all Europe is committed, for the salvage of what is left
of European civilization.
The threat of a complete collapse of civilization is more imminent in
Russia than elsewhere. But it is clear enough in Poland, it cannot be
disregarded in Germany, there is no doubt of its existence in Italy,
France is conscious of it; it is only in England and America that this
threat is not among the waking nightmares of everybody. Unless the
struggle, which has hitherto been going against us, takes a turn for the
better, we shall presently be quite unable to ignore it ourselves.
I have tried to state the position in Russia today: on the one hand to
describe the crisis itself, the threat which is forcing these people to an
extreme of effort, and on the other hand to describe the organization that
is facing that threat; on the one hand to set down what are the main
characteristics of the crisis, on the other hand to show how the
comparatively small body of persons actually supplying the Russian people
with its directives set about the stupendous task of moving that vast
inert mass, not along the path of least resistance, but along a path
which, while alike unpleasant and extremely difficult, does seem to them
to promise some sort of eventual escape.
No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind stating my
own reason for writing this one (which has taken time that I should have
liked to spend on other and very different things). Knowledge of this
reason will permit the reader to make allowances for such bias I have been
unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my book perhaps
nearly as objective as I should myself wish it to be.
It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battle
front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a single
army engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, each one
severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their
utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are witnessing
something very like the suicide of civilization itself. There are people
in both camps who believe that armed and economic conflict between
revolutionary and non-revolutionary Europe, or if you like between
Capitalism and Communism, is inevitable. These people, in both camps, are
doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy pessimists, in Moscow no
less than in London and Paris, they go so far as to say "the sooner the
better," and by all means in their power try to precipitate a conflict.
Now the main effort in Russia to-day, the struggle which absorbs the chief
attention of all but the few Communist Churchills and Communist Millerands
who, blind to all else, demand an immediate pitched battle over the
prostrate body of civilization, is directed to finding a way for Russia
herself out of the crisis, the severity of which can hardly be realized by
people who have not visited the country again and again, and to bringing
her as quickly as possible into a state in which she can export her raw
materials and import the manufactured goods of which she stands in need. I
believe that this struggle is ours as well as Russia's, though we to whom
the threat is less imminent, are less desperately engaged. Victory or
defeat in this struggle in Russia, or anywhere else on the world's
surface, is victory or defeat for every one. The purpose of my book is to
make that clear. For, bearing that in mind, I cannot but think that every
honest man, of whatever parity, who cares more for humanity than for
politics, must do his utmost to postpone the conflict which a few
extremists on each side of the barricades so fanatically desire. If that
conflict is indeed inevitable, its consequences will be less devastating
to a Europe cured of her wounds than to a Europe scarcely, even by the
most hopeful, to be described as convalescent. But the conflict may not be
inevitable after all. No man not purblind but sees that Communist Europe
is changing no less than Capitalist Europe. If we succeed in postponing
the struggle long enough, we may well succeed in postponing it until the
war-like on both sides look in vain for the reasons of their bellicosity.
Contents
THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA
THE SHORTAGE OF THINGS
Nothing can be more futile than to describe conditions in Russia as a sort
of divine punishment for revolution, or indeed to describe them at all
without emphasizing the fact that the crisis in Russia is part of the
crisis in Europe, and has been in the main brought about like the
revolution itself, by the same forces that have caused, for example, the
crisis in Germany or the crisis in Austria.
No country in Europe is capable of complete economic independence. In
spite of her huge variety of natural resources, the Russian organism
seemed in 1914 to have been built up on the generous assumption that with
Europe at least the country was to be permanently at peace, or at the lost
to engage in military squabbles which could be reckoned in months, and
would keep up the prestige of the autocracy without seriously hampering
imports and exports. Almost every country in Europe, with the exception of
England, was better fitted to stand alone, was less completely specialized
in a single branch of production. England, fortunately for herself, was
not isolated during the war, and will not become isolated unless the
development of the crisis abroad deprives her of her markets. England
produces practically no food, but great quantities of coal, steel and
manufactured goods. Isolate her absolutely, and she will not only starve,
but will stop producing manufactured goods, steel and coal, because those
who usually produce these things will be getting nothing for their labor
except money which they will be unable to use to buy dinners, because
there will be no dinners to buy. That supposititious case is a precise
parallel to what has happened in Russia. Russia produced practically no
manufactured goods (70 per cent. of her machinery she received from
abroad), but great quantities of food. The blockade isolated her. By the
blockade I do not mean merely the childish stupidity committed by
ourselves, but the blockade, steadily increasing in strictness, which
began in August, 1914, and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our
stupidity. The war, even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade,
was so actually. The use of tonnage was perforce restricted to the
transport of the necessaries of war, and these were narrowly defined as
shells, guns and so on, things which do not tend to improve a country
economically, but rather the reverse. The imports from Sweden through
Finland were no sort of make-weight for the loss of Poland and Germany.
The war meant that Russia's ordinary imports practically ceased. It meant
a strain on Russia, comparable to that which would have been put on
England if the German submarine campaign had succeeded in putting an end
to our imports of food from the Americas. From the moment of the
Declaration of War, Russia was in the position of one "holding out," of a
city standing a siege without a water supply, for her imports were so
necessary to her economy that they may justly be considered as essential
irrigation. There could be no question for her of improvement, of
strengthening. She was faced with the fact until the war should end she
had to do with what she had, and that the things she had formerly counted
on importing would be replaced by guns and shells, to be used, as it
turned out, in battering Russian property that happened to be in enemy
hands. She even learned that she had to develop gun-making and
shell-making at home, at the expense of those other industries which to
some small extent might have helped her to keep going. And, just as in
England such a state of affairs would lead to a cessation of the output of
iron and coal in which England is rich, so in Russia, in spite of her corn
lands, it led to a shortage of food.
The Russian peasant formerly produced food, for which he was paid in
money. With that money, formerly, he was able to clothe himself, to buy
the tools of his labor, and further, though no doubt he never observed the
fact, to pay for the engines and wagons that took his food to market. A
huge percentage of the clothes and the tools and the engines and the
wagons and the rails came from abroad, and even those factories in Russia
which were capable of producing such things were, in many essentials,
themselves dependent upon imports. Russian towns began to be hungry in
1915. In October of that year the Empress reported to the Emperor that the
shrewd Rasputin had seen in a vision that it was necessary to bring wagons
with flour, butter and sugar from Siberia, and proposed that for three
days nothing else should be done. Then there would be no strikes. "He
blesses you for the arrangement of these trains." In 1916 the peasants
were burying their bread instead of bringing it to market. In the autumn
of 1916 I remember telling certain most incredulous members of the English
Government that there would be a most serious food shortage in Russia in
the near future. In 1917 came the upheaval of the revolution, in 1918
peace, but for Russia, civil war and the continuance of the blockade. By
July, 1919, the rarity of manufactured goods was such that it was possible
two hundred miles south of Moscow to obtain ten eggs for a box of matches,
and the rarity of goods requiring distant transport became such that in
November, 1919, in Western Russia, the peasants would sell me nothing for
money, whereas my neighbor in the train bought all he wanted in exchange
for small quantities of salt.
It was not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in a
satisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a country of
huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is no
exaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transport
able to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before the war
began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops and the
maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with each succeeding
week of war, although in 1916 and 1917 Russia did receive 775 locomotives
from abroad, Russian transport went from bad to worse, making inevitable a
creeping paralysis of Russian economic life, during the latter already
acute stages of which the revolutionaries succeeded to the disease that
had crippled their precursors.
In 1914 Russia had in all 20,057 locomotives, of which 15,047 burnt coal,
4,072 burnt oil and 938 wood. But that figure of twenty thousand was more
impressive for a Government official, who had his own reasons for desiring
to be impressed, than for a practical railway engineer, since of that
number over five thousand engines were more than twenty years old, over
two thousand were more than thirty years old, fifteen hundred were more
than forty years old, and 147 patriarchs had passed their fiftieth
birthday. Of the whole twenty thousand only 7,108 were under ten years of
age. That was six years ago. In the meantime Russia has been able to make
in quantities decreasing during the last five years by 40 and 50 per cent.
annually, 2,990 new locomotives. In 1914 of the locomotives then in Russia
about 17,000 were in working condition. In 1915 there were, in spite of
800 new ones, only 16,500. In 1916 the number of healthy locomotives was
slightly higher, owing partly to the manufacture of 903 at home in the
preceding year and partly to the arrival of 400 from abroad. In 1917 in
spite of the arrival of a further small contingent the number sank to
between 15,000 and 16,000. Early in 1918 the Germans in the Ukraine and
elsewhere captured 3,000. Others were lost in the early stages of the
civil war. The number of locomotives fell from 14,519 in January to 8,457
in April, after which the artificially instigated revolt of the
Czecho-Slovaks made possible the fostering of civil war on a large scale,
and the number fell swiftly to 4,679 in December. In 1919 the numbers
varied less markedly, but the decline continued, and in December last year
4,141 engines were in working order. In January this year the number was
3,969, rising slightly in February, when the number was 4,019. A
calculation was made before the war that in the best possible conditions
the maximum Russian output of engines could be not more than 1,800
annually. At this rate in ten years the Russians could restore their
collection of engines to something like adequate numbers. Today, thirty
years would be an inadequate estimate, for some factories, like the
Votkinsky, have been purposely ruined by the Whites, in others the lathes
and other machinery for building and repairing locomotives are worn out,
many of the skilled engineers were killed in the war with Germany, many
others in defending the revolution, and it will be long before it will be
possible to restore to the workmen or to the factories the favorable
material conditions of 1912-13. Thus the main fact in the present crisis
is that Russia possesses one-fifth of the number of locomotives which in
1914 was just sufficient to maintain her railway system in a state of
efficiency which to English observers at that time was a joke. For six
years she has been unable to import the necessary machinery for making
engines or repairing them. Further, coal and oil have been, until
recently, cut off by the civil war. The coal mines are left, after the
civil war, in such a condition that no considerable output may be expected
from them in the near future. Thus, even those engines which exist have
had their efficiency lessened by being adapted in a rough and ready manner
for burning wood fuel instead of that for which they were designed.
Let us now examine the combined effect of ruined transport and the six
years' blockade on Russian life in town and country. First of all was cut
off the import of manufactured goods from abroad. That has had a
cumulative effect completed, as it were, and rounded off by the breakdown
of transport. By making it impossible to bring food, fuel and raw material
to the factories, the wreck of transport makes it impossible for Russian
industry to produce even that modicum which it contributed to the general
supply of manufactured goods which the Russian peasant was accustomed to
receive in exchange for his production of food. On the whole the peasant
himself eats rather more than he did before the war. But he has no
matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are
trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages the most
frequent excuse for keeping children from school is a request to come and
see them, when they will be found, as I have seen them myself, playing
naked about the stove, without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in
which to go and learn to read and write. Clothes and such things as
matches are, however, of less vital importance than tools, the lack of
which is steadily reducing Russia's actual power of food production.
Before the war Russia needed from abroad huge quantities of agricultural
implements, not only machines, but simple things like axes, sickles,
scythes. In 1915 her own production of these things had fallen to 15.1 per
cent. of her already inadequate peacetime output. In 1917 it had fallen to
2.1 per cent. The Soviet Government is making efforts to raise it, and is
planning new factories exclusively for the making of these things. But,
with transport in such a condition, a new factory means merely a new
demand for material and fuel which there are neither engines nor wagons to
bring. Meanwhile, all over Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowing
with burnt staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface of
the ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked harrow of some
weight, are brushing the ground with light constructions of wooden spikes
bound together with wattles.
The actual agricultural productive powers of Russia are consequently
sinking. But things are no better if we turn from the rye and corn lands
to the forests. Saws are worn out. Axes are worn out. Even apart from
that, the shortage of transport affects the production of wood fuel, lack
of which reacts on transport and on the factories and so on in a circle
from which nothing but a large import of engines and wagons will provide
an outlet. Timber can be floated down the rivers. Yes, but it must be
brought to the rivers. Surely horses can do that. Yes, but, horses must be
fed, and oats do not grow in the forests. For example, this spring (1920)
the best organized timber production was in Perm Government. There sixteen
thousand horses have been mobilized for the work, but further development
is impossible for lack of forage. A telegram bitterly reports, "Two trains
of oats from Ekaterinburg are expected day by day. If the oats arrive in
time a considerable success will be possible." And if the oats do not
arrive in time? Besides, not horses alone require to be fed. The men who
cut the wood cannot do it on empty stomachs. And again rises a cry for
trains, that do not arrive, for food that exists somewhere, but not in the
forest where men work. The general effect of the wreck of transport on
food is stated as follows: Less than 12 per cent. of the oats required,
less than 5 per cent. of the bread and salt required for really efficient
working, were brought to the forests. Nonetheless three times as much wood
has been prepared as the available transport has removed.
The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the combined effect on
the country of their productive weakness and of the loss of their old
position as centres through which the country received its imports from
abroad. Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials and
much else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life.
Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there were no
means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrial centres
where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and in winter, cold.
People living in rooms in a flat, complete strangers to each other, by
general agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen. In the kitchen
soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth there beside the natural
warmth of several human beings in a small room. There it is possible to
sleep. During the whole of last winter, in the case I have in mind, there
were no means of heating the other rooms, where the temperature was almost
always far below freezing point. It is difficult to make the conditions
real except by individual examples. The lack of medicines, due directly to
the blockade, seems to have small effect on the imagination when simply
stated as such. Perhaps people will realize what it means when instead of
talking of the wounded undergoing operations without anesthetics I record
the case of an acquaintance, a Bolshevik, working in a Government office,
who suffered last summer from a slight derangement of the stomach due to
improper and inadequate feeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and
nearly a dozen different apothecaries were unable to make up the
prescription for lack of one or several of the simple ingredients
required. Soap has become an article so rare (in Russia as in Germany
during the blockade and the war there is a terrible absence of fats) that
for the present it is to be treated as a means of safeguarding labor, to
be given to the workmen for washing after and during their work, and in
preference to miners, chemical, medical and sanitary workers, for whose
efficiency and health it is essential. The proper washing of underclothes
is impossible. To induce the population of Moscow to go to the baths
during the typhus epidemic, it was sufficient bribe to promise to each
person beside the free bath a free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into
disrepair for want of plaster, paint and tools. Nor is it possible to
substitute one thing for another, for Russia's industries all suffer alike
from their dependence on the West, as well as from the inadequacy of the
transport to bring to factories the material they need. People remind each
other that during the war the Germans, when similarly hard put to it for
clothes, made paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In Russia the nets used in
paper-making are worn out. At last, in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me),
there seemed to be a hope of getting new ones from abroad. But the
condition of the paper industry is typical of all, in a country which, it
should not be forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulp for
other countries besides itself. The factories are able to produce only
sixty per cent. of demands that have previously, by the strictest
scrutiny, been reduced to a minimum before they are made. The reasons,
apart from the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence of food,
forage and finally labor. Even when wood is brought by river the trouble
is not yet overcome. The horses are dead and eaten or starved and weak.
Factories have to cease working so that the workmen, themselves underfed,
can drag the wood from the barges to the mills. It may well be imagined
what the effect of hunger, cold, and the disheartenment consequent on such
conditions of work and the seeming hopelessness of the position have on
the productivity of labor, the fall in which reacts on all the industries,
on transport, on the general situation and so again on itself.
Mr. J. M. Keynes, writing with Central Europe in his mind (he is, I think,
as ignorant of Russia as I am of Germany), says: "What then is our picture
of Europe? A country population able to support life on the fruits of its
own agricultural production, but without the accustomed surplus for the
towns, and also (as a result of the lack of imported materials, and so of
variety and amount in the salable manufactures of the towns) without the
usual incentives to market food in exchange for other wares; an industrial
population unable to keep its strength for lack of food, unable to earn a
livelihood for lack of materials, and so unable to make good by imports
from abroad the failure of productivity at home."
Russia is an emphasized engraving, in which every line of that picture is
bitten in with repeated washes of acid. Several new lines, however, are
added to the drawing, for in Russia the processes at work elsewhere have
gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to see dimly,
in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened. The struggle
to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, of Russia, and, not
impossibly, of Europe. For each country that develops to the end in this
direction is a country lost to the economic comity of Europe. And, as one
country follows another over the brink, so will the remaining countries be
faced by conditions of increasingly narrow self-dependence, in fact by the
very conditions which in Russia, so far, have received their clearest,
most forcible illustration.
THE SHORTAGE OF MEN
In the preceding chapter I wrote of Russia's many wants, and of the
processes visibly at work, tending to make her condition worse and not
better. But I wrote of things, not of people. I wrote of the shortage of
this and of that, but not of the most serious of all shortages, which,
while itself largely due to those already discussed, daily intensifies
them, and points the way to that further stage of decay which is
threatened in the near future in Russia, and, in the more distant future
in Europe. I did not write of the shortage deterioration of labor.
Shortage of labor is not peculiar to Russia. It is among the postwar
phenomena common to all countries. The war and its accompanying eases have
cost Europe, including Russia, an enormous number of able-bodied men. Many
millions of others have lost the habit of regular work. German
industrialists complain that they cannot get labor, and that when they get
it, it is not productive. I heard complaints on the same subject in
England. But just as the economic crisis, due in the first instance to the
war and the isolation it imposed, has gone further in Russia than
elsewhere, so the shortage of labor, at present a handicap, an annoyance
in more fortunate countries, is in Russia perhaps the greatest of the
national dangers. Shortage of labor cannot be measured simply by the
decreasing numbers of the workmen. If it takes two workmen as long to do a
particular job in 1920 as it took one man to do it in 1914, then, even if
the number of workman has remained the same, the actual supply of labor
has been halved. And in Russia the situation is worse than that. For
example, in the group of State metal-working factories, those, in fact
which may be considered as the weapon with which Russia is trying to cut
her way out of her transport difficulties, apart from the fact that there
were in 1916 81,600 workmen, whereas in 1920 there are only 42,500, labor
has deteriorated in the most appalling manner. In 1916 in these factories
92 per cent. of the nominal working hours were actually kept; in 1920 work
goes on during only 60 per cent. of the nominal hours. It is estimated
that the labor of a single workman produces now only one quarter of what
it produced in 1916. To take another example, also from workmen engaged in
transport, that is to say, in the most important of all work at the
present time: in the Moscow junction of the Moscow Kazan Railway, between
November 1st and February 29th (1920), 292 workmen and clerks missed
12,048 working days, being absent, on in average, forty days per man in
the four months. In Moscow passenger-station on this line, 22 workmen
missed in November 106 days, in December 273, in January 338, and in
February 380; in an appalling crescendo further illustrated by the wagon
department, where 28 workmen missed in November 104 days and in February
500. In November workmen absented themselves for single days. In February
the same workmen were absent for the greater part of the month. The
invariable excuse was illness. Many cases of illness there undoubtedly
were, since this period was the worst of the typhus epidemic, but besides
illness, and besides mere obvious idleness which no doubt accounts for a
certain proportion of illegitimate holidays, there is another explanation
which goes nearer the root of the matter. Much of the time filched from
the State was in all probability spent in expeditions in search of food.
In Petrograd, the Council of Public Economy complain that there is a
tendency to turn the eight-hour day into a four-hour day. Attempts are
being made to arrest this tendency by making an additional food allowance
conditional on the actual fulfilment of working days. In the Donetz coal
basin, the monthly output per man was in 1914 750 poods, in 1916 615
poods, in 1919 240 poods (figures taken from Ekaterinoslav Government),
and in 1920 the output per man is estimated at being something near 220
poods. In the shale mines on the Volga, where food conditions are
comparatively good, productivity is comparatively high. Thus in a small
mine near Simbirsk there are 230 workmen, of' whom 50 to 60 are skilled.
