SOVIET RUSSIA

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 126, 23 November 1935, Page 7

SOVIET RUSSIA

STORY OF REVOLUTION

CONDITIONS UNIQUE

RECURRENCE ELSEWHERE

INCREASINGLY DOUBTFUL

(By "Quivis.") It becomes .increasingly doubtful with the passing of years • whether the Russian Revolution was, as Lenin believed, a prelude to similar upheavals in other countries— W. H; Chamberlin in "The ' Russian Revolution, 1917-1931." Not the least service a scientific historian can perform, like other trained men' who approach a mass of data with a scientific mind, is to remove! misconceptions and misunderstandings \ and; as far as is humanly possible, to establish the truth about a given set of facts, events, and circumstances. This Mr. W. H. Chamberlain has succeeded in doing to a remarkable degree in his recently published monumental work on "The Russian Revolution," reviewed in last Saturday's "Bookman" column in "The Post." In a closely documented narrative of nearly 1000 pages, full of the most searching

analysis, he disposes once and for all of the bogy of Bolshevism sweeping the Western world in violent revolutions like that of Russia between .1917 and 1921, and lays a spectre of revolt which has been almost übiquitous since the end of the Great War. He shows that the Russian Revolution was the product of conditions peculiar to Russia and not likely to be repeated elsewhere, and that if Bolshevik Communism failed to spread to Western European nations in the disturbed years immediately after the war, it is less than ever likely to do so now. So important is this conclusion that it is worth while tracing briefly the reasoning which led to it. TWO BASIC CAUSES. Mr. Chamberlin gives two basic causes of the Bolshevik Revolution. One was the Tsarist system, with all its political, economic, and social implications. The second, and more immediate, was the World War. Russia, under the Tsars, was a medieval type of Eurasian despotism right up to the downfall of the Romanovs in 1917. Says Mr. Chamberlin:— A very noteworthy feature in Russia's development was the absence of any classes or institutions which could impose any check on the autocracy. . . One finds in Russian history no parallel to the. Barons at . Runnymede or to John Hampden refusing, on a point of principle, to pay an arbitrary tax. .. . The Muscovite I State created a sense of popular I strain and oppression which periodically expressed itself in destructive, sweeping revolts that shook the governmental system to its foundations. . . . Three examples of these major upheavals are quoted:—The so-called Troubled Times (1603-1613), recalling ! Boris Gudonov, and the uprisings of jstenka Razin (1670-1671), and Emilian Pugachev (1773-1775). These were all movements of the type of Jack Cade and Wat Tyler in i England in the Middle Ages. The next big upheaval did not take place until 1905, when the first Revolution, following Russia's defeat in the war against Japan, lapsed for want of leadership. In the interval, however, particularly in the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, many members of the Russian intelligentsia worked underground in revolutionary anarchism and nihilism which broke out in the futile assassinations of the Tsar Alexander II and some of his Ministers. This was the period when exile j to Siberia was the fate of the revolutionists who were not hanged outright, and the knout was freely used ' on recalcitrants. The most important event of this period wns the abolition of serfdom by Alexander II after the Crimean War. but under the emancipaj tion the peasants.' as a general rule, received only the land they had culliI vated as their own under serfdom. It was not till after the Revolution of 1905 that Peter Stolypin. Minister of the j last of the Tsnrs. introduced a form of \ ] individual ownership of land designed ! rto create an independent yeomanry, j j such as already existed among the Cos- ■ sacks and interposed an obstacle to the spread of Communism that was not "liquidated" until a few years ago. The only form of local self-govern-; ment Russia had was that of the Zem- i I stvos, or county councils in which the nobility played a dominant role. A forerunner of the Tsar's secret police and the later Cheka and Ogpu of the I Soviets was the Oprichina, whose eraI blem was a dog's head and a horse's tail, "the first symbolising the obliga-' tion to sniff out treason, the second the I i duty to sweep the land clear of rebel- - ! lion." j GROWTH OF PROLETARIAT. j i Ths latter part of the nineteenth cen- | tury gave Russia a proletariat in addi-

