My American Lectures/Russian Bolshevism and its Neighbours
RUSSIAN BOLSHEVISM AND ITS NEIGHBOURS
For many inexperienced observers, as well as interested judges of this great historical question, Russian bolshevism, founded on the principles of universal sociology of Marxian « critical » and « scientific » world-economics, is the beginning of a new era.
More attentive observation, however, quickly shows that the phenomenon is a purely Russian one: not a theory of Russian thinkers based on Marxism, but the inevitable result of long development and, because the past of no other nation contains the same elements, bolshevism, as such, cannot be transplanted, but, at best, can only provoke a corresponding contagion of social reform and economic change in other nations, admittedly under the same title, but necessarily as a heritage of a quite different past and the heir of quite other moral and material necessities of the present.
Communism, in other words, is not a strange doctrine for the Russians, but the doctrinary presentation of certain very old traditions and its adoption in our day meets a hitherto unsatisfied desire of the Russian masses in the historical progress of their country.
I
As early as the 9th century the immense Russian territory contained thousands of scattered villages where life was primitive in the extreme and which were unable by themselves to form a state. The state emanated from beyond the borders of this chaotic leviathan. The Roumanians in the 13th century were able to organise their villages into groups called « judicatures », to govern them by dukes (voevodes) and give birth in this way to the principalities, the imperial « domnii » of Wallachia and later of Moldavia. No foreign conqueror menaced the Danube or the Carpathian slopes to introduce alien political principles, but in the case of Russia this was effected by the incursions of Scandinavian Normans — and in the Carolingian annals Rhos is Scandinavian, notwithstanding Roumanian place-names such as Ruși, Rușciori, or the Saxon Reussmarkt, which seem to give support to the Slavonic theory of the Russians — or more probably South Scandinavian (Byzantine Varegues), because the centre was so far to the South-East as Kiev, and their foundation tended to the possession of Constantinople, which was the goal of all barbarians. Such Scandinavians employed the Slavs without, in their turn, being of service to them. If Sviatoslav, called upon by the Byzantine emperor to destroy the state of the Bulgarians, had continued to rule in Silistria (Durostoron), on the Lower Danube, the capital, which, of all places belonging to the besieged Bulgarians, he preferred, he would have employed Bulgars and Serbs in the same manner. From the first he took the name of « boyar » for his noblemen, then adopted Byzantine architecture for the church of Hagia Sophia, and, for Greek Christianity, the literary forms recommended by Methodius and Cyrill, with cyrillian script. All, for these adventurers of the blood of Rurik, was loot of war, and nothing else.
The Mongols conquered, one after the other, the territories, the « kingdoms » or « knezates » in which the once-united state of the Dnieper was divided by the caprice of the times. As their supremacy was attacked in the 14th and destroyed in the 15th century, so the new unitary state of Moscow, far to the East, was only, as commonly occurs in such circumstances, a Christian copy of the Tartar province. From Ivan Vassilievitch to citizen Benin this Mongol influence, the idolatry of the omnipotent monarch, a tyrant, decreeing by « yarliks-ucazes » or by Communist decrees, remained unchanged. Under a Czar of an Asiatic type, ascending to a Djinghis Khan, the Slav subjects had no rights in their local popular life. Nor have they more today.
Peter the Great europeanised the Asiatic khanate of his predecessors. By cutting the beards of the boyards and by introducing the French « justaucorps », by organising a navy, by translating books of elementary mathematics into Russian he imagined that he had created a new State. Actually it was only a blurred image of its German and Swedish models. And still the Slav masses, living in their village-groups, had no part in the government of the country. They had not yet come of age.
From one despotic illusion to another, Catherine II « frenchified » the inheritance of her stronger predecessor. Her imperious philanthropy would have disposed of, and arranged, all things and all human beings, without their knowledge or permission, on the lines of the French philosophy of her time. By the time Diderot, as a representative of this doctrine, bidden in haste to Russia, had chosen the place which he designed to be the scene of his future work and had arranged and furnished the rooms, but he was sent back, with his due rewards and yet more compliments, to his country. Though much that was French remained, yet up to the end of the 18th century, after fifty generations from the birth of the race, it had failed to produce as much as one solid political idea.