The output for the unskilled is 28.9 poods in a shift, for the skilled
68.3. But even there 25 per cent. of the workmen are regular absentees,
and actually the mine works only 17 or 18 days in a month, that is, 70 per
cent. of the normal number of working days. The remaining 30 per cent. of
normal working time is spent by the workmen in getting food. Another small
mine in the same district is worked entirely by unskilled labor, the
workers being peasants from the neighboring villages. In this mine the
productivity per man is less, but all the men work full time. They do not
have to waste time in securing food, because, being local peasants, they
are supplied by their own villages and families. In Moscow and Petrograd
food is far more difficult to secure, more time is wasted on that hopeless
task; even with that waste of time, the workman is not properly fed, and
it cannot be wondered at that his productivity is low.
Something, no doubt, is due to the natural character of the Russians,
which led Trotsky to define man as an animal distinguished by laziness.
Russians are certainly lazy, and probably owe to their climate their
remarkable incapacity for prolonged effort. The Russian climate is such
that over large areas of Russia the Russian peasant is accustomed, and has
been accustomed for hundreds of years, to perform prodigies of labor
during two short periods of sowing and harvest, and to spend the immensely
long and monotonous winter in a hibernation like that of the snake or the
dormouse. There is a much greater difference between a Russian workman's
normal output and that of which he is capable for a short time if he sets
himself to it, than there is between the normal and exceptional output of
an Englishman, whose temperate climate has not taught him to regard a
great part of the year as a period of mere waiting for and resting from
the extraordinary effort of a few weeks. [*]
* Given any particular motive, any particular enthusiasm, or
visible, desirable object, even the hungry Russian workmen
of to-day are capable of sudden and temporary increase of
output. The "Saturdayings" (see p. 119) provide endless
illustrations of this. They had something in the character
of a picnic, they were novel, they were out of the routine,
and the productivity of labor during a "Saturdaying" was
invariably higher than on a weekday. For example, there is
a shortage of paper for cigarettes. People roll cigarettes
in old newspapers. It occurred to the Central Committee of
the Papermakers' Union to organize a "Sundaying" with the
object of sending cigarette paper to the soldiers in the Red
Army. Six factories took part. Here is a table showing the
output of these factories during the "Sundaying" and the
average weekday output. The figures are in poods.
Made on Average week
Factory the Sunday Day Output
Krasnogorodskaya.........615...............450
Griaznovskaya.............65................45
Medianskaya..............105................90
Dobruzhskaya.............186...............250
Belgiiskaya..............127................85
Ropshinskaya..............85................55]
But this uneven working temperament was characteristic of the Russian
before the war as well as now. It has been said that the revolution
removed the stimulus to labor, and left the Russian laziness to have its
way. In the first period of the revolution that may have been true. It is
becoming day by day less true. The fundamental reasons of low productivity
will not be found in any sudden or unusual efflorescence of idleness, but
in economic conditions which cannot but reduce the productivity of idle
and industrious alike. Insufficient feeding is one such reason. The
proportion of working time consumed in foraging is another. But the whole
of my first chapter may be taken as a compact mass of reasons why the
Russians at the present time should not work with anything like a normal
productivity. It is said that bad workmen complain of their tools, but
even good ones become disheartened if compelled to work with makeshifts,
mended tools, on a stock of materials that runs out from one day to the
next, in factories where the machinery may come at any moment to a
standstill from lack of fuel. There would thus be a shortage of labor in
Russia, even if the numbers of workmen were the same today as they were
before the war. Unfortunately that is not so. Turning from the question of
low productivity per man to that of absolute shortage of men: the example
given at the beginning of this chapter, showing that in the most important
group of factories the number of workmen has fallen 50 per cent. is by no
means exceptional. Walking through the passages of what used to be the
Club of the Nobles, and is now the house of the Trades Unions during the
recent Trades Union Congress in Moscow, I observed among a number of
pictorial diagrams on the walls, one in particular illustrating the rise
and fall of the working population of Moscow during a number of years.
Each year was represented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which
rose and fell with the population. From that diagram I took the figures
for 1913, 1918 and 1919. These figures should be constantly borne in mind
by any one who wishes to realize how catastrophic the shortage of labor in
Russia actually is, and to judge how sweeping may be the changes in the
social configuration of the country if that shortage continues to
increase. Here are the figures:
Workmen in Moscow in 1913............159,344
Workmen in Moscow in 1918...........157,282
Workmen in Moscow in 1919............105,210
That is to say, that one-third of the workmen of Moscow ceased to live
there, or ceased to be workmen, in the course of a single year. A similar
phenomenon is observable in each one of the big industrial districts.
What has become of those workmen?
A partial explanation is obvious. The main impulse of the revolution came
from the town workers. Of these, the metal workers were the most decided,
and those who most freely joined the Red Guard in the early and the Red
Army in the later days of the revolution. Many, in those early days, when
there was more enthusiasm than discipline, when there were hardly any
experienced officers, and those without much authority, were slaughtered
during the German advance of 1918. The first mobilizations, when
conscription was introduced, were among the workers in the great
industrial districts. The troops from Petrograd and Moscow, exclusively
workmen's regiments, have suffered more than any other during the civil
war, being the most dependable and being thrown, like the guards of old
time, into the worst place at any serious crisis. Many thousands of them
have died for the sake of the revolution which, were they living, they
would be hard put to it to save. (The special shortage of skilled workers
is also partially to be explained by the indiscriminate mobilizations of
1914-15, when great numbers of the most valuable engineers and other
skilled workers were thrown into the front line, and it was not until
their loss was already felt that the Tsar's Government in this matter came
belatedly to its senses.)
But these explanations are only partial. The more general answer to the
question, What has become of the workmen? lies in the very economic crisis
which their absence accentuates. Russia is unlike England, where
starvation of the towns would be practically starvation of the whole
island. In Russia, if a man is hungry, he has only to walk far enough and
he will come to a place where there is plenty to eat. Almost every Russian
worker retains in some form or other connection with a village, where, if
he returns, he will not be an entire stranger, but at worst a poor
relation, and quite possibly an honored guest. It is not surprising that
many thousands have "returned to the land" in this way.
Further, if a workman retains his connection, both with a distant village
and with a town, he can keep himself and his family fat and prosperous by
ceasing to be a workman, and, instead, traveling on the buffers or the
roof of a railway wagon, and bringing back with him sacks of flour and
potatoes for sale in the town at fantastic prices. Thereby he is lost to
productive labor, and his uncomfortable but adventurous life becomes
directly harmful, tending to increase the strain on transport, since it is
obviously more economical to transport a thousand sacks than to transport
a thousand sacks with an idle workman attached to each sack. Further, his
activities actually make it more difficult for the town population to get
food. By keeping open for the village the possibility of selling at
fantastic prices, he lessens the readiness of the peasants to part with
their flour at the lower prices of the Government. Nor is it as if his
activities benefited the working population. The food he brings in goes
for the most part to those who have plenty of money or have things to
exchange for it. And honest men in Russia to-day have not much money, and
those who have things to exchange are not as a rule workmen. The theory of
this man's harmfulness is, I know, open to argument, but the practice at
least is exactly as I have stated it, and is obviously attractive to the
individual who prefers adventure on a full stomach to useful work on an
empty. Setting aside the theory with its latent quarrel between Free Trade
and State control, we can still recognize that each workman engaged in
these pursuits has become an unproductive middleman, one of that very
parasitic species which the revolutionaries had hoped to make unnecessary.
It is bad from the revolutionary point of view if a workman is so
employed, but it is no less bad from the point of view of people who do
not care twopence about the revolution one way or the other, but do care
about getting Russia on her feet again and out of her economic crisis. It
is bad enough if an unskilled workman is so employed. It is far worse if a
skilled workman finds he can do better for himself as a "food speculator"
than by the exercise of his legitimate craft. From mines, from every kind
of factory come complaints of the decreasing proportion of skilled to
unskilled workmen. The superior intelligence of the skilled worker offers
him definite advantages should he engage in these pursuits, and his actual
skill gives him other advantages in the villages. He can leave his factory
and go to the village, there on the spot to ply his trade or variations of
it, when as a handy man, repairing tools, etc., he will make an easy
living and by lessening the dependence of the village on the town do as
much as the "food speculator" in worsening the conditions of the workman
he has left behind.
And with that we come to the general changes in the social geography of
Russia which are threatened if the processes now at work continue
unchecked. The relations between town and village are the fundamental
problem of the revolution. Town and countryside are in sharp contradiction
daily intensified by the inability of the towns to supply the country's
needs. The town may be considered as a single productive organism, with
feelers stretching into the country, and actual outposts there in the form
of agricultural enterprises taking their directives from the centre and
working as definite parts of the State organism. All round this town
organism, in all its interstices, it too, with its feelers in the form of
"food speculators," is the anarchic chaos of the country, consisting of a
myriad independent units, regulated by no plan, without a brain centre of
any kind. Either the organized town will hold its own against and
gradually dominate and systematize the country chaos, or that chaos little
by little will engulf the town organism. Every workman who leaves the town
automatically places himself on the side of the country in that struggle.
And when a town like Moscow loses a third of its working population in a
year, it is impossible not to see that, so far, the struggle is going in
favor of that huge chaotic, unconscious but immensely powerful
countryside. There is even a danger that the town may become divided
against itself. Just as scarcity of food leads to food speculation, so the
shortage of labor is making possible a sort of speculation in labor. The
urgent need of labor has led to a resurrection of the methods of the
direct recruiting of workmen in the villages by the agents of particular
factories, who by exceptional terms succeed in getting workmen where the
Government organs fail. And, of course, this recruiting is not confined to
the villages. Those enterprises which are situated in the corn districts
are naturally able to offer better conditions, for the sake of which
workmen are ready to leave their jobs and skilled workmen to do unskilled
work, and the result can only be a drainage of good workmen away from the
hungry central industrial districts where they are most of all needed.
Summing up the facts collected in this chapter and in the first on the
lack of things and the lack of men, I think the economic crisis in Russia
may be fairly stated as follows: Owing to the appalling condition of
Russian transport, and owing to the fact that since 1914 Russia has been
practically in a state of blockade, the towns have lost their power of
supplying, either as middlemen or as producers, the simplest needs of the
villages. Partly owing to this, partly again because of the condition of
transport, the towns are not receiving the necessaries of life in
sufficient quantities. The result of this is a serious fall in the
productivity of labor, and a steady flow of skilled and unskilled workmen
from the towns towards the villages, and from employments the exercise of
which tends to assist the towns in recovering their old position as
essential sources of supply to employments that tend to have the opposite
effect. If this continues unchecked, it will make impossible the
regeneration of Russian industry, and will result in the increasing
independence of the villages, which will tend to become entirely
self-supporting communities, tilling the ground in a less and less
efficient manner, with ruder tools, with less and less incentive to
produce more than is wanted for the needs of the village itself. Russia,
in these circumstances, may sink into something very like barbarism, for
with the decay of the economic importance of the towns would decay also
their authority, and free-booting on a small and large scale would become
profitable and not very dangerous. It would be possible, no doubt, for
foreigners to trade with the Russians as with the natives of the cannibal
islands, bartering looking-glasses and cheap tools, but, should such a
state of things come to be, it would mean long years of colonization, with
all the new possibilities and risks involved in the subjugation of a free
people, before Western Europe could count once more on getting a
considerable portion of its food from Russian corn lands.
That is the position, those the natural tendencies at work. But opposed to
these tendencies are the united efforts of the Communists and of those
who, leaving the question of Communism discreetly aside, work with them
for the sake of preventing such collapse of Russian civilization. They
recognize the existence of every one of the tendencies I have described,
but they are convinced that every one of these tendencies will be
arrested. They believe that the country will not conquer the town but the
reverse. So far from expecting the unproductive stagnation described in
the last paragraph, they think of Russia as of the natural food supply of
Europe, which the Communists among them believe will, in course of time,
be made up for "Working Men's Republics" (though, for the sake of their
own Republic, they are not inclined to postpone trade with Europe until
that epoch arrives). At the very time when spades and sickles are wearing
out or worn out, these men are determined that the food output of Russia
shall sooner or later be increased by the introduction of better methods
of agriculture and farming on a larger scale. We are witnessing in Russia
the first stages of a titanic struggle, with on one side all the forces of
nature leading apparently to an inevitable collapse of civilization, and
on the other side nothing but the incalculable force of human will.
THE COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP
How is that will expressed? What is the organization welded by adversity
which, in this crisis, supersedes even the Soviet Constitution, and stands
between this people and chaos?
It is a commonplace to say that Russia is ruled, driven if you like, cold,
starving as she is, to effort after effort by the dictatorship of a party.
It is a commonplace alike in the mouths of those who wish to make the
continued existence of that organization impossible and in the mouths of
the Communists themselves. At the second congress of the Third
International, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of the
development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution."
Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that he
differed from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant by
the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understand by
the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' what is actually the
dictatorship of its determined and conscious minority. And that is the
fact." Later he asked, "What is this minority? It may be called a party.
If this minority is actually conscious, if it is able to draw the masses
after it, if it shows itself capable of replying to every question on the
agenda list of the political day, it actually constitutes a party." And
Trotsky again, on the same occasion, illustrated the relative positions of
the Soviet Constitution and the Communist Party when he said, "And today,
now that we have received an offer of peace from the Polish Government,
who decides the question? Whither are the workers to turn? We have our
Council of People's Commissaries, of course, but that, too, must be under
a certain control. Whose control? The control of the working class as a
formless chaotic mass? No. The Central Committee of the party is called
together to discuss and decide the question. And when we have to wage war,
to form new divisions, to find the best elements for them-to whom do we
turn? To the party, to the Central Committee. And it gives directives to
the local committees, 'Send Communists to the front.' The case is
precisely the same with the Agrarian question, with that of supply, and
with all other questions whatsoever."
No one denies these facts, but their mere statement is quite inadequate to
explain what is being done in Russia and how it is being done. I do not
think it would be a waste of time to set down as briefly as possible,
without the comments of praise or blame that would be inevitable from one
primarily interested in the problem from the Capitalist or Communist point
of view what, from observation and inquiry, I believe to be the main
framework of the organization whereby that dictatorship of the party
works.
The Soviet Constitution is not so much moribund as in abeyance. The
Executive Committee, for example, which used to meet once a week or even
oftener, now meets on the rarest occasions. Criticism on this account was
met with the reply that the members of the Executive Committee, for
example, which used to meet once a week or even oftener, now meets on the
rarest occasions. Criticism on this account was met with the reply that
the members of the Executive Committee were busy on the front and in
various parts of Russia. As a matter of fact, the work which that
Committee used to do is now done by Central Committee of the Bolshevik
Party, so that the bulk of the 150 members of the Central Executive are
actually free for other work, a saving of something like 130 men. This
does not involve any very great change, but merely an economy in the use
of men. In the old days, as I well remember, the opening of a session of
the Executive Committee was invariably late, the reason being that the
various parties composing it had not yet finished their preliminary and
private discussions. There is now an overwhelming Communist majority in
the Executive Committee, as elsewhere. I think it may be regarded as
proved that these majorities are not always legitimately obtained.
Non-Communist delegates do undoubtedly find every kind of difficulty put
in their way by the rather Jesuitical adherents of the faith. But, no
matter how these majorities are obtained, the result is that when the
Communist Party has made up its mind on any subject, it is so certain of
being able to carry its point that the calling together of the All-Russian
Executive Committee is merely a theatrical demonstration of the fact that
it can do what it likes. When it does meet, the Communists allow the
microscopical opposition great liberty of speech, listen quietly, cheer
ironically, and vote like one man, proving on every occasion that the
meeting of the Executive Committee was the idlest of forms, intended
rather to satisfy purists than for purposes of discussion, since the real
discussion has all taken place beforehand among the Communists themselves.
Something like this must happen with every representative assembly at
which a single party has a great preponderance and a rigid internal
discipline. The real interest is in the discussion inside the Party
Committees.
This state of affairs would probably be more actively resented if the
people were capable of resenting anything but their own hunger, or of
fearing anything but a general collapse which would turn that hunger into
starvation. It must be remembered that the urgency of the economic crisis
has driven political questions into the background. The Communists
(compare Rykov's remarks on this subject, p. 175) believe that this is the
natural result of social revolution. They think that political parties
will disappear altogether and that people will band together, not for the
victory of one of several contending political parties, but solely for
economic cooperation or joint enterprise in art or science. In support of
this they point to the number of their opponents who have become
Communists, and to the still greater number of non-Communists who are
loyally working with them for the economic reconstruction of the country.
I do not agree with the Communists in this, nor yet with their opponents,
who attribute the death of political discussion to fear of the
Extraordinary Commission. I think that both the Communists and their
opponents underestimate the influence of the economic ruin that affects
everybody. The latter particularly, feeling that in some way they must
justify themselves to politically minded foreign visitors, seek an excuse
for their apathy in the one institution that is almost universally
unpopular. I have many non-Communist friends in Russia, but have never
detected the least restraint that could be attributed to fear of anybody
in their criticisms of the Communist regime. The fear existed alike among
Communists and non-Communists, but it was like the fear of people walking
about in a particularly bad thunderstorm. The activities and arrests of
the Extraordinary Commission are so haphazard, often so utterly illogical,
that it is quite idle for any one to say to himself that by following any
given line of conduct he will avoid molestation. Also, there is something
in the Russian character which makes any prohibition of discussion almost
an invitation to discuss. I have never met a Russian who could be
prevented from saying whatever he liked whenever he liked, by any threats
or dangers whatsoever. The only way to prevent a Russian from talking is
to cut out his tongue. The real reason for the apathy is that, for the
moment, for almost everybody political questions are of infinitesimal
importance in comparison with questions of food and warmth. The ferment of
political discussion that filled the first years of the revolution has
died away, and people talk about little but what they are able to get for
dinner, or what somebody else his been able to get. I, like other foreign
visitors coming to Russia after feeding up in other countries, am all agog
to make people talk. But the sort of questions which interest me, with my
full-fed stomach, are brushed aside almost fretfully by men who have been
more or less hungry for two or three years on end.
I find, instead of an urgent desire to alter this or that at once,
to-morrow, in the political complexion of the country, a general desire to
do the best that can be done with things as they are, a general fear of
further upheaval of any kind, in fact a general acquiescence in the
present state of affairs politically, in the hope of altering the present
state of affairs economically. And this is entirely natural. Everybody,
Communists included, rails bitterly at the inefficiencies of the present
system, but everybody, Anti-Communists included, admits that there is
nothing whatever capable of taking its place. Its failure is highly
undesirable, not because it itself is good, but because such failure would
be preceded or followed by a breakdown of all existing organizations. Food
distribution, inadequate as it now is, would come to an end. The
innumerable non-political committees, which are rather like Boards of
Directors controlling the Timber, Fur, Fishery, Steel, Matches or other
Trusts (since the nationalized industries can be so considered) would
collapse, and with them would collapse not only yet one more hope of
keeping a breath of life in Russian industry, but also the actual
livelihoods of a great number of people, both Communists and
non-Communists. I do not think it is realized out-side Russia how large a
proportion of the educated classes have become civil servants of one kind
or another. It is a rare thing when a whole family has left Russia, and
many of the most embittered partisans of war on Russia have relations
inside Russia who have long ago found places under the new system, and
consequently fear its collapse as much as any one. One case occurs to me
in which a father was an important minister in one of the various White
Governments which have received Allied support, while his son inside
Russia was doing pretty well as a responsible official under the
Communists. Now in the event of a violent change, the Communists would be
outlaws with a price on every head, and those who have worked with them,
being Russians, know their fellow countrymen well enough to be pretty well
convinced that the mere fact that they are without cards of the membership
of the Communist Party, would not save them in the orgy of slaughter that
would follow any such collapse.