tion to her peasantry through industries mainly established by foreign capital. Thus at the beginning of the World War Russia consisted of rough- ,| ly a town proletariat, a far more i numerous, but virtually landless peasantry, with their Obschina or village community as a basis, an intelligentsia of officials, merchants, and industrialists and the upper class of the Tsar and the nobility. There was no real middle class at all. The Duma or Russian Parliament, established after the Revolution of 1905, was a very poor shadow of a Western Parliament. The landed aristocracy chose half the deputies; the wealthy class in the cities 14 per cent.; the peasants 22 per cent.; the city middle class 12 per cent., and the workers 2 per cent. Thus the Duma was far from being representative. Behind all this were the revolutionists conspiring for the downfall of the regime. Of them Mr. Chamberlin says: The conditions under which a revolutionist lived, whether he was dofiig underground work in Russia or participating in emigrant circles abroad, were admirably calculated to produce fanatics, saints, heroes, inquisitors, and neurotics. In this grim I crucible were being forged future Red administrators and managers of socialised industry, future commanders of the Red Army, and officials of the Cheka. EFFECT OF THE WAR. Such was the Russia of the Tsars at the outbreak of the Great War. Russia, as usual, was very badly prepared and the Russian statesman, P. N. Durnovo, in a report submitted to the Tsar in 1914, predicted that "social revolution in its most extreme form" and "hopeless anarchy, the issue of which

cannot be foreseen" would be the re-] suits of an unsuccessful clash with Ger--1 many. The clash was unsuccessful and the prediction was fulfilled. The morale of the.Russian Army was shattered in the fearful campaign of 1915, in which in one single operation the Russians lost 1,410,000 killed and 976.0001 prisoners. The total Russian losses in the war are estimated at from six to eight million dead, wounded, and prisoners. "It is highly doubtful," says the historian, "whether under any conditions the Russian political, economic, and social organism could have stood sucn an ordeal as the World War. But the characters of the Tsar and the Tsarina accelerated and made inevitable the doom of the Romanov dynasty." He quotes the Tsar's impatient remark to the Minister of the Court on the reception of a telegram from Rodzianko. President of the Duma, reporting the rising in St. Petersburg in March, 1917: "This fat Rodzianko has written me some nonsense, to which I will not even reply," and the Tsarina's fond description of.the rascally Rasputin as "Our Friend." The Tsar abdicated first in favour of his son and then of his brother the Grand Duke Michael, who, finding that Rodzianko could not guarantee his personal safety, declined the honour, and Mr. Chamberlin writes:— The Romanov autocracy, with threo centuries of traditional absolutism behind it, fell not as a result of any carefully-planned conspiracy or ooup d'etat, but as a result of an unorganised, almost anarchical popular movement, the success of which was the measure of the inner weakness and decadence of the old order. PASSING OF ROMANOVS. In 1905 the Revolution of that year was suppressed because it developed no strong leadership and because the Tsar had troops on which he could rely to shoot down the mob. In 1917 there was still no leadership—at least at the. outset—but the Tsar this time had no "reliable" troops. Even the j Cossacks in St. Petersburg refused to I fire on the demonstrators and, thougn | I there was some shooting in which the killed, wounded, and injured were estimated at 1315, the troops of the garrison fraternised with the civilians and the Tsar was powerless to do anything. After his abdication he and his family almost pass out of view until they finally vanish altogether in a mans slaughter at Ekaterinburg in July, 1918. Never at any time in the chequered course of the Revolution and the subsequent sanguinary civil war j was there a word raised on either side j ■ for the restoration of the Romanovs. I FROM EXTREME TO EXTREME. Between March and November. 1917. anything short of the return of the Tsarist regime might have happened. Had Russia been a Western country the Revolution would have stopped far • short oi! where it actually did. It j might have gone no further than h did in Germany in 1918-19, if there had been a real, substantial, educated : middle class or a genuine land-owning j j peasantry. But being Russia, a land | lof a vast illiterate, ignorant peasantry. Lan ill-paid, discontented proletariat, a j small, visionary, impracticable intelli-! igentsia and a nobility of great estates j jcut off from the masses, it ran to form j | from one violent extreme to another. The army, demoralised by defeat. I streamed back from the front to their j i homes in open desertion and joined th'_> | j peasantry to which most belonged, in | the forcible seizure of the land. In j the cities the workers similarly took charge of the factories. Where it might all have ended without leadership it is impossible to say, but it is i an open question whether, der.pite all) j that Russia suffered, under the 801-j |sheviks. in the four years of revolu- : tiovi and civil war. an even more terrible fate might not have befallen this I hapless country in Ihe shape of com-' i plete chaos and consequent famine i that might have almost wiped out ths ■ nation. One has only to compare what