Alexander the First too would have created a new Russia, first in the Napoleonic sense, conducted by a monarchical genius, and then a romantic one, upon the counsels of Mme de Krüdener, who used her influence to persuade him to employ his power as a Messiah — the beginning of the Slav messianism as later represented by the Poles — in praying for the salvation of mankind. The Russians desired neither the one nor the other of these formulae. Nicholas the First, the man for whom « no important person existed in Russia other than him to whom he spoke and then only for as long as he spoke to him », turned Russia into an armed camp with himself as generalissimo. If his son, Alexander the Second, freed the peasant from years-long existence under the communism of the mir, it was not under the pressure of any Russian popular movement (the Nihilists who assassinated him were students and other young men bred to western ideas), but to satisfy the requirements of the age. Alexander the Third reverted to what seemed to him to be the true Muscovite tradition, but Pobiedonossev the retrograde could not, any more than Katkov the Slavophile, be considered an exponent of the Russian nation, his theoretical despotism descending directly from that of mediaeval Byzantium. The « peace-maker of Europe », Nicholas the Second, was the product of his occidental education, untroubled by the voices which, more and more clamorous, could be heard crying from the depths.
Bolshevism dawned for these inchoate masses, at first in whatever manner it particularly appealed to them. All that is foreign will disappear: pedantic Marxism, the new bureaucracy, the ridiculously belligerent irreligion which imagines that religion can be set up and as easily put down by mere decrees, the hero-worship of the chiefs of the movement, the mummified idol of Lenin. But the local form, the soviets themselves, will remain because centuries of Russian history, which sought them unavailing, have gone to their making.
As a proof of this, I myself saw in that Roumanian capital of refuge, Jassy, the conditions which the Bolshevik revolution had fomented and I was able to perceive the existence of two entirely different elements: the popular state of mind and the individual influence of agitators belonging to the daring world of adventurers. Forty thousand Russian soldiers and workers waited in Socola near Jassy, defended by a handful of soldiers under the command of a colonel. The disintegration of a large and splendid army had begun. The first deed was the procession of red flags through the streets, all bearing inscriptions which the poor misguided people could not understand — they were wholly illiterate. The second was the sermon preached at the street corner by the good apostle, wearing the red cockade at his lapel. The Russians usually followed him, the Roumanians contenting themselves with a smile and a derisive shrug of the shoulders. The final point in the affair was the surprise occupation of the Russian headquarters.
A friend of mine was present at this tragic yet ridiculous phase, when the proclamation to the army had to be written, little before the arrest of its leader, General Stcherbatchev, who in less happy circumstances would have been shot next day. The Bolshevik leader was one Roshal, a student, who had boiled officers of the Russian Navy at Kronstadt near Petrograd: he did not possess sufficient command of his own language to draw up the proclamation. Eventually the task was undertaken by Roshal's concubine, a young Jewess of seventeen years of age. I happened to learn of the plot to suppress Stcherbatchev, which was also communicated by my informant to the then President of the Council, Ion Brătianu. In the evening of the same day the Russian general was safe, but Roshal and his lady were arrested by a Roumanian colonel. Conducted to a military prison, they were later handed over to the White Russians, on the basis of an order which later proved to have been forged, and were shot.
The Roumanian capital, the government and the King were spared the menace, but the new psychology of the Russian army itself was being formed. After a few weeks I could see clearly the return to barbarism, common soldiers riding in carriages full of loot and women, after having sold guns and superfluous horses for a few pence, and after having tried to attack such Roumanian cities as offered promise of licence and loot.
How could such men, inspired by such doctrines and with such means at their disposal, produce a revolution? It is plainly incredible.
Never in history was a leading class beset by its adversaries of the masses: always was it this class which, bereft of confidence in its mission, abandoned power voluntarily. It was neither La Fayette, Mirabeau, nor the men of ’89 who brought about the French revolution: or at most they brought it about because they were themselves members of a wholly despondent class, the king and his family, the highest representatives of the nobility and the religion at its head. So it was with Russia. There was no single man with that faith which alone can save a tottering empire, whereas this faith was manifest in nearly all Roumanians.