People may think that I underestimate the importance of, the Extraordinary
Commission. I am perfectly aware that without this police force with its
spies, its prisons and its troops, the difficulties of the Dictatorship
would be increased by every kind of disorder, and the chaos, which I fear
may come, would have begun long ago. I believe, too, that the overgrown
power of the Extraordinary Commission, and the cure that must sooner or
later be applied to it, may, as in the French Revolution, bring about the
collapse of the whole system. The Commission depends for its strength on
the fear of something else. I have seen it weaken when there was a hope of
general peace. I have seen it tighten its grip in the presence of attacks
from without and attempted assassination within. It is dreaded by
everybody; not even Communists are safe from it; but it does not suffice
to explain the Dictatorship, and is actually entirely irrelevant to the
most important process of that Dictatorship, namely, the adoption of a
single idea, a single argument, by the whole of a very large body of men.
The whole power of the Extraordinary Commission does not affect in the
slightest degree discussions inside the Communist Party, and those
discussions are the simple fact distinguishing the Communist Dictatorship
from any of the other dictatorships by which it may be supplanted.
There are 600,000 members of the Communist Party (611,978 on April 2,
1920). There are nineteen members of the Central Committee of that party.
There are, I believe, five who, when they agree, can usually sway the
remaining fourteen. There is no need to wonder how these fourteen can be
argued into acceptance of the views of the still smaller inner ring, but
the process of persuading the six hundred thousand of the desirability of,
for example, such measures as those involved in industrial conscription
which, at first sight, was certainly repugnant to most of them, is the
main secret of the Dictatorship, and is not in any way affected by the
existence of the Extraordinary Commission.
Thus the actual government of Russia at the present time may be not
unfairly considered as a small group inside the Central Committee of the
Communist Party. This small group is able to persuade the majority of the
remaining members of that Committee. The Committee then sets about
persuading the majority of the party. In the case of important measures
the process is elaborate. The Committee issues a statement of its case,
and the party newspapers the Pravda and its affiliated organs are deluged
with its discussion. When this discussion has had time to spread through
the country, congresses of Communists meet in the provincial centres, and
members of the Central Committee go down to these conferences to defend
the "theses" which the Committee has issued. These provincial congresses,
exclusively Communist, send their delegates of an All-Russian Congress.
There the "theses" of the Central Committee get altered, confirmed, or, in
the case of an obviously unpersuaded and large opposition in the party,
are referred back or in other ways shelved. Then the delegates, even those
who have been in opposition at the congress, go back to the country
pledged to defend the position of the majority. This sometimes has curious
results. For example, I heard Communist Trades Unionists fiercely arguing
against certain clauses in the theses on industrial conscription at a
Communist Congress at the Kremlin; less than a week afterwards I heard
these same men defending precisely these clauses at a Trades Union
Congress over the way, they loyally abiding by the collective opinion of
their fellow Communists and subject to particularly uncomfortable heckling
from people who vociferously reminded them (since the Communist debates
had been published) that they were now defending what, a few days before,
they had vehemently attacked.
The great strength of the Communist Party is comparable to the strength of
the Jesuits, who, similarly, put themselves and their opinions at the
disposal of the body politic of their fellow members. Until a decision had
been made, a Communist is perfectly free to do his best to prevent it
being made, to urge alterations in it, or to supply a rival decision, but
once it has been made he will support it without changing his private
opinion. In all mixed congresses, rather than break the party discipline,
he will give his vote for it, speak in favor of it, and use against its
adversaries the very arguments that have been used against himself. He has
his share in electing the local Communist Committee, and, indirectly, in
electing the all-powerful Central Committee of the party, and he binds
himself to do at any moment in his life exactly what these Committees
decide for him. These Committees decide the use that is to be made of the
lives, not only of the rank and file of the party, but also of their own
members. Even a member of the Central Committee does not escape. He may be
voted by his fellow members into leaving a job he likes and taking up
another he detests in which they think his particular talents will better
serve the party aims. To become a member of the Communist Party involves a
kind of intellectual abdication, or, to put it differently, a readiness at
any moment to place the collective wisdom of the party's Committee above
one's individual instincts or ideas. You may influence its decisions, you
may even get it to endorse your own, but Lenin himself, if he were to fail
on any occasion to obtain the agreement of a majority in the Central
Committee, would have to do precisely what the Committee should tell him.
Lenin's opinion carries great weight because he is Lenin, but it carries
less weight than that of the Central Committee, of which he forms a
nineteenth part. On the other hand, the opinion of Lenin and a very small
group of outstanding figures is supported by great prestige inside the
Committee, and that of the Committee is supported by overwhelming prestige
among the rank and file. The result is that this small group is nearly
always sure of being able to use the whole vote of 600,000 Communists, in
the realization of its decisions.
Now 600,000 men and women acting on the instructions of a highly
centralized directive, all the important decisions of which have been
thrashed out and re-thrashed until they have general support within the
party; 600,000 men and women prepared, not only to vote in support of
these decisions, but with a carefully fostered readiness to sacrifice
their lives for them if necessary; 600,000 men and women who are persuaded
that by their way alone is humanity to be saved; who are persuaded (to put
it as cynically and unsympathetically as possible) that the noblest death
one can die is in carrying out a decision of the Central Committee; such a
body, even in a country such as Russia, is an enormously strong embodiment
of human will, an instrument of struggle capable of working something very
like miracles. It can be and is controlled like an army in battle. It can
mobilize its members, 10 per cent. of them, 50 per cent., the local
Committees choosing them, and send them to the front when the front is in
danger, or to the railways and repair shops when it is decided that the
weakest point is that of transport. If its only task were to fight those
organizations of loosely knit and only momentarily united interests which
are opposed to it, those jerry-built alliances of Reactionaries with
Liberals, United-Indivisible-Russians with Ukrainians, Agrarians with
Sugar-Refiners, Monarchists with Republicans, that task would long ago
have been finished. But it has to fight something infinitely stronger than
these in fighting the economic ruin of Russia, which, if it is too strong,
too powerful to be arrested by the Communists, would make short work of
those who are without any such fanatic single-minded and perfectly
disciplined organization.
A CONFERENCE AT JAROSLAVL
I have already suggested that although the small Central Committee of the
Communist Party does invariably get its own way, there are essential
differences between this Dictatorship and the dictatorship of, for
example, a General. The main difference is that whereas the General merely
writes an order about which most people hear for the first time only when
it is promulgated, the Central Committee prepares the way for its
dictation by a most elaborate series of discussions and counter
discussions throughout the country, whereby it wins the bulk of the
Communist Party to its opinion, after which it proceeds through local and
general congresses to do the same with the Trades Unions. This done, a
further series of propaganda meetings among the people actually to be
affected smooths the way for the introduction of whatever new measure is
being carried through at the moment. All this talk, besides lessening the
amount of physical force necessary in carrying out a decision, must also
avoid, at least in part, the deadening effect that would be caused by mere
compulsory obedience to the unexplained orders of a military dictator. Of
the reality of the Communist Dictatorship I have no sort of doubt. But its
methods are such as tend towards the awakening of a political
consciousness which, if and when normal conditions-of feeding and peace,
for example-are attained, will make dictatorship of any kind almost
impossible.
To illustrate these methods of the Dictatorship, I cannot do better than
copy into this book some pages of my diary written in March of this year
when I was present at one of the provincial conferences which were held in
preparation of the All-Russian Communist Conference at the end of the
month.
At seven in the evening Radek called for me and took me to the Jaroslavl
station, where we met Larin, whom I had known in 1918. An old Menshevik,
he was the originator and most urgent supporter of the decree annulling
the foreign debts. He is a very ill man, partially paralyzed, having to
use both hands even to get food to his mouth or to turn over the leaves of
a book. In spite of this he is one of the hardest workers in Russia, and
although his obstinacy, his hatred of compromise, and a sort of mixed
originality and perverseness keep him almost permanently at loggerheads
with the Central Committee, he retains everybody's respect because of the
real heroism with which he conquers physical disabilities which long ago
would have overwhelmed a less unbreakable spirit. Both Radek and Larin
were going to the Communist Conference at Jaroslavl which was to consider
the new theses of the Central Committee of the party with regard to
Industrial Conscription. Radek was going to defend the position of the
Central Committee, Larin to defend his own. Both are old friends. As Radek
said to me, he intended to destroy Larin's position, but not, if he could
help it, prevent Larin being nominated among the Jaroslavl delegates to
All-Russian Conference which was in preparation. Larin, whose work keeps
him continually traveling, has his own car, specially arranged so that his
uninterrupted labor shall have as little effect as possible on his
dangerously frail body. Radek and I traveled in one of the special cars of
the Central Executive Committee, of which he is a member.
The car seemed very clean, but, as an additional precaution, we began by
rubbing turpentine on our necks and wrists and angles for the
discouragement of lice, now generally known as "Semashki" from the name of
Semashko, the Commissar of Public Health, who wages unceasing war for
their destruction as the carriers of typhus germs. I rubbed the turpentine
so energetically into my neck that it burnt like a collar of fire, and for
a long time I was unable to get to sleep.
In the morning Radek, the two conductors who had charge of the wagons and
I sat down together to breakfast and had a very merry meal, they providing
cheese and bread and I a tin of corned beef providently sent out from home
by the Manchester Guardian. We cooked up some coffee on a little spirit
stove, which, in a neat basket together with plates, knives, forks, etc.
(now almost unobtainable in Russia) had been a parting present from the
German Spartacists to Radek when he was released from prison in Berlin and
allowed to leave Germany.
The morning was bright and clear, and we had an excellent view of
Jaroslavl when we drove from the station to the town, which is a mile or
so off the line of the railway. The sun poured down on the white snow, on
the barges still frozen into the Volga River, and on the gilt and painted
domes and cupolas of the town. Many of the buildings had been destroyed
during the rising artificially provoked in July, 1918, and its subsequent
suppression. More damage was done then than was necessary, because the
town was recaptured by troops which had been deserted by most of their
officers, and therefore hammered away with artillery without any very
definite plan of attack. The more important of the damaged buildings, such
as the waterworks and the power station, have been repaired, the tramway
was working, and, after Moscow, the town seemed clean, but plenty of ruins
remained as memorials of that wanton and unjustifiable piece of folly
which, it was supposed, would be the signal for a general rising.
We drove to the Hotel Bristol, now the headquarters of the Jaroslavl
Executive Committee, where Rostopchin, the president, discussed with Larin
and Radek the programme arranged for the conference. It was then proposed
that we should have something to eat, when a very curious state of affairs
(and one extremely Russian) was revealed. Rostopchin admitted that the
commissariat arrangements of the Soviet and its Executive Committee were
very bad. But in the center of the town there is a nunnery which was very
badly damaged during the bombardment and is now used as a sort of prison
or concentration camp for a Labor Regiment. Peasants from the surrounding
country who have refused to give up their proper contribution of corn, or
leave otherwise disobeyed the laws, are, for punishment, lodged here, and
made to expiate their sins by work. It so happens, Rostopchin explained,
that the officer in charge of the prison feeding arrangements is a very
energetic fellow, who had served in the old army in a similar capacity,
and the meals served out to the prisoners are so much better than those
produced in the Soviet headquarters, that the members of the Executive
Committee make a practice of walking over to the prison to dine. They
invited us to do the same. Larin did not feel up to the walk, so he
remained in the Soviet House to eat an inferior meal, while Radek and I,
with Rostopchin and three other members of the local committee walked
round to the prison. The bell tower of the old nunnery had been half shot
away by artillery, and is in such a precarious condition that it is
proposed to pull it down. But on passing under it we came into a wide
courtyard surrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings that seemed
scarcely to have suffered at all. We found the refectory in one of these
buildings. It was astonishingly clean. There were wooden tables, of course
without cloths, and each man had a wooden spoon and a hunk of bread. A
great bowl of really excellent soup was put down in the middle of table,
and we fell to hungrily enough. I made more mess on the table than any one
else, because it requires considerable practice to convey almost boiling
soup from a distant bowl to one's mouth without spilling it in a shallow
wooden spoon four inches in diameter, and, having got it to one's mouth,
to get any of it in without slopping over on either side. The regular
diners there seemed to find no difficulty in it at all. One of the
prisoners who mopped up after my disasters said I had better join them for
a week, when I should find it quite easy. The soup bowl was followed by a
fry of potatoes, quantities of which are grown in the district. For
dealing with these I found the wooden spoon quite efficient. After that we
had glasses of some sort of substitute for tea.
The Conference was held in the town theatre. There was a hint of comedy in
the fact that the orchestra was playing the prelude to some very cheerful
opera before the curtain rang up. Radek characteristically remarked that
such music should be followed by something more sensational than a
conference, proposed to me that we should form a tableau to illustrate the
new peaceful policy of England with regard to Russia. As it was a party
conference, I had really no right to be there, but Radek had arranged with
Rostopchin that I should come in with himself, and be allowed to sit in
the wings at the side of the stage. On the stage were Rostopchin, Radek,
Larin and various members of the Communist Party Committee in the
district. Everything was ready, but the orchestra went on with its jig
music on the other side of the curtain. A message was sent to them. The
music stopped with a jerk. The curtain rose, disclosing a crowded
auditorium. Everybody stood up, both on the stage and in the theater, and
sang, accompanied by the orchestra, first the "Internationale" and then
the song for those who had died for the revolution. Then except for two or
three politically minded musicians, the orchestra vanished away and the
Conference began.
Unlike many of the meetings and conferences at which I have been present
in Russia, this Jaroslavl Conference seemed to me to include practically
none but men and women who either were or had been actual manual workers.
I looked over row after row of faces in the theatre, and could only find
two faces which I thought might be Jewish, and none that obviously
belonged to the "intelligentsia." I found on inquiry that only three of
the Communists present, excluding Radek and Larin, were old exiled and
imprisoned revolutionaries of the educated class. Of these, two were on
the platform. All the rest were from the working class. The great majority
of them, of course, had joined the Communists in 1917, but a dozen or so
had been in the party as long as the first Russian revolution of 1905.
Radek, who was tremendously cheered (his long imprisonment in Germany,
during which time few in Russia thought that they would see him alive
again, has made him something of a popular hero) made a long, interesting
and pugnacious speech setting out the grounds on which the Central
Committee base their ideas about Industrial Conscription. These ideas are
embodied in the series of theses issued by the Central Committee in
January (see p. 134). Larin, who was very tired after the journey and
patently conscious that Radek was a formidable opponent, made a speech
setting out his reasons for differing with the Central Committee, and
proposed an ingenious resolution, which, while expressing approval of the
general position of the Committee, included four supplementary
modifications which, as a matter of fact, nullified that position
altogether. It was then about ten at night, and the Conference adjourned.
We drove round to the prison in sledges, and by way of supper had some
more soup and potatoes, and so back to the railway station to sleep in the
cars.
Next day the Conference opened about noon, when there was a long
discussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to the
platform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, as
when one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often before
pointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed they
had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was much in
the Central Committee's theses that was hard to digest, he was for giving
them complete support, confident that, as Comrades Lenin and Trotsky were
in favor of them, they were likely to be right this time, as so often
heretofore. But for the most part the speeches were directly concerned
with the problem under discussion, and showed a political consciousness
which would have been almost incredible three years ago. The Red Army
served as a text for many, who said that the methods which had produced
that army and its victories over the Whites had been proved successful and
should be used to produce a Red Army of Labor and similar victories on the
bloodless front against economic disaster. Nobody seemed to question the
main idea of compulsory labor. The contest that aroused real bitterness
was between the methods of individual and collegiate command. The new
proposals lead eventually towards individual command, and fears were
expressed lest this should mean putting summary powers into the hands of
bourgeois specialists, thus nullifying "workers' control". In reply, it
was pointed out that individual command had proved necessary in the army
and had resulted in victory for the revolution. The question was not
between specialists and no specialists. Everybody knew that specialists
were necessary. The question was how to get the most out of them.
Effective political control had secured that bourgeois specialists, old
officers, led to victory the army of the Red Republic. The same result
could be secured in the factories in the same way. It was pointed out that
in one year they had succeeded in training 32,000 Red Commanders, that is
to say, officers from the working class itself, and that it was not
Utopian to hope and work for a similar output of workmen specialists,
technically trained, and therefore themselves qualified for individual
command in the factories. Meanwhile there was nothing against the
employment of Political Commissars in the factories as formerly in the
regiments, to control in other than technical matters the doings of the
specialists. On the other hand, it was said that the appointment of
Commissars would tend to make Communists unpopular, since inevitably in
many cases they would have to support the specialists against the workmen,
and that the collegiate system made the workmen feel that they were
actually the masters, and so gave possibilities of enthusiastic work not
otherwise obtainable. This last point was hotly challenged. It was said
that collegiate control meant little in effect, except waste of time and
efficiency, because at worst work was delayed by disputes and at best the
workmen members of the college merely countersigned the orders decided
upon by the specialists. The enthusiastic work was said to be a fairy
story. If it were really to be found then there would be no need for a
conference to discover how to get it.
The most serious opposition, or at least the most serious argument put
forward, for there was less opposition than actual discussion, came from
some of the representatives of the Trade Unionists. A good deal was said
about the position of the Trades Unions in a Socialist State. There was
general recognition that since the Trade Unions themselves controlled the
conditions of labor and wages, the whole of their old work of organizing
strikes against capitalists had ceased to have any meaning, since to
strike now would be to strike against their own decisions. At the same
time, certain tendencies to Syndicalism were still in existence,
tendencies which might well lead to conflict between different unions, so
that, for example, the match makers or the metal worker, might wish to
strike a bargain with the State, as of one country with another, and this
might easily lead to a complete collapse of the socialist system.
The one thing on which the speakers were in complete agreement was the
absolute need of an effort in industry equal to, if not greater than, the
effort made in the army. I thought it significant that in many of the
speeches the importance of this effort was urged as the only possible
means of retaining the support of the peasants. There was a tacit
recognition that the Conference represented town workers only. Larin, who
had belonged to the old school which had grown up with its eyes on the
industrial countries of the West and believed that revolution could be
brought about by the town workers alone, that it was exclusively their
affair, and that all else was of minor importance, unguardedly spoke of
the peasant as "our neighbor." In Javoslavl, country and town are too near
to allow the main problem of the revolution to be thus easily dismissed.
It was instantly pointed out that the relation was much more intimate, and
that, even if it were only "neighborly," peace could not long be preserved
if it were continually necessary for one neighbor to steal the chickens of
the other. These town workers of a district for the most part agricultural
were very sure that the most urgent of all tasks was to raise industry to
the point at which the town would really be able to supply the village
with its needs.
Larin and Radek severally summed up and made final attacks on each other's
positions, after which Radek's resolution approving the theses of the
Central Committee was passed almost unanimously. Larin's four amendments
received 1, 3, 7 and 1 vote apiece. This result was received with cheering
throughout the theater, and showed the importance of such Conferences in
smoothing the way of the Dictatorship, since it had been quite obvious
when the discussion began that a very much larger proportion of the
delegates than finally voted for his resolution had been more or less in
sympathy with Larin in his opposition to the Central Committee.
