but must be won alongside of them; and it is civilization that makes possible and ensures economic development—and bread. The Russians, even the Bolshevists, are children of the Tsarism in which they were brought up and fashioned for centuries. They managed to get rid of the Tsar but not of Tsarism. They still wear the Tsarist uniform, albeit inside out; a Russian, as is known, can even wear his boots with the soles inside.
The Bolshevists continued to employ the underground tactics which they had long practised. They were not prepared for positive administration but were fit only for a negative revolution, negative in the sense that, in their uncultivated one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness, they were guilty of much superfluous destruction. Particularly do I blame them for having revelled, after a truly Tsarist fashion, in the destruction of human life. Degrees of barbarism are always expressed in the way men deal with their own lives and those of others. In their extermination of the Russian intellectual class, the Bolshevists overlooked the warning example set by Severus when he killed off the old Roman families and especially the families of Senators. Thus Severus barbarized the State and the administration—and hastened the decline of the Empire. Historians may find more recent Russian precedents—in Ivan the Terrible or, apter still, in Stenka Razin.
In point of fact, the Bolshevists stand nearer to Bakunin than to Marx, or follow Marx in his first revolutionary period—1848—before his Socialist doctrine had been worked out. To Bakunin they could appeal in justification of their avowed Jesuitism and Machiavellism. To him they were drawn by their secrecy—which had become to them, as conspirators, a second nature—and by their striving for power, for dictatorship. To seize power and to hold it was their first aim. People who believe that they have reached the highest and ultimate degree of development, who think they have gained infallible knowledge of the whole organization of society, cease to trouble about progress and perfectibility and have one chief and only care—how to keep their power and position. Thus it was during the Catholic Reformation, when the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation arose. So it is in Russia.
Of Russia, the Bolshevists know little. Tsarism forced them to live abroad. Thus they lost touch with their own country. Nor can I say that they got to know the West better. Since they lived in groups of their own, they did not know even the West. They knew enough of it to take an interest in it and to make of it a standard for Russia; and, as they believed