Some years ago, at a party in Paris, I heard a Grand Duke speaking — after he had reached haven in exile and after the massacre of so many friends and relatives — but not of this he spoke, nor of the future of his country, but of « buds, birds and flowers », and such sentimental romantic things. A great part of what still remains of Russian aristocracy was present; noble women and plump men of child-like and innocent visage, who hung upon his very words as if they were jewels of Holy Writ. It sufficed to make one understand why a throne had toppled to ruin, supported by such people. The reason they had lost power, wealth and all they possessed was because they had wanted to lose it.
II
And now let us compare the foregoing with a picture of socialist development in another country. Socialism and communism are really the same thing, the first being merely the theoretical, inanimate and bloodless image of the second.
In my youth socialism had already penetrated into Roumania. In its initial form it was introduced by students returned from Paris and Brussels. An aristocratic form of preaching, it rallied intellectuals to its flag, sons of the best families, men to whom the apparition of the socialist state actually in being (the days of the Commune were invoked lightly by such as had no experience of their horrors) would have been the most vivid moment of terror in their lives. Most of these meek propagandists were easily tamed in the bitter school of life. Suddenly in Moldavia, the neighbour province of Russia, a preacher of convinced and active character appeared, a Russian exile — perhaps a Jew, perhaps, as many surmised, an American — Doctor Russell. Established in Jassy, he won to his cause a few professors, the brothers Nădejde, both worthy disseminators of educational-science, and the wife of the elder of the brothers, a talented novelist. The review known as « The Contemporary », which was written in an exceedingly vulgar fashion and affected a negligent style of printing, was the creed of the young generation. Socialism in all its aspects, incredulity, negation, was introduced into the higher schools. The Nădejde family were prosecuted and lost their posts as teachers. But the review continued to appear and found a staunch supporter in the person of a young landowner, Basile G. Morțun. He finally became a minister of the Liberal « bourgeoisie », while the elder of the Nădejde brothers, as a journalist, gave his pen to the same party. The second socialist movement failed because the workmen (Roumania then being in its very early industrial infancy) were both few and unprepared, and because the peasant, a hereditary individualist, notwithstanding that the soil had not yet become his property, had no taste for communism. When later, in 1907, a peasant revolution broke out in which thousands of them were killed, it was under the influence of this mystical creed that the students — who had rioted in the National Theatre just a year before against a French play — were called upon by the then Queen Elizabeth to avenge the oppression of the boyards.
A third epoch of socialism of obviously communistic leanings was provoked by that curious personality Doctor Rakovsky, who is now an exile in Siberia. This future ambassador of the Soviets in Paris, whose guests were to eat from the golden platters of his Czarist predecessors, was a Bulgarian by birth, though a Roumanian citizen owning land in the Dobrudja, a doctor and a captain in the Roumanian army. Bad orator though he was, he was idolised by the workers for his dissimilarity to any agitator they had so far encountered. Of great culture, speaking four languages, he wrote scientific articles on economics which were seldom read. When the war with his adopted country began, he was suspected and arrested. He was, however, set-free by a group of former comrades, and, somewhat unexpectedly, was heard in the main square of Jassy demanding the deposition of King Ferdinand who, he declared, he would deliver to Russia in fetters. By the irony of fate it was in that same Russia that he himself was raised to eminence and power, later to meet the exile which he, like many others, was not skilful enough to escape. Today he has become almost a cypher. Nor had he found in the material elements of Roumanian society or in its moral habits that support he had desired.
Now, however, the peasant, the only important member of the community in Roumania, is part-owner and individually proprietor of the soil. What can he gain by dividing it with his fellows?
Because of this, Roumanian communism has some hundreds, even thousands of young Jew adherents, mostly from Bessarabia. They assemble frequently, behave noisily and are dispersed by the police called to protect them from the violence of the public. A fervid but little-gifted apostle, son of a celebrated critic of Russo-Israelitish origin, and an old maid who sought permanent refuge in a Moscow club can hardly be said to have been capable of imbuing with life and inspiration so mean a mob of ignorant people and fools.
I cannot be certain that Bolshevism will not reach London or New York, but I am sure that it will not be by way of Roumania.