■ Ger man y sufiere'd in the Thirty • Years • War with Russia's far briefer ordeal to | realise that Russia was after all lucky jm her Lenin. THE GUEATNESS OF LEXIN. The historian of "The Russian Revolution" is neither a Red nor a White. So far as one can judge he has no political leanings, but is all the while a true scientific historian, following the truth wherever it leads. He has this to say of Lenin:— Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin was a supreme genius of revolutionary leadership, in Maxim Gorky's apt phrase, 'Lenin was. a man who prevented people from leading their accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do." The magnitude of the social revolution which he led to victory speaks for itself. And, far more significant, perhaps, than Lenin's ability to drive on the masses, unleashed after the collapse of Tsarism, to the final act of seizure of power by the Soviets (this was, after all, not so difficult under the conditions) was his subsequent success in building up a new type of State and a new social and economic order. Whatever one may think of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution or of the Soviet State which grew out of it, ths political greatness of the main architect of these sweeping changes is scarcely open to question. The Russian Revolution was in no small degree the result of the contact of two potentially explosive forces: the socially revolutionary teaching of Karl Marx and the peculiar conditions of Eurasian Russia, where the primitive mentality of the povertystricken masses, the repressive traditions of autocracy, the absence of a

moderating powerful middle class, and the numerous sharp, jagged edges of social, economic, and racial antagonisms made the soil singularly propi-1 tious fcr a literal application of Marx's more violent theories. And Lenin, in whom Western education ) and assimilation of Western, econo mic and philosophic theory were strangely and strikingly blended witti some very characteristic Russian psychological traits, absolute faith in his convictions, intolerance of opposition, contempt for compromise, was the indispensable incarnate link between revolutionary theory and Russian revolutionary practice. . . . Yet the political system of government which he sponsored in Russia, a system which might be paradoxically described as a popular dictatorship, a system under which the ultimate source of power is a single party monopolising all the agencies of ■ instruction and propaganda and ruthlessly and systemically extirpating the faintest symptoms of organised political opposition,, has found conscious or unconscious imitation in two large European countries, even though Italian Fascism and German National Socialism would certainly have excited Lenin's fiercest denunciation. And on tho | economic side the Soviet system, with its virtually complex elimination of private profit-making enterprise, with its enormous extension ot the functions of the State, remains distinctive, an inevitable object of favourable or unfavourable comparison with the systems of other countries. EXAMPLE NOT FOLLOWED. Almost up to the day of his death Lenin seems to have believed that a complete and final victory of Socialism in a single country was impossible and this accounts for the aggressive propaganda of Communism abroad thai for some years after the Revolution j and even after Lenin"s death made Russia an outcast among nations and a bugbear to the rest of the world, -t^tsky, one of the great Russian triumvirate of the Revolution, held so strongily to this faith in bringing the rest of the .world into Communism that h'j was expelled from Russia as an international nuisance by Stalin, the third member, who differed from both Lenin and Trotsky in thinking that Russia's j first task was to set her own CommunI istic house in order. How Stalin has ! built the Soviet Russia of today, with !his two Five-Year Plans, on the foundations so deeply dug-and sour.dly laid by Lenin, is before the whole world to see. It is a far cry from Russia of the Revolution to Russia of the Soviets in 1935, a member of the League of Nations, and a firm allj* in the cause of peace. How essentially Russian it all I is and incapable of transfer holus bolus Ito other countries has been left for Mr. Chamberlin convincingly to demonstrate in this epoch-making book of -\ great epoch. "The Russian Revolution." i :~ CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE !— immediately suggests London, the ; throbbing heart of the Empire, centre !of the nation. Government, commerce. and—men's tailoring. Men the world over who desire to keep to the fore |in style matters unhesitatingly look 'to | London for authoritative advice on i matters pertaining to clothes. In future. Wellington men need look no further than E. C. Browne and Co., Ltd., 14 Willis Street, who have engaged Mr. |J. Knox, Graham, an English cutter of {long experience in London, who brings to Wellington the most authentic advice on style matters for men. WelI lington gentlemen are invited to see | the range of new suitings at E. C.' Browne's: prices ranging from £8 Es to £12 12s—Advt,