There followed elections to the Party Conference in Moscow. Rostopchin,
the president, read a list which had been submitted by the various ouyezds
in the Jaroslavl Government. They were to send to Moscow fifteen delegates
with the right to vote, together with another fifteen with the right to
speak but not to vote. Larin, who had done much work in the district, was
mentioned as one of the fifteen voting delegates, but he stood up and said
that as the Conference had so clearly expressed its disagreement with his
views, he thought it better to withdraw his candidature. Rostopchin put it
to the Conference that although they disagreed with Larin, yet it would be
as well that he should have the opportunity of stating his views at the
All-Russian Conference, so that discussion there should be as final and as
many-sided as possible. The Conference expressed its agreement with this.
Larin withdrew his withdrawal, and was presently elected. The main object
of these conferences in unifying opinion and in arming Communists with
argument for the defence of this unified opinion a mong the masses was
again illustrated when the Conference, in leaving it to the ouyezds to
choose for themselves the non-voting delegates urged them to select
wherever possible people who would have the widest opportunities of
explaining on their return to the district whatever results might be
reached in Moscow.
It was now pretty late in the evening, and after another very satisfactory
visit to the prison we drove back to the station. Larin, who was very
disheartened, realizing that he had lost much support in the course of the
discussion, settled down to work, and buried himself in a mass of
statistics. I prepared to go to bed, but we had hardly got into the car
when there was a tap at the door and a couple of railwaymen came in. They
explained that a few hundred yards away along the line a concert and
entertainment arranged by the Jaroslavl railwaymen was going on, and that
their committee, hearing that Radek was at the station, had sent them to
ask him to come over and say a few words to them if he were not too tired.
"Come along," said Radek, and we walked in the dark along the railway
lines to a big one-story wooden shanty, where an electric lamp lit a great
placard, "Railwaymen's Reading Room." We went into a packed hall. Every
seat was occupied by railway workers and their wives and children. The
gangways on either side were full of those who had not found room on the
benches. We wriggled and pushed our way through this crowd, who were
watching a play staged and acted by the railwaymen themselves, to a side
door, through which we climbed up into the wings, and slid across the
stage behind the scenery into a tiny dressing-room. Here Radek was laid
hold of by the Master of the Ceremonies, who, it seemed, was also part
editor of a railwaymen's newspaper, and made to give a long account of the
present situation of Soviet Russia's Foreign Affairs. The little box of a
room filled to a solid mass as policemen, generals and ladies of the old
regime threw off their costumes, and, in their working clothes, plain
signalmen and engine-drivers, pressed round to listen. When the act ended,
one of the railwaymen went to the front of the stage and announced that
Radek, who had lately come back after imprisonment in Germany for the
cause of revolution, was going to talk to them about the general state of
affairs. I saw Radek grin at this forecast of his speech. I understood
why, when he began to speak. He led off by a direct and furious onslaught
on the railway workers in general, demanding work, work and more work,
telling them that as the Red Army had been the vanguard of the revolution
hitherto, and had starved and fought and given lives to save those at home
from Denikin and Kolchak, so now it was the turn of the railway workers on
whose efforts not only the Red Army but also the whole future of Russia
depended. He addressed himself to the women, telling them in very bad
Russian that unless their men worked superhumanly they would see their
babies die from starvation next winter. I saw women nudge their husbands
as they listened. Instead of giving them a pleasant, interesting sketch of
the international position, which, no doubt, was what they had expected,
he took the opportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And
the amazing thing was that they seemed to be pleased. They listened with
extreme attention, wanted to turn out some one who had a sneezing fit at
the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheering when
Radek had done. I wondered what sort of reception a man would have who in
another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths about the need of
work into an audience of working men who had gathered solely for the
purpose of legitimate recreation. It was not as if he sugared the medicine
he gave them. His speech was nothing but demands for discipline and work,
coupled with prophecy of disaster in case work and discipline failed. It
was delivered like all his speeches, with a strong Polish accent and a
steady succession of mistakes in grammar.
As we walked home along the railway lines, half a dozen of the railwaymen
pressed around Radek, and almost fought with each other as to who should
walk next to him. And Radek entirely happy, delighted at his success in
giving them a bombshell instead of a bouquet, with one stout fellow on one
arm, another on the other, two or three more listening in front and
behind, continued rubbing it into them until we reached our wagon, when,
after a general handshaking, they disappeared into the night.
THE TRADE UNIONS
Trade Unions in Russia are in a different position from that which is
common to all other Trades Unions in the world. In other countries the
Trades Unions are a force with whose opposition the Government must
reckon. In Russia the Government reckons not on the possible opposition of
the Trades Unions, but on their help for realizing its most difficult
measures, and for undermining and overwhelming any opposition which those
measures may encounter. The Trades Unions in Russia, instead of being an
organization outside the State protecting the interests of a class against
the governing class, have become a part of the State organization. Since,
during the present period of the revolution the backbone of the State
organization is the Communist Party, the Trade Unions have come to be
practically an extension of the party organization. This, of course, would
be indignantly denied both by Trade Unionists and Communists. Still, in
the preface to the All-Russian Trades Union Reports for 1919, Glebov, one
of the best-known Trade Union leaders whom I remember in the spring of
last year objecting to the use of bourgeois specialists in their proper
places, admits as much in the following muddleheaded statement:—
"The base of the proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, which in
general directs all the political and economic work of the State, leaning,
first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary form of
dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions, as
organizations which economically unite the proletariat of factory and
workshop as the vanguard of the revolution, and as organizations of the
new socialistic construction of the State. Thus the Trade Unions must be
considered as a base of the Soviet State, as an organic form complementary
to the other forms of the Proletariat Dictatorship." These two elaborate
sentences constitute an admission of what I have just said.
Trades Unionists of other countries must regard the fate of their Russian
colleagues with horror or with satisfaction, according to their views of
events in Russia taken as a whole. If they do not believe that there has
been a social revolution in Russia, they must regard the present position
of the Russian Trades Unions as the reward of a complete defeat of Trade
Unionism, in which a Capitalist government has been able to lay violent
hands on the organization which was protecting the workers against it. If,
on the other hand, they believe that there has been a social revolution,
so that the class organized in Trades Unions is now, identical with the
governing, class (of employers, etc.) against which the unions once
struggled, then they must regard the present position as a natural and
satisfactory result of victory.
When I was in Moscow in the spring of this year the Russian Trades Unions
received a telegram from the Trades Union Congress at Amsterdam, a
telegram which admirably illustrated the impossibility of separating
judgment of the present position of the Unions from judgments of the
Russian revolution as a whole. It encouraged the Unions "in their
struggle" and promised support in that struggle. The Communists
immediately asked "What struggle? Against the capitalist system in Russia
which does not exist? Or against capitalist systems outside Russia?" They
said that either the telegram meant this latter only, or it meant that its
writers did not believe that there had been a social revolution in Russia.
The point is arguable. If one believes that revolution is an
impossibility, one can reason from that belief and say that in spite of
certain upheavals in Russia the fundamental arrangement of society is the
same there as in other countries, so that the position of the Trade Unions
there must be the same, and, as in other countries they must be still
engaged in augmenting the dinners of their members at the expense of the
dinners of the capitalists which, in the long run (if that were possible)
they would abolish. If, on the other hand, one believes that social
revolution has actually occurred, to speak of Trades Unions continuing the
struggle in which they conquered something like three years ago, is to
urge them to a sterile fanaticism which has been neatly described by
Professor Santayana as a redoubling of your effort when you have forgotten
your aim.
It 's probably true that the "aim" of the Trades Unions was more clearly
defined in Russia than elsewhere. In England during the greater part of
their history the Trades Unions have not been in conscious opposition to
the State. In Russia this position was forced on the Trades Unions almost
before they had time to get to work. They were born, so to speak, with red
flags in their hands. They grew up under circumstances of extreme
difficulty and persecution. From 1905 on they were in decided opposition
to the existing system, and were revolutionary rather than merely
mitigatory organizations.
Before 1905 they were little more than associations for mutual help, very
weak, spending most of their energies in self-preservation from the
police, and hiding their character as class organizations by electing more
or less Liberal managers and employers as "honorary members." 1905,
however, settled their revolutionary character. In September of that year
there was a Conference at Moscow, where it was decided to call an
All-Russian Trades Union Congress. Reaction in Russia made this
impossible, and the most they could do was to have another small
Conference in February, 1906, which, however, defined their object as that
of creating a general Trade Union Movement organized on All-Russian lines.
The temper of the Trades Unions then, and the condition of the country at
that time, may be judged from the fact that although they were merely
working for the right to form Unions, the right to strike, etc., they
passed the following significant resolution: "Neither from the present
Government nor from the future State Duma can be expected realization of
freedom of coalition. This Conference considers the legalization of the
Trades Unions under present conditions absolutely impossible." The
Conference was right. For twelve years after that there were no Trades
Unions Conferences in Russia. Not until June, 1917, three months after the
March Revolution, was the third Trade Union Conference able to meet. This
Conference reaffirmed the revolutionary character of the Russian Trades
Unions.
At that time the dominant party in the Soviets was that of the Mensheviks,
who were opposed to the formation of a Soviet Government, and were
supporting the provisional Cabinet of Kerensky. The Trades Unions were
actually at that time more revolutionary than the Soviets. This third
Conference passed several resolutions, which show clearly enough that the
present position of the Unions has not been brought about by any violence
of the Communists from without, but was definitely promised by tendencies
inside the Unions at a time when the Communists were probably the least
authoritative party in Russia. This Conference of June, 1917, resolved
that the Trades Unions should not only "remain militant class
organizations... but... should support the activities of the Soviets of
soldiers and deputies." They thus clearly showed on which side they stood
in the struggle then proceeding. Nor was this all. They also, though the
Mensheviks were still the dominant party, resolved on that system of
internal organizations and grouping, which has been actually realized
under the Communists. I quote again from the resolution of this
Conference:
"The evolution of the economic struggle demands from the workers such
forms of professional organization as, basing themselves on the connection
between various groups of workers in the process of production, should
unite within a general organization, and under general leadership, as
large masses of workers as possible occupied in enterprises of the same
kind, or in similar professions. With this object the workers should
organize themselves professionally, not by shops or trades, but by
productions, so that all the workers of a given enterprise should belong
to one Union, even if they belong to different professions and even
different productions." That which was then no more than a design is now
an accurate description of Trades Union organization in Russia. Further,
much that at present surprises the foreign inquirer was planned and
considered desirable then, before the Communists had won a majority either
in the Unions or in the Soviet. Thus this same third Conference resolved
that "in the interests of greater efficiency and success in the economic
struggle, a professional organization should be built on the principle of
democratic centralism, assuring to every member a share in the affairs of
the organization and, at the same time, obtaining unity in the leadership
of the struggle." Finally "Unity in the direction (leadership) of the
economic struggle demands unity in the exchequer of the Trades Unions."
The point that I wish to make in thus illustrating the pre-Communist
tendencies of the Russian Trades Unions is not simply that if their
present position is undesirable they have only themselves to thank for it,
but that in Russia the Trades Union movement before the October Revolution
was working in the direction of such a revolution, that the events of
October represented something like a Trade Union victory, so that the
present position of the Unions as part of the organization defending that
victory, as part of the system of government set up by that revolution, is
logical and was to be expected. I have illustrated this from resolutions,
because these give statements in words easily comparable with what has
come to pass. It would be equally easy to point to deeds instead of words
if we need more forcible though less accurate illustrations.
Thus, at the time of the Moscow Congress the Soviets, then Mensheviks, who
were represented at the Congress (the object of the Congress was to whip
up support for the Coalition Government) were against strikes of protest.
The Trades Unions took a point of view nearer that of the Bolsheviks, and
the strikes in Moscow took place in spite of the Soviets. After the
Kornilov affair, when the Mensheviks were still struggling for coalition
with the bourgeois parties, the Trades Unions quite definitely took the
Bolshevik standpoint. At the so-called Democratic Conference, intended as
a sort of life belt for the sinking Provisional Government, only eight of
the Trades Union delegates voted for a continuance of the coalition,
whereas seventy three voted against.
This consciously revolutionary character throughout their much shorter
existence has distinguished Russian from, for example, English Trades
Unions. It has set their course for them.
In October, 1917, they got the revolution for which they had been asking
since March. Since then, one Congress after another has illustrated the
natural and inevitable development of Trades Unions inside a revolutionary
State which, like most if not all revolutionary States, is attacked
simultaneously by hostile armies from without and by economic paralysis
from within. The excited and lighthearted Trades Unionists of three years
ago, who believed that the mere decreeing of "workers' control" would
bring all difficulties automatically to an end, are now unrecognizable. We
have seen illusion after illusion scraped from them by the pumice-stone of
experience, while the appalling state of the industries which they now
largely control, and the ruin of the country in which they attained that
control, have forced them to alter their immediate aims to meet immediate
dangers, and have accelerated the process of adaptation made inevitable by
their victory.
The process of adaptation has had the natural result of producing new
internal cleavages. Change after change in their programme and theory of
the Russian Trades Unionists has been due to the pressure of life itself,
to the urgency of struggling against the worsening of conditions already
almost unbearable. It is perfectly natural that those Unions which hold
back from adaptation and resent the changes are precisely those which,
like that of the printers, are not intimately concerned in any productive
process, are consequently outside the central struggle, and, while feeling
the discomforts of change, do not feel its need.
The opposition inside the productive Trades Unions is of two kinds. There
is the opposition, which is of merely psychological interest, of old
Trades Union leaders who have always thought of themselves as in
opposition to the Government, and feel themselves like watches without
mainsprings in their new role of Government supporters. These are men in
whom a natural intellectual stiffness makes difficult the complete change
of front which was the logical result of the revolution for which they had
been working. But beside that there is a much more interesting opposition
based on political considerations. The Menshevik standpoint is one of
disbelief in the permanence of the revolution, or rather in the permanence
of the victory of the town workers. They point to the divergence in
interests between the town and country populations, and are convinced that
sooner or later the peasants will alter the government to suit themselves,
when, once more, it will be a government against which the town workers
will have to defend their interests. The Mensheviks object to the
identification of the Trades Unions with the Government apparatus on the
ground that when this change, which they expect comes about, the Trade
Union movement will be so far emasculated as to be incapable of defending
the town workers against the peasants who will then be the ruling class.
Thus they attack the present Trades Union leaders for being directly
influenced by the Government in fixing the rate of wages, on the ground
that this establishes a precedent from which, when the change comes, it
will be difficult to break away. The Communists answer them by insisting
that it is to everybody's interest to pull Russia through the crisis, and
that if the Trades Unions were for such academic reasons to insist on
their complete independence instead of in every possible way collaborating
with the Government, they would be not only increasing the difficulties of
the revolution in its economic crisis, but actually hastening that change
which the Mensheviks, though they regard it as inevitable, cannot be
supposed to desire. This Menshevik opposition is strongest in the Ukraine.
Its strength may be judged from the figures of the Congress in Moscow this
spring when, of 1,300 delegates, over 1,000 were Communists or
sympathizers with them; 63 were Mensheviks and 200 were non-party, the
bulk of whom, I fancy, on this point would agree with the Mensheviks.
But apart from opposition to the "stratification" of the Trades Unions,
there is a cleavage cutting across the Communist Party itself and uniting
in opinion, though not in voting, the Mensheviks and a section of their
Communist opponents. This cleavage is over the question of "workers'
control." Most of those who, before the revolution, looked forward to the
"workers' control", thought of it as meaning that the actual workers in a
given factory would themselves control that factory, just as a board of
directors controls a factory under the ordinary capitalist system. The
Communists, I think, even today admit the ultimate desirability of this,
but insist that the important question is not who shall give the orders,
but in whose interest the orders shall be given. I have nowhere found this
matter properly thrashed out, though feeling upon it is extremely strong.
Everybody whom I asked about it began at once to address me as if I were a
public meeting, so that I found it extremely difficult to get from either
side a statement not free from electioneering bias. I think, however, that
it may be fairly said that all but a few lunatics have abandoned the ideas
of 1917, which resulted in the workmen in a factory deposing any technical
expert or manager whose orders were in the least irksome to them. These
ideas and the miseries and unfairness they caused, the stoppages of work,
the managers sewn up in sacks, ducked in ponds and trundled in
wheelbarrows, have taken their places as curiosities of history. The
change in these ideas has been gradual. The first step was the recognition
that the State as a whole was interested in the efficiency of each
factory, and, therefore, that the workmen of each factory had no right to
arrange things with no thought except for themselves. The Committee idea
was still strong, and the difficulty was got over by assuring that the
technical staff should be represented on the Committee, and that the
casting vote between workers and technical experts or managers should
belong to the central economic organ of the State. The next stage was when
the management of a workshop was given a so called "collegiate" character,
the workmen appointing representatives to share the responsibility of the
"bourgeois specialist." The bitter controversy now going on concerns the
seemingly inevitable transition to a later stage in which, for all
practical purposes, the bourgeois specialist will be responsible solely to
the State. Many Communists, including some of the best known, while
recognizing the need of greater efficiency if the revolution is to survive
at all, regard this step as definitely retrograde and likely in the long
run to make the revolution not worth preserving. [*]
* Thus Rykov, President of the Supreme Council of Public
Economy: "There is a possibility of so constructing a State
that in it there will be a ruling caste consisting chiefly
of administrative engineers, technicians, etc.; that is, we
should get a form of State economy based on a small group of
a ruling caste whose privilege in this case would be the
management of the workers and peasants." That criticism of
individual control, from a communist, goes a good deal
further than most of the criticism from people avowedly in
opposition.] The enormous importance attached by everybody
to this question of individual or collegiate control, may
be judged from the fact that at every conference I attended,
and every discussion to which I listened, this point, which
might seem of minor importance, completely overshadowed the
question of industrial conscription which, at least inside
the Communist Party, seemed generally taken for granted. It
may be taken now as certain that the majority of the
Communists are in favor of individual control. They say that
the object of "workers' control" before the revolution was
to ensure that factories should be run in the interests of
workers as well of employers. In Russia now there are no
employers other than the State as a whole, which is
exclusively made up of employees. (I am stating now the view
of the majority at the last Trades Union Congress at which I
was present, April, 1920.) They say that "workers' control"
exists in a larger and more efficient manner than was
suggested by the old pre-revolutionary statements on that
question. Further, they say that if workers' control ought
to be identified with Trade Union control, the Trades Unions
are certainly supreme in all those matters with which they
have chiefly concerned themselves, since they dominate the
Commissariat of Labor, are very largely represented on the
Supreme Council of Public Economy, and fix the rates of pay
for their own members. [*]
* The wages of workmen are decided by the Trades Unions, who
draw up "tariffs" for the whole country, basing their
calculations on three criteria: (I) The price of food in the
open market in the district where a workman is employed,
(2)the price of food supplied by the State on the card
system, (3)the quality of the workman. This last is decided
by a special section of the Factory Committee, which in each
factory is an organ of the Trades Union.]
