munist shreds and patches. As a system, it was a primitive (agrarian) capitalism and a primitive socialism under the control of a primitive State which arose out of anarchical elements that had broken away from a likewise primitive Tsarist centralism. Only the primitive condition of Russia—the mass of illiterate peasants isolated in their villages, the lack of communications, the decay of the army and the bureaucracy in consequence of the loss of the war, the collapse of Tsarism and of Caesaropapism, the bewilderment of political parties and classes—made it possible for a vigorous usurper to bring about the Bolshevist revolution in the chief towns and to establish the rule of a small but organized minority.
On all hands the defects and inadequacies of social and political anthropomorphism were to be seen in Russia. Responsible administrative and military functions were mostly entrusted to young, inexperienced and technically untrained men. The best of them did what they could. They sought and found things long known and already existing. But many of them merely abused their positions and turned them to selfish ends. The integral calculus is beyond beginners in arithmetic. In Lenin’s frequent admissions that mistakes had been made and that there was much to learn, lie something of Russian honesty and also an indictment. Neither in administration nor in politics is it necessary nowadays to invent the alphabet anew. Lack of system and countless improvisations produced the Bolshevist system. Bolshevist semi-culture is worse than no culture at all; its insufficiency and its strange primitivism are revealed in its official adoption of all the monstrosities of so-called “modern art.” Uncritical, wholly unscientific infallibility is the basis of the Bolshevist dictatorship; and a régime that quails before criticism and fears to recognize thinking men stands self-condemned.
Even the mistaken Marxist conception of the State took its revenge upon the Bolshevist administration; for the Marxists never paid sufficient heed to the organization and administration of the State. Anarchism, in the proper sense of the word, or Statelessness, seemed enough for them, and they insisted on the absolute pre-eminence of economic conditions, which they called economic or historical materialism. This Marxist materialism was well suited to the passive Russian character—why bother about anything save bread! But the State, Literature, Science, Philosophy, the Schools and Education, the health and morality of the nation, in a word, the whole civilization of the spirit, are not products of economic conditions
