RUSSIA IN BONDS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22356, 1 September 1934, Page 4

RUSSIA IN BONDS

AUTOCRACY TO BOLSHEVISM " The Crucifixion of Liberty.” By Alexander Kerensky. Translated by 0. Kerensky. Frontispiece Portrait. London; Barker. (£1 2s 6d net.) In 1934 Alexander Kerensky seems to find it as difficult to explain how the Bolsheviks managed to seize control in Russia in 1917 ns he found it in the November of that year when the coup d’etat turned the Provisional Government out of office. The failure of the Kornilov affair had apparently left the group of which he was the leader supreme in Russia; the moderates had apparently triumphed finally over the forces of disruption when, gathering seemingly from nowhere, the Bolsheviks took control of a nation of 160,000,000 people._ Seventeen years later Kerensky is still dazed by the dramatic suddenness of the disaster.

In his latest publication, “The Crucifixion of Liberty,” he has endeavoured to give to the rest of the world some conception of the sequence of events that led the Russia of Alexander I on the bloody road that culminated in the Revolution of February 27. Of that other development among the Russian masses in the months that followed, the development that brought about his_ own downfall, Kerensky can scarcely give so lucid and convincing a history, and for this the reader will have to seek elsewhere than in the pages of Kerensky’s book. But, despite this, “The Crucifixion of Liberty ” must be regarded as one of the most interesting books of the year-. As a study of the Russian psychology, of the growth of the movement within Russia for freedom from the autocracy of the Czars, and an exposition s of the aims and hopes of the revolutionaries by one who was himself a revolutionary the book must take a high place among those which have been written about the political development of Russia within the last 100 years. If he has done nothing else Kerensky has succeeded in dispelling some illusions regarding the state of Russia immediately preceding the revolution. He has shown that the popular conception of a Russia in which the great landowners controlled almost the whole of the country’s agrarian resources is far removed from the true state of affairs. As a matter of fact by the end of 1916, 89.3 per cent, of all arable land was being cultivated by*the working peasant farmer. The Provisional Government as early as April, 1917, abolished all private ownership of land, and what the Bolshevik* have done since for the peasants of Russia represents no progress along the road on which by 1917 they had advanced so far. It is the same tale in respect to the industrial expansion of the country. “The production of the ‘ Americanised ’ Russian industry for the years 1908-13-16 was respectively li, Si, and finally 8i millard gold roubles. Yet in those days a ' Five Year Period of Industrial Construction’ with such splendid results did not cause the population to starve, to go naked, to dream of a piece of soap, of a lump of Bugarj of a needle, or of a button as a luxuries extraordinary.” It was the tragedy of Russia that this development was not accompanied by a similar progress in the field of politics. Deprived of all share In the executive government of the nation, the Russian peasant and the worker remained politically uneducated. When the tall of Czardom transferred the power into their hands they were unfitted for the responsibility. Kerensky realised this, as did Lenin and the Bolshevists, and the most striking commentary on the situation is the fear of the moderates after the revolution that the submerged masses might realise their power before some form of government could be devised that might hope of stability. That hope was doomed not to be realised. The moderates hesitated, the Bolshevists acted, and the only party that might have saved the day for Russian democracy was defeated before it had really started its work. Perhaps Kerensky lacked the qualities of leadership for the creation of a new order of things with the cooperation of a people who scarcely knew at what they were aiming and who among themselves had no fixed unity of purpose. Lenin foresaw the danger, and, having climbed to power upon the backs of the workers, gave them no further opportunity of changing their minds. With his advent the curtain was rung down on an interesting political experiment in which Kerensky was the central figure. "The new structure of post-war soc ty was first subconsciously if not consciously recognised in 1917, the year of revolution, by Russia. Long before the Bolshevist coup d’etat, immediately after the fall of the monarchy, Russia put forward the idea of public economy, the idea of a plan, and placed Labour foremost on the scale of social values.” The " crucifixion of liberty” which followed that coup d’etat effectively closed the period of which Kerensky writes and opened a new one in the history of democracy. W. S.N.