The enormous Communist majority, together with the fact that however much
they may quarrel with each other inside the party, the Communists will go
to almost any length to avoid breaking the party discipline, means that at
present the resolutions of Trades Union Congresses will not be different
from those of Communists Congresses on the same subjects. Consequently,
the questions which really agitate the members, the actual cleavages
inside that Communist majority, are comparatively invisible at a Trades
Union Congress. They are fought over with great bitterness, but they are
not fought over in the Hall of the Unions-once the Club of the Nobility,
with on its walls on Congress days the hammer and spanner of the
engineers, the pestle and trowel of the builders, and so on-but in the
Communist Congresses in the Kremlin and throughout the country. And, in
the problem with which in this book we are mainly concerned, neither the
regular business of the Unions nor their internal squabbles affects the
cardinal fact that in the present crisis the Trades Unions are chiefly
important as part of that organization of human will with which the
Communists are attempting to arrest the steady progress of Russia's
economic ruin. Putting it brutally, so as to offend Trades Unionists and
Communists alike, they are an important part of the Communist system of
internal propaganda, and their whole organization acts as a gigantic
megaphone through which the Communist Party makes known its fears, its
hopes and its decisions to the great masses of the industrial workers.
THE PROPAGANDA TRAINS
When I crossed the Russian front in October, 1919, the first thing I
noticed in peasants' cottages, in the villages, in the little town where I
took the railway to Moscow, in every railway station along the line, was
the elaborate pictorial propaganda concerned with the war. There were
posters showing Denizen standing straddle over Russia's coal, while the
factory chimneys were smokeless and the engines idle in the yards, with
the simplest wording to show why it was necessary to beat Denizen in order
to get coal; there were posters illustrating the treatment of the peasants
by the Whites; posters against desertion, posters illustrating the Russian
struggle against the rest of the world, showing a workman, a peasant, a
sailor and a soldier fighting in self-defence against an enormous
Capitalistic Hydra. There were also-and this I took as a sign of what
might be-posters encouraging the sowing of corn, and posters explaining in
simple pictures improved methods of agriculture. Our own recruiting
propaganda during the war, good as that was, was never developed to such a
point of excellence, and knowing the general slowness with which the
Russian centre reacts on its periphery, I was amazed not only at the
actual posters, but at their efficient distribution thus far from Moscow.
I have had an opportunity of seeing two of the propaganda trains, the
object of which is to reduce the size of Russia politically by bringing
Moscow to the front and to the out of the way districts, and so to lessen
the difficulty of obtaining that general unity of purpose which it is the
object of propaganda to produce. The fact that there is some hope that in
the near future the whole of this apparatus may be turned over to the
propaganda of industry makes it perhaps worth while to describe these
trains in detail.
Russia, for purposes of this internal propaganda, is divided into five
sections, and each section has its own train, prepared for the particular
political needs of the section it serves, bearing its own name, carrying
its regular crew-a propaganda unit, as corporate as the crew of a ship.
The five trains at present in existence are the "Lenin," the "Sverdlov,"
the "October Revolution," the "Red East," which is now in Turkestan, and
the "Red Cossack," which, ready to start for Rostov and the Don, was
standing, in the sidings at the Kursk station, together with the "Lenin,"
returned for refitting and painting.
Burov, the organizer of these trains, a ruddy, enthusiastic little man in
patched leather coat and breeches, took a party of foreigners-a Swede, a
Norwegian, two Czechs, a German and myself to visit his trains, together
with Radek, in the hope that Radek would induce Lenin to visit them, in
which case Lenin would be kinematographed for the delight of the
villagers, and possibly the Central Committee would, if Lenin were
interested, lend them more lively support.
We walked along the "Lenin" first, at Burov's special request. Burov, it
seems, has only recently escaped from what he considered a bitter
affliction due to the Department of Proletarian Culture, who, in the
beginning, for the decoration of his trains, had delivered him bound hand
and foot to a number of Futurists. For that reason he wanted us to see the
"Lenin" first, in order that we might compare it with the result of his
emancipation, the "Red Cossack," painted when the artists "had been
brought under proper control." The "Lenin" had been painted a year and a
half ago, when, as fading hoarding in the streets of Moscow still testify,
revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement. Every carriage
is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensible pictures in
the brightest colors, and the proletariat was called upon to enjoy what
the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part failed to
understand. Its pictures are "art for art's sake," and cannot have done
more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants and the workmen of
the country towns who had the luck to see them. The "Red Cossack" is quite
different. As Burov put it with deep satisfaction, "At first we were in
the artists' hands, and now the artists are in our hands," a sentence
suggesting the most horrible possibilities of official art under
socialism, although, of course, bad art flourishes pretty well even under
other systems.
I inquired exactly how Burov and his friends kept the artists in the right
way, and received the fullest explanation. The political section of the
organization works out the main idea and aim for each picture, which
covers the whole side of a wagon. This idea is then submitted to a
"collective" of artists, who are jointly responsible for its realization
in paint. The artists compete with each other for a prize which is awarded
for the best design, the judges being the artists themselves. It is the
art of the poster, art with a purpose of the most definite kind. The
result is sometimes amusing, interesting, startling, but, whatever else it
does, hammers home a plain idea.
Thus the picture on the side of one wagon is divided into two sections. On
the left is a representation of the peasants and workmen of the Soviet
Republic. Under it are the words, "Let us not find ourselves again..." and
then, in gigantic lettering under the right-hand section of the picture,
"... in the HEAVEN OF THE WHITES." This heaven is shown by an epauletted
officer hitting a soldier in the face, as was done in the Tsar's army and
in at least one army of the counter revolutionaries, and workmen tied to
stakes, as was done by the Whites in certain towns in the south. Then
another wagon illustrating the methods of Tsardom, with a State vodka shop
selling its wares to wretched folk, who, when drunk on the State vodka,
are flogged by the State police. Then there is a wagon showing the
different Cossacks-of the Don, Terek, Kuban, Ural-riding in pairs. The
Cossack infantry is represented on the other side of this wagon. On
another wagon is a very jolly picture of Stenka Razin in his boat with
little old-fashioned brass cannon, rowing up the river. Underneath is
written the words: "I attack only the rich, with the poor I divide
everything." On one side are the poor folk running from their huts to join
him, on the other the rich folk firing at him from their castle. One wagon
is treated purely decoratively, with a broad effective characteristically
South Russian design, framing a huge inscription to the effect that the
Cossacks need not fear that the Soviet Republic will interfere with their
religion, since under its regime every man is to be free to believe
exactly what he likes. Then there is an entertaining wagon, showing
Kolchak sitting inside a fence in Siberia with a Red soldier on guard,
Judenitch sitting in a little circle with a sign-post to show it is
Esthonia, and Denikin running at full speed to the asylum indicated by
another sign-post on which is the crescent of the Turkish Empire. Another
lively picture shows the young Cossack girls learning to read, with a most
realistic old Cossack woman telling them they had better not. But there is
no point in describing every wagon. There are sixteen wagons in the "Red
Cossack," and every one is painted all over on both sides.
The internal arrangements of the train are a sufficient proof that
Russians are capable of organization if they set their minds to it. We
went through it, wagon by wagon. One wagon contains a wireless telegraphy
station capable of receiving news from such distant stations as those of
Carnarvon or Lyons. Another is fitted up as a newspaper office, with a
mechanical press capable of printing an edition of fifteen thousand daily,
so that the district served by the train, however out of the way, gets its
news simultaneously with Moscow, many days sometimes before the belated
Izvestia or Pravda finds its way to them. And with its latest news it gets
its latest propaganda, and in order to get the one it cannot help getting
the other. Next door to that there is a kinematograph wagon, with benches
to seat about one hundred and fifty persons. But indoor performances are
only given to children, who must come during the daytime, or in summer
when the evenings are too light to permit an open air performance. In the
ordinary way, at night, a great screen is fixed up in the open. There is a
special hole cut in the side of the wagon, and through this the
kinematograph throws its picture on the great screen outside, so that
several thousands can see it at once. The enthusiastic Burov insisted on
working through a couple of films for us, showing the Communists boy
scouts in their country camps, children's meetings in Petrograd, and the
big demonstrations of last year in honor of the Third International. He
was extremely disappointed that Radek, being in a hurry, refused to wait
for a performance of "The Father and his Son," a drama which, he assured
us with tears in his eyes, was so thrilling that we should not regret
being late for our appointments if we stayed to witness it. Another wagon
is fitted up as an electric power-station, lighting the train, working the
kinematograph and the printing machine, etc. Then there is a clean little
kitchen and dining-room, where, before being kinematographed-a horrible
experience when one is first quite seriously begged (of course by Burov)
to assume an expression of intelligent interest—we had soup, a plate
of meat and cabbage, and tea. Then there is a wagon bookshop, where, while
customers buy books, a gramophone sings the revolutionary songs of Demian
Bledny, or speaks with the eloquence of Trotsky or the logic of Lenin.
Other wagons are the living-rooms of the personnel, divided up according
to their duties-political, military, instructional, and so forth. For the
train has not merely an agitational purpose. It carries with it a staff to
give advice to local authorities, to explain what has not been understood,
and so in every way to bring the ideas of the Centre quickly to the
backwoods of the Republic. It works also in the opposite direction,
helping to make the voice of the backwoods heard at Moscow. This is
illustrated by a painted pillar-box on one of the wagons, with a slot for
letters, labelled, "For Complaints of Every Kind." Anybody anywhere who
has grievance, thinks he is being unfairly treated, or has a suggestion to
make, can speak with the Centre in this way. When the train is on a voyage
telegrams announce its arrival beforehand, so that the local Soviets can
make full use of its advantages, arranging meetings, kinematograph shows,
lectures. It arrives, this amazing picture train, and proceeds to publish
and distribute its newspapers, sell its books (the bookshop, they tell me,
is literally stormed at every stopping place), send books and posters for
forty versts on either side of the line with the motor-cars which it
carries with it, and enliven the population with its kinematograph.
I doubt if a more effective instrument of propaganda has ever been
devised. And in considering the question whether or no the Russians will
be able after organizing their military defence to tackle with similar
comparative success the much more difficult problem of industrial rebirth,
the existence of such instruments, the use of such propaganda is a factor
not to be neglected. In the spring of this year, when the civil war seemed
to be ending, when there was a general belief that the Poles would accept
the peace that Russia offered (they ignored this offer, advanced, took
Kiev, were driven back to Warsaw, advanced again, and finally agreed to
terms which they could have had in March without bloodshed any kind), two
of these propaganda trains were already being repainted with a new
purpose. It was hoped that in the near future all five trains would be
explaining not the need to fight but the need to work. Undoubtedly, at the
first possible moment, the whole machinery of agitation, of posters, of
broadsheets and of trains, will be turned over to the task of explaining
the Government's plans for reconstruction, and the need for extraordinary
concentration, now on transport, now on something else, that these plans
involve.
SATURDAYINGS
So much for the organization, with its Communist Party, its system of
meetings and counter-meetings, its adapted Trades Unions, its infinitely
various propaganda, which is doing its best to make headway against ruin.
I want now to describe however briefly, the methods it has adopted in
tackling the worst of all Russia's problems-the non-productivity and
absolute shortage of labor.
I find a sort of analogy between these methods and those which we used in
England in tackling the similar cumulative problem of finding men for war.
Just as we did not proceed at once to conscription, but began by a great
propaganda of voluntary effort, so the Communists, faced with a need at
least equally vital, did not turn at once to industrial conscription. It
was understood from the beginning that the Communists themselves were to
set an example of hard work, and I dare say a considerable proportion of
them did so. Every factory had its little Communist Committee, which was
supposed to leaven the factory with enthusiasm, just as similar groups of
Communists drafted into the armies in moments of extreme danger did, on
more than one occasion, as the non-Communist Commander-in-Chief admits,
turn a rout into a stand and snatch victory from what looked perilously
like defeat. But this was not enough, arrears of work accumulated,
enthusiasm waned, productivity decreased, and some new move was obviously
necessary. This first move in the direction of industrial conscription,
although no one perceived its tendency at the time, was the inauguration
of what have become known as "Saturdayings".
Early in 1919 the Central Committee of the Communist Party put out a
circular letter, calling upon the Communists "to work revolutionally," to
emulate in the rear the heroism of their brothers on the front, pointing
out that nothing but the most determined efforts and an increase in the
productivity of labor would enable Russia to win through her difficulties
of transport, etc. Kolchak, to quote from English newspapers, was it
"sweeping on to Moscow," and the situation was pretty threatening. As a
direct result of this letter, on May 7th, a meeting of Communists in the
sub-district of the Moscow-Kazan railway passed a resolution that, in view
of the imminent danger to the Republic, Communists and their sympathizers
should give up an hour a day of their leisure, and, lumping these hours
together, do every Saturday six hours of manual labor; and, further, that
these Communist "Saturdayings" should be continued "until complete victory
over Kolchak should be assured." That decision of a local committee was
the actual beginning of a movement which spread all over Russia, and
though the complete victory over Kolchak was long ago obtained, is likely
to continue so long as Soviet Russia is threatened by any one else.
The decision was put into effect on May 10th, when the first Communist
"Saturdaying" in Russia took place on the Moscow-Kazan railway. The
Commissar of the railway, Communist clerks from the offices, and every one
else who wished to help, marched to work, 182 in all, and put in 1,012
hours of manual labor, in which they finished the repairs of four
locomotives and sixteen wagons and loaded and unloaded 9,300 poods of
engine and wagon parts and material. It was found that the productivity of
labor in loading and unloading shown on this occasion was about 270 per
cent. of the normal, and a similar superiority of effort was shown in the
other kinds of work. This example was immediately copied on other
railways. The Alexandrovsk railway had its first "Saturdaying" on May
17th. Ninety-eight persons worked for five hours, and here also did two or
three times as much is the usual amount of work done in the same number of
working hours under ordinary circumstances. One of the workmen, in giving
an account of the performance, wrote: "The Comrades explain this by saying
that in ordinary times the work was dull and they were sick of it, whereas
this occasion they were working willingly and with excitement. But now it
will be shameful in ordinary hours to do less than in the Communist
'Saturdaying.'" The hope implied in this last sentence has not been
realized.
In Pravda of June 7th there is an article describing one of these early
"Saturdayings," which gives a clear picture of the infectious character of
the proceedings, telling how people who came out of curiosity to look on
found themselves joining in the work, and how a soldier with an accordion
after staring for a long time open-mouthed at these lunatics working on a
Saturday afternoon put up a tune for them on his instrument, and,
delighted by their delight, played on while the workers all sang together.
The idea of the "Saturdayings" spread quickly from railways to factories,
and by the middle of the summer reports of similar efforts were coming
from all over Russia. Then Lenin became interested, seeing in these
"Saturdayings" not only a special effort in the face of common danger, but
an actual beginning of Communism and a sign that Socialism could bring
about a greater productivity of labor than could be obtained under
Capitalism. He wrote: "This is a work of great difficulty and requiring
much time, but it has begun, and that is the main thing. If in hungry
Moscow in the summer of 1919 hungry workmen who have lived through the
difficult four years of the Imperialistic war, and then the year and a
half of the still more difficult civil war, have been able to begin this
great work, what will not be its further development when we conquer in
the civil war and win peace." He sees in it a promise of work being done
not for the sake of individual gain, but because of a recognition that
such work is necessary for the general good, and in all he wrote and spoke
about it he emphasized the fact that people worked better and harder when
working thus than under any of the conditions (piece-work, premiums for
good work, etc.) imposed by the revolution in its desperate attempts to
raise the productivity of labor. For this reason alone, he wrote, the
first "Saturdaying" on the Moscow-Kazan railway was an event of historical
significance, and not for Russia alone.
Whether Lenin was right or wrong in so thinking, "Saturdayings" became a
regular institution, like Dorcas meetings in Victorian England, like the
thousands of collective working parties instituted in England during the
war with Germany. It remains to be seen how long they will continue, and
if they will survive peace when that comes. At present the most
interesting point about them is the large proportion of non-Communists who
take an enthusiastic part in them. In many cases not more than ten per
cent. of Communists are concerned, though they take the initiative in
organizing the parties and in finding the work to be done. The movement
spread like fire in dry grass, like the craze for roller-skating swept
over England some years ago, and efforts were made to control it, so that
the fullest use might be made of it. In Moscow it was found worth while to
set up a special Bureau for "Saturdayings." Hospitals, railways,
factories, or any other concerns working for the public good, notify this
bureau that they need the sort of work a "Saturdaying" provides. The
bureau informs the local Communists where their services are required, and
thus there is a minimum of wasted energy. The local Communists arrange the
"Saturdayings," and any one else joins in who wants. These "Saturdayings"
are a hardship to none because they are voluntary, except for members of
the Communist Party, who are considered to have broken the party
discipline if they refrain. But they can avoid the "Saturdayings" if they
wish to by leaving the party. Indeed, Lenin points, out that the
"Saturdayings" are likely to assist in clearing out of the party those
elements which joined it with the hope of personal gain. He points out
that the privileges of a Communists now consist in doing more work than
other people in the rear, and, on the front, in having the certainty of
being killed when other folk are merely taken prisoners.
The following are a few examples of the sort of work done in the
"Saturdayings." Briansk hospitals were improperly heated because of lack
of the local transport necessary to bring them wood. The Communists
organized a "Saturdaying," in which 900 persons took part, including
military specialists (officers of the old army serving in the new),
soldiers, a chief of staff, workmen and women. Having no horses, they
harnessed themselves to sledges in groups of ten, and brought in the wood
required. At Nijni 800 persons spent their Saturday afternoon in unloading
barges. In the Basman district of Moscow there was a gigantic
"Saturdaying" and "Sundaying" in which 2,000 persons (in this case all but
a little over 500 being Communists) worked in the heavy artillery shops,
shifting materials, cleaning tramlines for bringing in fuel, etc. Then
there was a "Saturdaying" the main object of which was a general autumn
cleaning of the hospitals for the wounded. One form of "Saturdaying" for
women is going to the hospitals, talking with the wounded and writing
letters for them, mending their clothes, washing sheets, etc. The majority
of "Saturdayings" at present are concerned with transport work and with
getting and shifting wood, because at the moment these are the chief
difficulties. I have talked to many "Saturdayers," Communist and
non-Communist, and all alike spoke of these Saturday afternoons of as kind
of picnic. On the other hand, I have met Communists who were accustomed to
use every kind off ingenuity to find excuses not to take part in them and
yet to preserve the good opinion of their local committee.
But even if the whole of the Communist Party did actually indulge in a
working picnic once a week, it would not suffice to meet Russia's
tremendous needs. And, as I pointed out in the chapter specially devoted
to the shortage of labor, the most serious need at present is to keep
skilled workers at their jobs instead of letting them drift away into
non-productive labor. No amount of Saturday picnics could do that, and it
was obvious long ago that some other means, would have to be devised.
INDUSTRIAL CONSCRIPTION
The general principle of industrial conscription recognized by the Russian
Constitution, section ii, chapter v, paragraph 18, which reads: "The
Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic recognizes that work is an
obligation on every citizen of the Republic," and proclaims, "He who does
not work shall not eat." It is, however, one thing to proclaim such a
principle and quite another to put it into action.
On December 17, 1919, the moment it became clear that there was a real
possibility that the civil war was drawing to an end, Trotsky allowed the
Pravda to print a memorandum of his, consisting of "theses" or reasoned
notes about industrial conscription and the militia system. He points out
that a Socialist State demands a general plan for the utilization of all
the resources of a country, including its human energy. At the same time,
"in the present economic chaos in which are mingled the broken fragments
of the past and the beginnings of the future," a sudden jump to a complete
centralized economy of the country as a whole is impossible. Local
initiative, local effort must not be sacrificed for the sake of a plan. At
the same time industrial conscription is necessary for complete
socialization. It cannot be regardless of individuality like military
conscription. He suggests a subdivision of the State into territorial
productive districts which should coincide with the territorial districts
of the militia system which shall replace the regular army. Registration
of labor necessary. Necessary also to coordinate military and industrial
registration. At demobilization the cadres of regiments, divisions, etc.,
should form the fundamental cadres of the militia. Instruction to this end
should be included in the courses for workers and peasants who are
training to become officers in every district. Transition to the militia
system must be carefully and gradually accomplished so as not for a moment
to leave the Republic defenseless. While not losing sight of these
ultimate aims, it is necessary to decide on immediate needs and to
ascertain exactly what amount of labor is necessary for their limited
realization. He suggests the registration of skilled labor in the army. He
suggests that a Commission under general direction of the Council of
Public Economy should work out a preliminary plan and then hand it over to
the War Department, so that means should be worked out for using the
military apparatus for this new industrial purpose.
Trotsky's twenty-four theses or notes must have been written in odd
moments, now here now there, on the way from one front to another. They do
not form a connected whole. Contradictions jostle each other, and it is
quite clear that Trotsky himself had no very definite plan in his head.
But his notes annoyed and stimulated so many other people that they did
perhaps precisely the work they were intended to do. Pravada printed them
with a note from the editor inviting discussion. The Ekonomitcheskaya Jizn
printed letter after letter from workmen, officials and others, attacking,
approving and bringing new suggestions. Larin, Semashko, Pyatakov,
Bucharin all took a hand in the discussion. Larin saw in the proposals the
beginning of the end of the revolution, being convinced that authority
would pass from the democracy of the workers into the hands of the
specialists. Rykov fell upon them with sturdy blows on behalf of the
Trades Unions. All, however, agreed on the one point—that something
of the sort was necessary. On December 27th a Commission for studying the
question of industrial conscription was formed under the presidency of
Trotsky. This Commission included the People's Commissars, or Ministers,
of Labor, Ways of Communication, Supply, Agriculture, War, and the
Presidents of the Central Council of the Trades Unions and of the Supreme
Council of Public Economy. They compiled a list of the principal questions
before them, and invited anybody interested to bring them suggestions and
material for discussion.
But the discussion was not limited to the newspapers or to this
Commission. The question was discussed in Soviets and Conferences of every
kind all over the country. Thus, on January 1st an All-Russian Conference
of local "departments for the registration and distribution of labor,"
after prolonged argument, contributed their views. They pointed out (1)
the need of bringing to work numbers of persons who instead of doing the
skilled labor for which they were qualified were engaged in petty
profiteering, etc.; (2) that there evaporation of skilled labor into
unproductive speculation could at least be checked by the introduction of
labor books, which would give some sort of registration of each citizen's
work; (3) that workmen can be brought back from the villages only for
enterprises which are supplied with provisions or are situated in
districts where there is plenty. ("The opinion that, in the absence of
these preliminary conditions, it will be possible to draw workmen from the
villages by measures of compulsion or mobilization is profoundly
mistaken.") (4) that there should be a census of labor and that the Trades
Unions should be invited to protect the interests of the conscripted.
Finally, this Conference approved the idea of using the already existing
military organization for carrying out a labor census of the Red Army, and
for the turning over to labor of parts of the army during demobilization,
but opposed the idea of giving the military organization the work of labor
registration and industrial conscription in general.
On January 22, 1920, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, after
prolonged discussion of Trotsky's rough memorandum, finally adopted and
published a new edition of the "theses," expanded, altered, almost
unrecognizable, a reasoned body of theory entirely different from the
bundle of arrows loosed at a venture by Trotsky. They definitely accepted
the principle of industrial conscription, pointing out the immediate
reasons for it in the fact that Russia cannot look for much help from
without and must somehow or other help herself.
Long before the All-Russian Congress of the Communist Party approved the
theses of the Committee, one form of industrial conscription was already
being tested at work. Very early in January, when the discussion on the
subject was at its height, the Soviet of the Third Army addressed itself
to the Council of Defense of the Republic with an invitation to make use
of this army (which at least for the moment had finished its military
task) and to experiment with it as a labor army. The Council of Defense
agreed. Representatives of the Commissariats of Supply, Agriculture, Ways
and Communications, Labor and the Supreme Council of Public Economy were
sent to assist the Army Soviet. The army was proudly re-named "The First
Revolutionary Army of Labor," and began to issue communiques "from the
Labor front," precisely like the communiques of an army in the field. I
translate as a curiosity the first communique issued by a Labor Army's
Soviet:
"Wood prepared in the districts of Ishim, Karatulskaya, Omutinskaya,
Zavodoutovskaya, Yalutorovska, Iushaly, Kamuishlovo, Turinsk, Altynai,
Oshtchenkovo, Shadrinsk, 10,180 cubic sazhins. Working days, 52,651. Taken
to the railway stations, 5,334 cubic sazhins. Working days on transport,
22,840. One hundred carpenters detailed for the Kizelovsk mines. One
hundred carpenters detailed for the bridge at Ufa. One engineer specialist
detailed to the Government Council of Public Economy for repairing the
mills of Chelyabinsk Government. One instructor accountant detailed for
auditing the accounts of the economic organizations of Kamuishlov. Repair
of locomotives proceeding in the works at Ekaterinburg. January 20, 1920,
midnight."
The Labor Army's Soviet received a report on the state of the district
covered by the army with regard to supply and needed work. By the end of
January it had already carried out a labor census of the army, and found
that it included over 50,000 laborers, of whom a considerable number were
skilled. It decided on a general plan of work in reestablishing industry
in the Urals, which suffered severely during the Kolchak regime and the
ebb and flow of the civil war, and was considering a suggestion of one of
its members that if the scheme worked well the army should be increased to
300,000 men by way of mobilization.
On January 23rd the Council of Defense of the Republic, encouraged to
proceed further, decided to make use of the Reserve Army for the
improvement of railway transport on the Moscow-Kazan railway, one of the
chief arteries between eastern food districts and Moscow. The main object
is to be the reestablishment of through traffic between Moscow and
Ekaterinburg and the repair of the Kazan-Ekaterinburg line, which
particularly suffered during the war. An attempt was to be made to rebuild
the bridge over the Kama River before the ice melts. The Commander of the
Reserve Army was appointed Commissar of the eastern part of the
Moscow-Kazan railway, retaining his position as Commander of the Army.
With a view of coordination between the Army Soviet and the railway
authorities, a member of the Soviet was also appointed Commissar of the
railway. On January 25th it was announced that a similar experiment was
being made in the Ukraine. A month before the ice broke the first train
actually crossed the Kama River by the rebuilt bridge.
By April of this year the organization of industrial conscription had gone
far beyond the original labor armies. A decree of February 5th had created
a Chief Labor Committee, consisting of five members, Serebryakov and
Danilov, from the Commissariat of War; Vasiliev, from the Commissariat of
the Interior; Anikst, from the Commissariat of Labor; Dzerzhinsky, from
the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Dzerzhinsky was President, and his
appointment was possibly made in the hope that the reputation he had won
as President of the Extraordinary Committee for Fighting
Counter-Revolution would frighten people into taking this Committee
seriously. Throughout the country in each government or province similar
committees, called "Troikas," were created, each of three members, one
from the Commissariat of War, one from the Department of Labor, one from
the Department of Management, in each case from the local Commissariats
and Departments attached to the local Soviet. Representatives of the
Central Statistical Office and its local organs had a right to be present
at the meeting of these committees of three, or "Troikas," but had not the
right to vote. An organization or a factory requiring labor, was to apply
to the Labor Department of the local Soviet. This Department was supposed
to do its best to satisfy demands upon it by voluntary methods first. If
these proved insufficient they were to apply to the local "Troika," or
Labor Conscription Committee. If this found that its resources also were
insufficient, it was to refer back the request to the Labor Department of
the Soviet, which was then to apply to its corresponding Department in the
Government Soviet, which again, first voluntarily and then through the
Government Committee of Labor Conscription, was to try to satisfy the
demands. I fancy the object of this arrangement was to prevent local
"Troikas" from referring to Government "Troikas," and so directly to
Dzerzhinsky's Central Committee. If they had been able to do this there
would obviously have been danger lest a new network of independent and
powerful organizations should be formed. Experience with the overgrown and
insuppressible Committees for Fighting Counter-Revolution had taught
people how serious such a development might be.
Such was the main outline of the scheme for conscripting labor. A similar
scheme was prepared for superintending and safeguarding labor when
conscripted. In every factory of over 1,000 workmen, clerks, etc., there
was formed a Commission (to distinguish it from the Committee) of
Industrial Conscription. Smaller factories shared such Commissions or were
joined for the purpose to larger factories near by. These Commissions were
to be under the direct control of a Factory Committee, thereby preventing
squabbles between conscripted and non-conscripted labor. They were to be
elected for six months, but their members could be withdrawn and replaced
by the Factory Committee with the approval of the local "Troika." These
Commissions, like the "Troikas," consisted of three members: (1) from the
management of the factory, (2) from the Factory Committee, (3) from the
Executive Committee of the workers. (It was suggested in the directions
that one of these should be from the group which "has been organizing
'Saturdayings,' that is to say that he or she should be a Communist.) The
payment of conscripted workers was to be by production, with prizes for
specially good work. Specially bad work was also foreseen in the detailed
scheme of possible punishments. Offenders were to be brought before the
"People's Court" (equivalent to the ordinary Civil Court), or, in the case
of repeated or very bad offenses, were to be brought before the far more
dreaded Revolutionary Tribunals. Six categories of possible offenses were
placed upon the new code:
(1)Avoiding registration, absenteeism, or desertion.
(2)The preparation of false documents or the use of such.
(3)Officials giving false information to facilitate these crimes.
(4)Purposeful damage of instruments or material.
(5)Uneconomical or careless work.
(6)(Probably the most serious of all: Instigation to any of
these actions.
The "Troikas" have the right to deal administratively with the less
important crimes by deprival of freedom for not more than two weeks. No
one can be brought to trial except by the Committee for Industrial
Conscription on the initiative of the responsible director of work, and
with the approval either of the local labor inspection authorities or with
that of the local Executive Committee.
No one with the slightest knowledge of Russia will suppose for a moment
that this elaborate mechanism sprang suddenly into existence when the
decree was signed. On the contrary, all stages of industrial conscription
exist simultaneously even today, and it would be possible by going from
one part of Russia to another to collect a series of specimens of
industrial conscription at every stage of evolution, just as one can
collect all stages of man from a baboon to a company director or a
Communist. Some of the more primitive kinds of conscription were not among
the least successful. For example, at the time (in the spring of the year)
when the Russians still hoped that the Poles would be content with the
huge area of non-Polish territory they had already seized, the army on the
western front was without any elaborate system of decrees being turned
into a labor army. The work done was at first ordinary country work,
mainly woodcutting. They tried to collaborate with the local "Troikas,"
sending help when these Committees asked for it. This, however, proved
unsatisfactory, so, disregarding the "Troikas," they organized things for
themselves in the whole area immediately behind the front. They divided up
the forests into definite districts, and they worked these with soldiers
and with deserters. Gradually their work developed, and they built
themselves narrow-gauge railways for the transport of the wood. Then they
needed wagons and locomotives, and of course immediately found themselves
at loggerheads with the railway authorities. Finally, they struck a
bargain with the railwaymen, and were allowed to take broken-down wagons
which the railway people were not in a position to mend. Using such
skilled labor as they had, they mended such wagons as were given them, and
later made a practice of going to the railway yards and in inspecting
"sick" wagons for themselves, taking out any that they thought had a
chance even of temporary convalescence. Incidentally they caused great
scandal by finding in the Smolensk sidings among the locomotives and
wagons supposed to be sick six good locomotives and seventy perfectly
healthy wagons. Then they began to improve the feeding of their army by
sending the wood they had cut, in the trains they had mended, to people
who wanted wood and could give them provisions. One such train went to
Turkestan and back from the army near Smolensk. Their work continually
increased, and since they had to remember that they were an army and not
merely a sort of nomadic factory, they began themselves to mobilize,
exclusively for purposes of work, sections of the civil population. I
asked Unshlicht, who had much to do with this organization, if the
peasants came willingly. He said, "Not very," but added that they did not
mind when they found that they got well fed and were given packets of salt
as prizes for good work. "The peasants," he said, "do not grumble against
the Government when it shows the sort of common sense that they themselves
can understand. We found that when we said definitely how many carts and
men a village must provide, and used them without delay for a definite
purpose, they were perfectly satisfied and considered it right and proper.
In every case, however, when they saw people being mobilized and sent
thither without obvious purpose or result, they became hostile at once." I
asked Unshlicht how it was that their army still contained skilled workmen
when one of the objects of industrial conscription was to get the skilled
workmen back into the factories. He said: "We have an accurate census of
the army, and when we get asked for skilled workmen for such and such a
factory, they go there knowing that they still belong to the army."
That, of course, is the army point of view, and indicates one of the main
squabbles which industrial conscription has produced. Trotsky would like
the various armies to turn into units of a territorial militia, and at the
same time to be an important part of the labor organization of each
district. His opponents do not regard the labor armies as a permanent
manifestation, and many have gone so far as to say that the productivity
of labor in one of these armies is lower than among ordinary workmen. Both
sides produce figures on this point, and Trotsky goes so far as to say
that if his opponents are right, then not only are labor armies damned,
but also the whole principle of industrial conscription. "If compulsory
labor-independently of social condition-is unproductive, that is a
condemnation not of the labor armies, but of industrial conscription in
general, and with it of the whole Soviet system, the further development
of which is unthinkable except on a basis of universal industrial
conscription."
But, of course, the question of the permanence of the labor armies is not
so important as the question of getting the skilled workers back to the
factories. The comparative success or failure of soldiers or mobilized
peasants in cutting wood is quite irrelevant to this recovery of the
vanished workmen. And that recovery will take time, and will be entirely
useless unless it is possible to feed these workers when they have been
collected. There have already been several attempts, not wholly
successful, to collect the straying workers of particular industries.
Thus, after the freeing of the oil-wells from the Whites, there was a
general mobilization of naphtha workers. Many of these had bolted on or
after the arrival of Krasnov or Denikin and gone far into Central Russia,
settling where they could. So months passed before the Red Army definitely
pushed the area of civil war beyond the oil-wells, that many of these
refugees had taken new root and were unwilling to return. I believe, that
in spite of the mobilization, the oil-wells are still short of men. In the
coal districts also, which have passed through similar experiences, the
proportion of skilled to unskilled labor is very much smaller than it was
before the war. There have also been two mobilizations of railway workers,
and these, I think, may be partly responsible for the undoubted
improvement noticeable during the year, although this is partly at least
due to other things beside conscription. In the first place Trotsky
carried with him into the Commissariat of Transport the same ferocious
energy that he has shown in the Commissariat of War, together with the
prestige that he had gained there. Further, he was well able in the
councils of the Republic to defend the needs of his particular
Commissariat against those of all others. He was, for example able to
persuade the Communist Party to treat the transport crisis precisely as
they had treated each crisis on the front-that is to say, to mobilize
great numbers of professed Communists to meet it, giving them in this case
the especial task of getting engines mended and, somehow or other, of
keeping trains on the move.
But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the labor armies, nor
the improvement in transport, are any final proof of the success of
industrial conscription. Industrial conscription in the proper sense of
the words is impossible until a Government knows what it has to conscript.
A beginning was made early this year by the introduction of labor books,
showing what work people were doing and where, and serving as a kind of
industrial passports. But in April this year these had not yet become
general in Moscow although the less unwieldy population of Petrograd was
already supplied with them. It will be long even if it is possible at all,
before any considerable proportion of the people not living in these two
cities are registered in this way. A more useful step was taken at the end
of August, in a general census throughout Russia. There has been no
Russian census since 1897. There was to have been another about the time
the war began. It was postponed for obvious reasons. If the Communists
carry through the census with even moderate success (they will of course
have to meet every kind of evasion), they will at least get some of the
information without which industrial conscription on a national scale must
be little more than a farce. The census should show them where the skilled
workers are. Industrial conscription should enable them to collect them
and put them at their own skilled work. Then if, besides transplanting
them, they are able to feed them, it will be possible to judge of the
success or failure of a scheme which in most countries would bring a
Government toppling to the ground.
"In most countries"; yes, but then the economic crisis has gone further in
Russia than in most countries. There is talk of introducing industrial
conscription (one year's service) in Germany, where things have not gone
nearly so far. And perhaps industrial conscription, like Communism itself,
becomes a thing of desperate hope only in a country actually face to face
with ruin. I remember saying to Trotsky, when talking of possible
opposition, that I, as an Englishman, with the tendencies to practical
anarchism belonging to my race, should certainly object most strongly if I
were mobilized and set to work in a particular factory, and might even
want to work in some other factory just for the sake of not doing what I
was forced to do. Trotsky replied: "You would now. But you would not if
you had been through a revolution, and seen your country in such a state
that only the united, concentrated effort of everybody could possibly
reestablish it. That is the position here. Everybody knows the position
and that there is no other way."
WHAT THE COMMUNISTS ARE TRYING TO DO IN RUSSIA
We come now to the Communist plans for reconstruction. We have seen, in
the first two chapters, something of the appalling paralysis which is the
most striking factor in the economic problem to-day. We have seen how
Russia is suffering from a lack of things and from a lack of labor, how
these two shortages react on each other, and how nothing but a vast
improvement in transport can again set in motion what was one of the great
food-producing machines of the world. We have also seen something of the
political organization which, with far wider ambitions before it, is at
present struggling to prevent temporary paralysis from turning into
permanent atrophy. We have seen that it consists of a political party so
far dominant that the Trades Unions and all that is articulate in the
country may be considered as part of a machinery of propaganda, for
getting those things done which that political party considers should be
done. In a country fighting, literally, for its life, no man can call his
soul his own, and we have seen how this fact-a fact that has become
obvious again and again in the history of the world, whenever a nation has
had its back to the wall-is expressed in Russia in terms of industrial
conscription; in measures, that is to say, which would be impossible in
any country not reduced to such extremities; in measures which may prove
to be the inevitable accompaniment of national crisis, when such crisis is
economic rather than military. Let us now see what the Russians, with that
machinery at their disposal are trying to do.
It is obvious that since this machinery is dominated by a political party,
it will be impossible to understand the Russian plans, without
understanding that particular political party's estimate of the situation
in general. It is obvious that the Communist plans for Russia must be
largely affected by their view of Europe as a whole. This view is gloomy
in the extreme. The Communists believe that Europe is steadily shaking
itself to pieces. They believe that this process has already gone so far
that, even given good will on the part of European Governments, the
manufacturers of Western countries are already incapable of supplying them
with all the things which Russia was importing before the war, still less
make up the enormous arrears which have resulted from six years of
blockade. They do not agree with M. Clemenceau that "revolution is a
disease attacking defeated countries only." Or, to put it as I have heard
it stated in Moscow, they believe that President Wilson's aspiration
towards a peace in which should be neither conqueror nor conquered has
been at least partially realized in the sense that every country ended the
struggle economically defeated, with the possible exception of America,
whose signature, after all, is still to be ratified. They believe that
even in seemingly prosperous countries the seeds of economic disaster are
already fertilized. They think that the demands of labor will become
greater and more difficult to fulfill until at last they become
incompatible with a continuance of the capitalist system. They think that
strike after strike, irrespective of whether it is successful or not, will
gradually widen the cracks and flaws already apparent in the damaged
economic structure of Western Europe. They believe that conflicting
interests will involve our nations in new national wars, and that each of
these will deepen the cleavage between capital and labor. They think that
even if exhaustion makes mutual warfare on a large scale impossible, these
conflicting interests will produce such economic conflicts, such refusals
of cooperation, as will turn exhaustion to despair. They believe, to put
it briefly, that Russia has passed through the worst stages of a process
to which every country in Europe will be submitted in turn by its
desperate and embittered inhabitants. We may disagree with them, but we
shall not understand them if we refuse to take that belief into account.
If, as they imagine, the next five years are to be years of disturbance
and growing resolution, Russia will get very little from abroad. If, for
example, there is to be a serious struggle in England, Russia will get
practically nothing. They not only believe that these things are going to
be, but make the logical deductions as to the effect of such disturbances
on their own chances of importing what they need. For example, Lenin said
to me that "the shock of revolution in England would ensure the final
defeat of capitalism," but he said at the same time that it would be felt
at once throughout the world and cause such reverberations as would
paralyze industry everywhere. And that is why, although Russia is an
agricultural country, the Communist plans for her reconstruction are
concerned first of all not with agriculture, but with industry. In their
schemes for the future of the world, Russia's part is that of a gigantic
farm, but in their schemes for the immediate future of Russia, their eyes
are fixed continually on the nearer object of making her so far
self-supporting that, even if Western Europe is unable to help them, they
may be able to crawl out of their economic difficulties, as Krassin put it
to me before he left Moscow, "if necessary on all fours, but somehow or
other, crawl out."
Some idea of the larger ambitions of the Communists with regard to the
development of Russia are given in a conversation with Rykov, which
follows this chapter. The most important characteristic of them is that
they are ambitions which cannot but find an echo in Russians of any kind,
quite regardless of their political convictions. The old anomalies of
Russian industry, for example, the distances of the industrial districts
from their sources of fuel and raw material are to be done away with.
These anomalies were largely due to historical accidents, such as the
caprice of Peter the Great, and not to any economic reasons. The
revolution, destructive as it has been, has at least cleaned the slate and
made it possible, if it is possible to rebuild at all, to rebuild Russia
on foundations laid by common sense. It may be said that the Communists
are merely doing flamboyantly and with a lot of flag-waving, what any
other Russian Government would be doing in their place. And without the
flamboyance and the flag-waving, it is doubtful whether in an exhausted
country, it would be possible to get anything done at all. The result of
this is that in their work of economic reconstruction the Communists get
the support of most of the best engineers and other technicians in the
country, men who take no interest whatsoever in the ideas of Karl Marx,
but have a professional interest in doing the best they can with their
knowledge, and a patriotic satisfaction in using that knowledge for
Russia. These men, caring not at all about Communism, want to make Russia
once more a comfortably habitable place, no matter under what Government.
Their attitude is precisely comparable to that of the officers of the old
army who have contributed so much to the success of the new. These
officers were not Communists, but they disliked civil war, and fought to
put an end of it. As Sergei Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief, and not a
Communist, said to me, "I have not looked on the civil war as on a
struggle between two political ideas, for the Whites have no definite
idea. I have considered it simply as a struggle between the Russian
Government and a number of mutineers." Precisely so do these "bourgeois"
technicians now working throughout Russia regard the task before them. It
will be small satisfaction to them if famine makes the position of any
Government impossible. For them the struggle is quite simply a struggle
between Russia and the economic forces tending towards a complete collapse
of civilization.
The Communists have thus practically the whole intelligence of the country
to help them in their task of reconstruction, or of salvage. But the
educated classes alone cannot save a nation. Muscle is wanted besides
brain, and the great bulk of those who can provide muscle are difficult to
move to enthusiasm by any broad schemes of economic rearrangement that do
not promise immediate improvement in their own material conditions.
Industrial conscription cannot be enforced in Russia unless there is among
the conscripted themselves an understanding, although a resentful
understanding, of its necessity. The Russians have not got an army of
Martians to enforce effort on an alien people. The army and the people are
one. "We are bound to admit," says Trotsky, "that no wide industrial
mobilization will succeed, if we do not capture all that is honorable,
spiritual in the peasant working masses in explaining our plan." And the
plan that he referred to was not the grandiose (but obviously sensible)
plan for the eventual electrification of all Russia, but a programme of
the struggle before them in actually getting their feet clear of the
morass of industrial decay in which they are at present involved. Such a
programme has actually been decided upon-a programme the definite object
of which is to reconcile the workers to work not simply hand to mouth,
each for himself, but to concentrate first on those labors which will
eventually bring their reward in making other labors easier and improving
the position as a whole.
Early this year a comparatively unknown Bolshevik called Gusev, to whom
nobody had attributed any particular intelligence, wrote, while busy on
the staff of an army on the southeast front, which was at the time being
used partly as a labor army, a pamphlet which has had an extraordinary
influence in getting such a programme drawn up. The pamphlet is based on
Gusev's personal observation both of a labor army at work and of the
attitude of the peasant towards industrial conscription. It was extremely
frank, and contained so much that might have been used by hostile critics,
that it was not published in the ordinary way but printed at the army
press on the Caucasian front and issued exclusively to members of the
Communist Party. I got hold of a copy of this pamphlet through a friend.
It is called "Urgent Questions of Economic Construction." Gusev sets out
in detail the sort of opposition he had met, and says: "The Anarchists,
Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks have a clear, simple economic plan
which the great masses can understand: 'Go about your own business and
work freely for yourself in your own place.' They have a criticism of
labor mobilizations equally clear for the masses. They say to them, 'They
are putting Simeon in Peter's place, and Peter in Simeon's. They are
sending the men of Saratov to dig the ground in the Government of
Stavropol, and the Stavropol men to the Saratov Government for the same
purpose.' Then besides that there is 'nonparty' criticism:
"'When it is time to sow they will be shifting muck, and when it is time
to reap they will be told to cut timber.' That is a particularly clear
expression of the peasants' disbelief in our ability to draw up a proper
economic plan. This belief is clearly at the bottom of such questions as,
'Comrade Gusev, have you ever done any plowing?' or 'Comrade Orator, do
you know anything about peasant work?' Disbelief in the townsman who
understands nothing about peasants is natural to the peasant, and we shall
have to conquer it, to get through it, to get rid of it by showing the
peasant, with a clear plan in our hands that he can understand, that we
are not altogether fools in this matter and that we understand more than
he does." He then sets out the argument which he himself had found
successful in persuading the peasants to do things the reward for which
would not be obvious the moment they were done. He says, "I compared our
State economy to a colossal building with scores of stories and tens of
thousands of rooms. The whole building has been half smashed; in places
the roof has tumbled down, the beams have rotted, the ceilings are
tumbling, the drains and water pipes are burst; the stoves are falling to
pieces, the partitions are shattered, and, finally, the walls and
foundations are unsafe and the whole building is threatened with collapse.
I asked, how, must one set about the repair of this building? With what
kind of economic plan? To this question the inhabitants of different
stories, and even of different rooms on one and the same story will reply
variously. Those who live on the top floor will shout that the rafters are
rotten and the roof falling; that it is impossible to live, there any
longer, and that it is immediately necessary, first of all, to put up new
beams and to repair the roof. And from their point of view they will be
perfectly right. Certainly it is not possible to live any longer on that
floor. Certainly the repair of the roof is necessary. The inhabitants of
one of the lower stories in which the water pipes have burst will cry out
that it is impossible to live without water, and therefore, first of all,
the water pipes must be mended. And they, from their point of view, will
be perfectly right, since it certainly is impossible to live without
water. The inhabitants of the floor where the stoves have fallen to pieces
will insist on an immediate mending of the stoves, since they and their
children are dying of cold because there is nothing on which they can heat
up water or boil kasha for the children; and they, too, will be quite
right. But in spite of all these just demands, which arrive in thousands
from all sides, it is impossible to forget the most important of all, that
the foundation is shattered and that the building is threatened with a
collapse which will bury all the inhabitants of the house together, and
that, therefore, the only immediate task is the strengthening of the
foundation and the walls. Extraordinary firmness, extraordinary courage is
necessary, not only not to listen to the cries and groans of old men,
women, children and sick, coming from every floor, but also to decide on
taking from the inhabitants of all floors the instruments and materials
necessary for the strengthening of the foundations and walls, and to force
them to leave their corners and hearths, which they are doing the best
they can to make habitable, in order to drive them to work on the
strengthening of the walls and foundations."
Gusev's main idea was that the Communists were asking new sacrifices from
a weary and exhausted people, that without such sacrifices these people
would presently find themselves in even worse conditions, and that, to
persuade them to make the effort necessary to save themselves, it was
necessary to have a perfectly clear and easily understandable plan which
could be dinned into the whole nation and silence the criticism of all
possible opponents. Copies of his little book came to Moscow. Lenin read
it and caused excruciating jealousy in the minds of several other
Communists, who had also been trying to find the philosopher's stone that
should turn discouragement into hope, by singling out Gusev for his
special praise and insisting that his plans should be fully discussed at
the Supreme Council in the Kremlin. Trotsky followed Lenin's lead, and in
the end a general programme for Russian reconstruction was drawn up,
differing only slightly from that which Gusev had proposed. I give this
scheme in Trotsky's words, because they are a little fuller than those of
others, and knowledge of this plan will explain not only what the
Communists are trying to do in Russia, but what they would like to get
from us today and what they will want to get tomorrow. Trotsky says:—
"The fundamental task at this moment is improvement in the condition of
our transport, prevention of its further deterioration and preparation of
the most elementary stores of food, raw material and fuel. The whole of
the first period of our reconstruction will be completely occupied in the
concentration of labor on the solution of these problems, which is a
condition of further progress.
"The second period (it will be difficult to say now whether it will be
measured in months or years, since that depends on many factors beginning
with the international situation and ending with the unanimity or the lack
of it in our own party) will be a period occupied in the building of
machines in the interest of transport, and the getting of raw materials
and provisions.
"The third period will be occupied in building machinery, with a view to
the production of articles in general demand, and, finally, the fourth
period will be that in which we are able to produce these articles."
Does it not occur, even to the most casual reader, that there is very
little politics in that program, and that, no matter what kind of
Government should be in Russia, it would have to endorse that programme
word for word? I would ask any who doubt this to turn again to my first
two chapters describing the nature of the economic crisis in Russia, and
to remind themselves how, not only the lack of things but the lack of men,
is intimately connected with the lack of transport, which keeps laborers
ill fed, factories ill supplied with material, and in this way keeps the
towns incapable of supplying the needs of the country, with the result
that the country is most unwilling to supply the needs of the town. No
Russian Government unwilling to allow Russia to subside definitely to a
lower level of civilization can do otherwise than to concentrate upon the
improvement of transport. Labor in Russia must be used first of all for
that, in order to increase its own productivity. And, if purchase of help
from abroad is to be allowed, Russia must "control" the outflow of her
limited assets, so that, by healing transport first of all, she may
increase her power of making new assets. She must spend in such a way as
eventually to increase her power of spending. She must prevent the
frittering away of her small purse on things which, profitable to the
vendor and doubtless desirable by the purchaser, satisfy only individual
needs and do not raise the producing power of the community as a whole.
RYKOV ON ECONOMIC PLANS AND ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
Alexei Rykov, the President of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, is
one of the hardest worked men in Russia, and the only time I was able to
have a long talk with him (although more than once he snatched moments to
answer particular questions) was on a holiday, when the old Siberian
Hotel, now the offices of the Council, was deserted, and I walked through
empty corridors until I found the President and his secretary at work as
usual.
After telling of the building of the new railway from Alexandrovsk Gai to
the Emba, the prospects of developing the oil industry in that district,
the relative values of those deposits and of those at Baku, and the
possible decreasing significance of Baku in Russian industry generally, we
passed to broader perspectives. I asked him what he thought of the
relations between agriculture and industry in Russia, and supposed that he
did not imagine that Russia would ever become a great industrial country.
His answer was characteristic of the tremendous hopes that nerve these
people in their almost impossible task, and I set it down as nearly as I
can in his own words. For him, of course, the economic problem was the
first, and he spoke of it as the director of a huge trust might have
spoken. But, as he passed on to talk of what he thought would result from
the Communist method of tackling that problem, and spoke of the eventual
disappearance of political parties, I felt I was trying to read a kind of
palimpsest of the Economist and
News from Nowhere, or listening to a strange compound of William Morris
and, for example, Sir Eric Geddes. He said: "We may have to wait a long
time before the inevitable arrives and there is a Supreme Economic Council
dealing with Europe as with a single economic whole. If that should come
about we should, of course, from the very nature of our country, be called
upon in the first place to provide food for Europe, and we should hope
enormously to improve our agriculture, working on a larger and larger
scale, using mechanical plows and tractors, which would be supplied us by
the West. But in the meantime we have to face the fact that events may
cause us to be, for all practical purposes, in a state of blockade for
perhaps a score of years, and, so far as we can, we must be ready to
depend on ourselves alone. For example, we want mechanical plows which
could be procured abroad. We have had to start making them ourselves. The
first electric plow made in Russia and used in Russia started work last
year, and this year we shall have a number of such plows made in our
country, not because it is economic so to make them, but because we could
get them in no other way. In so far as is possible, we shall have to make
ourselves self-supporting, so as somehow or other to get along even if the
blockade, formal or perhaps willy-nilly (imposed by the inability of the
West to supply us), compels us to postpone cooperation with the rest of
Europe. Every day of such postponement is one in which the resources of
Europe are not being used in the most efficient manner to supply the needs
not only of our own country but of all."
I referred to what he had told me last year about the intended
electrification of Moscow by a station using turf fuel.
"That," he said, "is one of the plans which, in spite of the war, has gone
a very long way towards completion. We have built the station in the
Ryezan Government, on the Shadul peat mosses, about 110 versts from
Moscow. Before the end of May that station should be actually at work. (It
was completed, opened and partially destroyed by a gigantic fire.) Another
station at Kashira in the Tula Government (on the Oka), using the small
coal produced in the Moscow coalfields, will be at work before the autumn.
This year similar stations are being built at Ivano-Voznesensk and at
Nijni-Novgorod. Also, with a view to making the most economic use of what
we already possess, we have finished both in Petrograd and in Moscow a
general unification of all the private power-stations, which now supply
their current to a single main cable. Similar unification is nearly
finished at Tula and at Kostroma. The big water-power station on the
rapids of the Volkhov is finished in so far as land construction goes, but
we can proceed no further until we have obtained the turbines, which we
hope to get from abroad. As you know, we are basing our plans in general
on the assumption that in course of time we shall supply the whole of
Russian industry with electricity, of which we also hope to make great use
in agriculture. That, of course, will take a great number of years."
[Nothing could have been much more artificial than the industrial
geography of old Russia. The caprice of history had planted great
industrial centers literally at the greatest possible distance from the
sources of their raw materials. There was Moscow bringing its coal from
Donetz, and Petrograd, still further away, having to eke out a living by
importing coal from England. The difficulty of transport alone must have
forced the Russians to consider how they could do away with such
anomalies. Their main idea is that the transport of coal in a modern State
is an almost inexcusable barbarism. They have set themselves, these ragged
engineers, working in rooms which they can hardly keep above
freezing-point and walking home through the snow in boots without soles,
no less a task than the electrification of the whole of Russia. There is a
State Committee presided over by an extraordinary optimist called
Krzhizhanovsky, entrusted by the Supreme Council of Public Economy and
Commissariat of Agriculture with the working out of a general plan. This
Committee includes, besides a number of well-known practical engineers,
Professors Latsinsky, Klassen, Dreier, Alexandrov, Tcharnovsky, Dend and
Pavlov. They are investigating the water power available in different
districts in Russia, the possibilities of using turf, and a dozen similar
questions including, perhaps not the least important, investigation to
discover where they can do most with least dependence on help from
abroad.]
Considering the question of the import of machinery from abroad, I asked
him whether in existing conditions of transport Russia was actually in a
position to export the raw materials with which alone the Russians could
hope to buy what they want. He said:
"Actually we have in hand about two million poods (a pood is a little over
thirty-six English pounds) of flax, and any quantity of light leather
(goat, etc.), but the main districts where we have raw material for
ourselves or for export are far away. Hides, for example, we have in great
quantities in Siberia, in the districts of Orenburg and the Ural River and
in Tashkent. I have myself made the suggestion that we should offer to
sell this stuff where it is, that is to say not delivered at a seaport,
and that the buyers should provide their own trains, which we should
eventually buy from them with the raw material itself, so that after a
certain number of journeys the trains should become ours. In the same
districts we have any quantity of wool, and in some of these districts
corn. We cannot, in the present condition of our transport, even get this
corn for ourselves. In the same way we have great quantities of rice in
Turkestan, and actually are being offered rice from Sweden, because we
cannot transport our own. Then we have over a million poods of copper,
ready for export on the same conditions. But it is clear that if the
Western countries are unable to help in the transport, they cannot expect
to get raw materials from us."
I asked about platinum. He laughed.
"That is a different matter. In platinum we have a world monopoly, and can
consequently afford to wait. Diamonds and gold, they can have as much as
they want of such rubbish; but platinum is different, and we are in no
hurry to part with it. But diamonds and gold ornaments, the jewelry of the
Tsars, we are ready to give to any king in Europe who fancies them, if he
can give us some less ornamental but more useful locomotives instead."
I asked if Kolchak had damaged the platinum mines. He replied, "Not at
all. On the contrary, he was promising platinum to everybody who wanted
it, and he set the mines going, so we arrived to find them in good
condition, with a considerable yield of platinum ready for use."
(I am inclined to think that in spite of Rykov's rather intransigent
attitude on the question, the Russians would none the less be willing to
export platinum, if only on account of the fact in comparison with its
great value it requires little transport, and so would make possible for
them an immediate bargain with some of the machinery they most urgently
need.)
Finally we talked of the growing importance of the Council of Public
Economy. Rykov was of opinion that it would eventually become the centre
of the whole State organism, "it and Trades Unions organizing the actual
producers in each branch."
"Then you think that as your further plans develop, with the creation of
more and more industrial centres, with special productive populations
concentrated round them, the Councils of the Trades Unions will tend to
become identical with the Soviets elected in the same districts by the
same industrial units?"
"Precisely," said Rykov, "and in that way the Soviets, useful during the
period of transition as an instrument of struggle and dictatorship, will
be merged with the Unions." (One
important factor, as Lenin pointed out when considering the same question,
is here left out of count, namely the political development of the
enormous agricultural as opposed to industrial population.)
"But if this merging of political Soviets with productive Unions occurs,
the questions that concern people will cease to be political questions,
but will be purely questions of economics."
"Certainly. And we shall see the disappearance of political parties. That
process is already apparent. In the present huge Trade Union Conference
there are only sixty Mensheviks. The Communists are swallowing one party
after another. Those who were not drawn over to us during the period of
struggle are now joining us during the process of construction, and we
find that our differences now are not political at all, but concerned only
with the practical details of construction." He illustrated this by
pointing out the present constitution of the Supreme Council of Public
Economy. There are under it fifty-three Departments or Centres (Textile,
Soap, Wool, Timber, Flax, etc.), each controlled by a "College" of three
or more persons. There are 232 members of these Colleges or Boards in all,
and of them 83 are workmen, 79 are engineers, 1 was an ex-director, 50
were from the clerical staff, and 19 unclassified. Politically 115 were
Communists, 105 were "non-party," and 12 were of non-Communist parties. He
continued, "Further, in swallowing the other parties, the Communists
themselves will cease to exist as a political party. Think only that
youths coming to their manhood during this year in Russia and in the
future will not be able to confirm from their own experience the reasoning
of Karl Marx, because they will have had no experience of a capitalist
country. What can they make of the class struggle? The class struggle here
is already over, and the distinctions of class have already gone
altogether. In the old days, members of our party were men who had read,
or tried to read, Marx's "Capital," who knew the "Communist Manifesto" by
heart, and were occupied in continual criticism of the basis of capitalist
society. Look at the new members of our party. Marx is quite unnecessary
to them. They join us, not for struggle in the interests of an oppressed
class, but simply because they understand our aims in constructive work.
And, as this process continues, we old social democrats shall disappear,
and our places will be filled by people of entirely different character
grown up under entirely new conditions."
NON-PARTYISM
Rykov's prophecies of the disappearance of Political parties may be
falsified by a development of that very non-partyism on which he bases
them. It is true that the parties openly hostile to the Communists in
Russia have practically disappeared. Many old-time Mensheviks have joined
the Communist Party. Here and there in the country may be found a Social
Revolutionary stronghold. Here and there in the Ukraine the Mensheviks
retain a footing, but I doubt whether either of these parties has in it
the vitality to make itself once again a serious political factor. There
is, however, a movement which, in the long run, may alter Russia's
political complexion. More and more delegates to Soviets or Congresses of
all kinds are explicitly described as "Non-party." Non-partyism is perhaps
a sign of revolt against rigid discipline of any kind. Now and then, of
course, a clever Menshevik or Social Revolutionary, by trimming his sails
carefully to the wind, gets himself elected on a non-party ticket. 'When
this happens there is usually a great hullabaloo as soon as he declares
himself. A section of his electors agitates for his recall and presently
some one else is elected in his stead. But non-partyism is much more than
a mere cloak of invisibility for enemies or conditional supporters of the
Communists. I know of considerable country districts which, in the face of
every kind of agitation, insist on returning exclusively non-party
delegates. The local Soviets in these districts are also non-party, and
they elect usually a local Bolshevik to some responsible post to act as it
were as a buffer between themselves and the central authority. They manage
local affairs in their own way, and, through the use of tact on both
sides, avoid falling foul of the more rigid doctrinaires in Moscow.
Eager reactionaries outside Russia will no doubt point to non-partyism as
a symptom of friendship for themselves. It is nothing of the sort. On all
questions of the defense of the Republic the non-party voting is
invariably solid with that of the Communists. The non-party men do not
want Denikin. They do not want Baron Wrangel. They have never heard of
Professor Struhve. They do not particularly like the Communists. They
principally want to be left alone, and they principally fear any enforced
continuation of war of any kind. If, in the course of time, they come to
have a definite political programme, I think it not impossible that they
may turn into a new kind of constitutional democrat. That does not mean
that they will have any use for M. Milukov or for a monarch with whom M.
Milukov might be ready to supply them. The Constitution for which they
will work will be that very Soviet Constitution which is now in abeyance,
and the democracy which they associate with it will be that form of
democracy which were it to be accurately observed in the present state of
Russia, that Constitution would provide. The capitalist in Russia has long
ago earned the position in which, according to the Constitution, he has a
right to vote, since he has long ago ceased to be a capitalist. Supposing
the Soviet Constitution were today to be literally applied, it would be
found that practically no class except the priests would be excluded from
the franchise. And when this agitation swells in volume, it will be an
agitation extremely difficult to resist, supposing Russia to be at peace,
so that there will be no valid excuse with which to meet it. These new
constitutional democrats will be in the position of saying to the
Communists, "Give us, without change, that very Constitution which you
yourselves drew up." I think they will find many friends inside the
Communist Party, particularly among those Communists who are also Trade
Unionists. I heard something very like the arguments of this new variety
of constitutional democrat in the Kremlin itself at an All-Russian
Conference of the Communist Party. A workman, Sapronov, turned suddenly
aside in a speech on quite another matter, and said with great violence
that the present system was in danger of running to seed and turning into
oligarchy, if not autocracy. Until the moment when he put his listeners
against him by a personal attack on Lenin, there was no doubt that he had
with him the sympathies of quite a considerable section of an exclusively
Communist audience.
Given peace, given an approximate return to normal conditions,
non-partyism may well profoundly modify the activities of the Communists.
It would certainly be strong enough to prevent the rasher spirits among
them from jeopardizing peace or from risking Russia's chance of
convalescence for the sake of promoting in any way the growth of
revolution abroad. Of course, so long as it is perfectly obvious that
Soviet Russia is attacked, no serious growth of non-partyism is to be
expected, but it is obvious that any act of aggression on the part of the
Soviet Government, once Russia had attained peace-which she has not known
since 1914-would provide just the basis of angry discontent which might
divide even the disciplined ranks of the Communists and give non-partyism
an active, instead of a comparatively passive, backing throughout the
country.
Non-partyism is already the peasants' way of expressing their aloofness
from the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defend that
revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin, talking to
me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: "Hegel wrote 'What is
the People? The people is that part of the nation which does not know what
it wants.' That is a good description of the Russian peasantry at the
present time, and it applies equally well to your Arthur Hendersons and
Sidney Webbs in England, and to all other people like yourself who want
incompatible things. The peasantry are individualists, but they support
us. We have, in some degree, to thank Kolchak and Denikin for that. They
are in favor of the Soviet Government, but hanker after Free Trade, not
understanding that the two things are self-contradictory. Of course, if
they were a united political force they could swamp us, but they are
disunited both in their interests and geographically. The interests of the
poorer and middle class peasants are in contradiction to those of the rich
peasant farmer who employs laborers. The poorer and middle class see that
we support them against the rich peasant, and also see that he is ready to
support what is obviously not in their interests." I said, "If State
agriculture in Russia comes to be on a larger scale, will there not be a
sort of proletarianization of the peasants so that, in the long run, their
interests will come to be more or less identical with those of the workers
in other than agricultural industry!" He replied, "Something in that
direction is being done, but it will have to be done very carefully and
must take a very long time. When we are getting many thousands of tractors
from abroad, then something of the sort would become possible." Finally I
asked him point blank, "Did he think they would pull through far enough
economically to be able to satisfy the needs of the peasantry before that
same peasantry had organized a real political opposition that should
overwhelm them!" Lenin laughed. "If I could answer that question," he
said, "I could answer everything, for on the answer to that question
everything depends. I think we can. Yes, I think we can. But I do not know
that we can."
Non-partyism may well be the protoplasmic stage of the future political
opposition of the peasants.
POSSIBILITIES
I have done my best to indicate the essential facts in Russia's problem
today, and to describe the organization and methods with which she is
attempting its solution. I can give no opinion as to whether by these
means the Russians will succeed in finding their way out of the quagmire
of industrial ruin in which they are involved. I can only say that they
are unlikely to find their way out by any other means. I think this is
instinctively felt in Russia. Not otherwise would it have been possible
for the existing organization, battling with one hand to save the towns
front starvation, to destroy with the other the various forces clothed and
armed by Western Europe, which have attempted its undoing. The mere fact
of continued war has, of course, made progress in the solution of the
economic problem almost impossible, but the fact that the economic problem
was unsolved, must have made war impossible, if it were not that the
instinct of the people was definitely against Russian or foreign invaders.
Consider for one moment the military position.
Although the enthusiasm for the Polish war began to subside (even among
the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to
their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area of
non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude with
Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of Soviet Russia
is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In 1918 the
Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was
in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flattering letter to the
Kaiser. In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov, Vitebsk and Mohilev.
We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel. In the east, the front which
became known as that of Kolchak, was on the Volga. Soviet Russia was a
little hungry island with every prospect of submersion. A year later the
Germans had vanished, the flatterers of the Kaiser had joined hands with
those who were temporarily flattering the Allies, Yudenitch's troops were
within sight of Petrograd, Denikin was at Orel, almost within striking
distance of Moscow; there had been a stampede of desertion from the Red
Army. There was danger that Finland might strike at any moment. Although
in the east Kolchak had been swept over the Urals to his ultimate
disaster, the situation of Soviet Russia seemed even more desperate than
in the year before. What is the position today! Esthonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Finland are at peace with Russia. The Polish peace brings
comparative quiet to the western front, although the Poles, keeping the
letter rather than the spirit of their agreement, have given Balahovitch
the opportunity of establishing himself in Minsk, where, it is said, that
the pogroms of unlucky Jews show that he has learnt nothing since his
ejection from Pskov.
Balahovitch's force is not important in itself, but its existence will
make it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier of
Poland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polish
population, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmen
may again choose war as the least of many threatening evils. Still, for
the moment, Russia's western frontier is comparatively quiet. Her northern
frontier is again the Arctic Sea. Her eastern frontier is in the
neighborhood of the Pacific. The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupied by no
enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding is the small
semi-circle north of the Crimea. There Denikin's successor, supported by
the French but exultantly described by a German conservative newspaper as
a "German baron in Cherkass uniform," is holding the Crimea and a
territory slightly larger than the peninsula on the main land. Only to the
immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevik propaganda can be ascribed the
opinion, common in England but comic to any one who takes the trouble to
look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on the eve of military collapse.
In any case it is easy in a revolution to magnify the influence of
military events on internal affairs. In the first place, no one who has
not actually crossed the Russian front during the period of active
operations can well realize how different are the revolutionary wars from
that which ended in 1918. Advance on a broad front no longer means that a
belt of men in touch with each other has moved definitely forward. It
means that there have been a series of forward movements at widely
separated, and with the very haziest of mutual, connections. There will be
violent fighting for a village or a railway station or the passage of a
river. Small hostile groups will engage in mortal combat to decide the
possession of a desirable hut in which to sleep, but, except at these rare
points of actual contact, the number of prisoners is far in excess of the
number of casualties. Parties on each side will be perfectly ignorant of
events to right or left of them, ignorant even of their gains and losses.
Last year I ran into Whites in a village which the Reds had assured me was
strongly held by themselves, and these same Whites refused to believe that
the village where I had spent the preceding night was in the possession of
the Reds. It is largely an affair of scouting parties, of patrols dodging
each other through the forest tracks, of swift raids, of sudden conviction
(often entirely erroneous) on the part of one side or the other, that it
or the enemy has been "encircled." The actual number of combatants to a
mile of front is infinitely less than during the German war. Further,
since an immense proportion of these combatants on both sides have no wish
to fight at all, being without patriotic or political convictions and very
badly fed and clothed, and since it is more profitable to desert than to
be taken prisoner, desertion in bulk is not uncommon, and the deserters,
hurriedly enrolled to fight on the other side, indignantly re-desert when
opportunity offers. In this way the armies of Denikin and Yudenitch
swelled like mushrooms and decayed with similar rapidity. Military events
of this kind, however spectacular they may seem abroad, do not have the
political effect that might be expected. I was in Moscow at the worst
moment of the crisis in 1919 when practically everybody outside the
Government believed that Petrograd had already fallen, and I could not but
realize that the Government was stronger then than it had been in February
of the same year, when it had a series of victories and peace with the
Allies seemed for a moment to be in sight. A sort of fate seems to impel
the Whites to neutralize with extraordinary rapidity any good will for
themelves which they may find among the population. This is true of both
sides, but seems to affect the Whites especially. Although General Baron
Wrangel does indeed seem to have striven more successfully than his
predecessors not to set the population against him and to preserve the
loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolute certainty that any large
success on his part would bring crowding to his banner the same crowd of
stupid reactionary officers who brought to nothing any mild desire for
moderation that may have been felt by General Denikin. If the area he
controls increases, his power of control over his subordinates will
decrease, and the forces that led to Denikin's collapse will be set in
motion in his case also. [*]
* On the day on which I send this book to the printers news
comes of Wrangel's collapse and flight. I leave standing
what I have written concerning him, since it will apply to
any successor he may have. Each general who has stepped
into Kolchak's shoes has eventually had to run away in them,
and always for the same reasons. It may be taken almost as
an axiom that the history of great country is that of its
centre, not of its periphery. The main course of English
history throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was never deflected from London. French history
did not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or at
Quiberon Bay. And only a fanatic could suppose that Russian
history would run away from Moscow, to begin again in a
semi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea. Moscow changes
continually, and may so change as to make easy the return of
the "refugees." Some have already returned. But the
refugees will not return as conquerors. Should a Russian
Napoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts)
appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of a
revolutionary war-cry. He will have to fight some one, or
he will not be a Napoleon. And whom will he fight but the
very people who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbed
Aladdin's ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no means
kindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avenge
the breaking of his sleep?
And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polish frontier,
should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack, Russian,
Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, no miracles of
diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows. For all these reasons a
military collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time, even a
concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely.
It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely to
be worse this winter than it has yet been. Forcible attempts to get food
from the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town and
country. There has been a very bad harvest in Russia. The bringing of food
from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make that
impossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequate
transport. Yet I think internal collapse unlikely. It may be said almost
with certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no one left
to defend them. That moment had arrived in the case of the Tsar. It had
arrived in the case of Kerensky. It has not arrived in the case of the
Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons. For one thing, a collapse
of the Soviet Government at the present time would be disconcerting, if
not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies. It would, of course, open
the way to a practically unopposed military advance, but at the same time
it would present its enemies with enormous territory, which would
overwhelm the organizing powers which they have shown again and again to
be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Nor would collapse of the
present Government turn a bad harvest into a good one. Such a collapse
would mean the breakdown of all existing organizations, and would
intensify the horrors of famine for every town dweller. Consequently,
though the desperation of hunger and resentment against inevitable
requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and there throughout the
country, the men who, in other circumstances, might coordinate such
events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort. I do not say that
collapse is impossible. I do say that it would be extremely undesirable
from the point of view of almost everybody in Russia. Collapse of the
present Government would mean at best a reproduction of the circumstances
of 1917, with the difference that no intervention from without would be
necessary to stimulate indiscriminate slaughter within. I say "at best"
because I think it more likely that collapse would be followed by a period
of actual chaos. Any Government that followed the Communists would be
faced by the same economic problem, and would have to choose between
imposing measures very like those of the Communists and allowing Russia to
subside into a new area for colonization. There are people who look upon
this as a natural, even a desirable, result of the revolution. They forget
that the Russians have never been a subject race, that they have immense
powers of passive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea
that they understand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is
difficult not to understand. Any country that takes advantage of the
Russian people in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later,
first that it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given
all Russians a single and undesirable view of the history of the last
three years. There will not be a Russian who will not believe that the
artificial incubation of civil war within the frontiers of old Russia was
not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of so far
weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy. Those who look with
equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe of a
new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign nations,
will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum will set at
loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a struggle which
may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will have done for
Russia.
It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolution may
prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a stricken
civilization. My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russia will
not die without infecting us with its disease. It seems to me that our own
civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, and liable, like a
man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravate the malady. I think
that the whole of the Russian war, waged directly or indirectly by Western
Europe, is an example of this sort of dementia, but I cannot help
believing that sanity will reassert itself in time. At the present moment,
to use a modification of Gusev's metaphor, Europe may be compared to a
burning house and the Governments of Europe to fire brigades, each one
engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of the building. It seems a
pity that these fire brigades should be fighting each other, and
forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact that some of them wear
red uniforms and some wear blue. Any single room to which the fire gains
complete control increases the danger of the whole building, and I hope
that before the roof falls in the firemen will come to their senses.
But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculations as
to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to the changes
in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely to happen
supposing it does not collapse. I have already said that I think collapse
unlikely. Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carry out their
programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrelling of the
firemen as to make that task impossible?
I think that there is still a hope. There is as yet no sign of a general
improvement in Russia, nor is such an improvement possible until the
Russians have at least carried out the first stage of their programme. It
would even not be surprising if things in general were to continue to go
to the bad during the carrying out of that first stage. Shortages of food,
of men, of tools, of materials, are so acute that they have had to choose
those factories which are absolutely indispensable for the carrying out of
this stage, and make of them "shock" factories, like the "shock" troops of
the war, giving them equipment over and above their rightful share of the
impoverished stock, feeding their workmen even at the cost of letting
others go hungry. That means that other factories suffer. No matter, say
the Russians, if only that first stage makes progress. Consequently, the
only test that can be fairly applied is that of transport. Are they or are
they not gaining on ruin in the matter of wagons and engines! Here are the
figures of wagon repairs in the seven chief repairing shops up to the
month of June:
December 1919............475 wagons were repaired.
January 1920.............656
February.................697
March...................1104
April...................1141
May.....................1154
June....................1161
After elaborate investigation last year, Trotsky, as temporary Commissar
of Transport, put out an order explaining that the railways, to keep up
their present condition, must repair roughly 800 engines every month.
During the first six months of 1920 they fulfilled this task in the
following percentages:
January..................32 per cent
February.................50
March....................66
April....................78
May......................98
June....................104
I think that is a proof that, supposing normal relations existed between
Russia and ourselves, the Russian would be able to tackle the first stage
of the problem that lies before them, and would lie before them whatever
their Government might be. Unfortunately there is no proof that this
steady improvement can be continued, except under conditions of trade with
Western Europe. There are Russians who think they can pull through without
us, and, remembering the miracles of which man is capable when his back is
to the wall, it would be rash to say that this is impossible. But other
Russians point out gloomily that they have been using certain parts taken
from dead engines (engines past repair) in order to mend sick engines.
They are now coming to the mending, not of sick engines merely, but of
engines on which post-mortems have already been held. They are actually
mending engines, parts of which have already been taken out and used for
the mending of other engines. There are consequently abnormal demands for
such things as shafts and piston rings. They are particularly short of
Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. In normal times the average number of new
tubes wanted for each engine put through the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15
for engines used in the more northerly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines
in the south where the water is not so good). This number must now be
taken as much higher, because during recent years tubes have not been
regularly renewed. Further, the railways have been widely making use of
tubes taken from dead engines, that is to say, tubes already worn. Putting
things at their very best, assuming that the average demand for tubes per
engine will be that of normal times, then, if 1,000 engines are to be
repaired monthly, 150,000 tubes will be wanted every six months. Now on
the 15th of June the total stock of tubes ready for use was 58,000, and
the railways could not expect to get more than another 13,000 in the near
future. Unless the factories are able to do better (and their improvement
depends on improvement in transport), railway repairs must again
deteriorate, since the main source of materials for it in Russia, namely
the dead engines, will presently be exhausted.
On this there is only one thing to be said. If, whether because we do not
trade with them, or from some other cause, the Russians are unable to
proceed even in this first stage of their programme, it means an
indefinite postponement of the moment when Russia will be able to export
anything, and, consequently, that when at last we learn that we need
Russia as a market, she will be a market willing to receive gifts, but
unable to pay for anything at all. And that is a state of affairs a great
deal more serious to ourselves than to the Russians, who can, after all,
live by wandering about their country and scratching the ground, whereas
we depend on the sale of our manufactured goods for the possibility of
buying the food we cannot grow ourselves. If the Russians fail, their
failure will affect not us alone. It will, by depriving her of a market,
lessen Germany's power of recuperation, and consequently her power of
fulfilling her engagements. What, then, is to happen to France? And, if we
are to lose our market in Russia, and find very much weakened markets in
Germany and France, we shall be faced with an ever-increasing burden of
unemployment, with the growth, in fact, of the very conditions in which
alone we shall ourselves be unable to recover from the war. In such
conditions, upheaval in England would be possible, and, for the
dispassionate observer, there is a strange irony in the fact that the
Communists desire that upheaval, and, at the same time, desire a rebirth
of the Russian market which would tend to make that upheaval unlikely,
while those who most fear upheaval are precisely those who urge us, by
making recovery in Russia impossible, to improve the chances of collapse
at home. The peasants in Russia are not alone in wanting incompatible
things.
