The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1921. RUSSIA AT CROSSROADS

Waikato Times, Volume 94, Issue 14777, 17 October 1921, Page 4

The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. MONDAY, OCTOBER 17, 1921. RUSSIA AT CROSSROADS

Few men have so good a claim to speak with authority on Russia as Sir Paul Vinogradoff, the distinguished Oxford jurist, A Russian by birth, an ex-Professor of History at the Univcrcity of Moscow, a leading advocate of educational, social, and political reform in the Russia of the 90's, an exile for conscience sake, who has won himself a European reputation as an authority on jurisprudence, he brings to his consideration of the complex of questions modern Russia presents an acute and well-trained mind, and an intimate inside knowledge of Russian life, character, and ways of thought. It is the more significant to find him in a recent issue of the Contemporary' Review denouncing Bolshevism and ad its works and ways in the most scathing terms. Bolshevism in its essence he looks on as no more and no less than a manifestation in the sphere of practice of that theoretical communism which has long been coursing like a poison in the veins of the Russian body politic. Its theoretical basis was outlined as far back as 1871 by Dostoyevsky in "The Possessed." "Starting from absolute freedom," says Shigafeff in that prophetic novel- "I arrive at absolute despotism. Mankind must be divided into two unequal parts. One-tenth receives personal freedom and absolute power over the nine other tenths. The latter arc bereft of personality, ami must be converted into a Hock reduced to complete subjection. Through a sequence of transformation"—even in 1871, wc note in passing, it seems there was much virtue in a nebulous phrase! —"they will attain a slate of primitive innocence, a kind of primitive paradise, although they have to work nevertheless." Could the theory of Bolshevism be stated in simpler terms? Or could its practical outcome as shaped by Lenin be more vividly etched than in the following mordantly ironic passage of the same novel? "Each member of the society has to watch over the others, and is obliged to denounce them. Each one belongs to all, and all belong to each. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. ... If necessary, calumny and murder, but, above all, equality. . . . We will kill all desire, we will propagate drunkenness, slander, delation; we will spread un-heard-of immorality; we will drown genius in its infancy." The closeness of the parallel between this acute diagnosis of the implications of Communism and what from time to time leaks out of the actual condition of affairs in Soviet Russia is sufficiently startling, but, Sir Paul Vinogradoff, out of the abundance of his knowledge of Russian history, produces a parallel more startling still. The spiritual fathers of Bolshevism, wc have been told, are Marx and Blanqui, G. Sorel and Bakunin. And no doubt there is much truth in this statement of paternity. But, says Sir Paul, not the whole truth. "There is one more line of tradition to be remembered; the pattern for a Communist organisation is a barrack where conscripts are rationed according to their abilities." This pleasing experiment was tried in Russia as long ago as 1831-33 in the military colonies originated by Arakchecff, Minister of War to Alexander 1., with the view of improving army discipline and implanting in infancy habits of obedience and order. It is impossible fully to describe the experiment here. Suffice it to say that it was unlike Bolshevism in that the material conditions of the colonists' lives were admirable, and like Bolshevism in that the spiritual conditions were unendurable. There was no privacy, there was no liberty, there was no real family life. It is on record that one of the colonists told a priest who was discoursing luridly on the fires of hell that he was not afraid of them, as he had already suffered worse things. The experiment ended bloodily in hopeless failure. It has been reserved for the Bolsheviks to repeat it, and so far, in spite of the hatred they have raised, and the chaos I hey have created, to repeat it with some outward semblance of success. This success Sir Paul ascribes mainly to three causes-—the failure of the Whites to accept the Revolution as a fait accompli and rally the people to their aid against. Lenin and his myrmidons; the vacillating policy of foreign nations; and the appalling convulsion which has shaken Russia to the core of its being. "It is hardly possible," he writes, "for outsiders to estimate the state of utter moral and intellectual confusion in which the Russian people found itself when all the time-honoured instituitions and beliefs had been uprooted and dragged in the mud. Tsardom, the Church, educational establishments and methods, trade, money—everything had been shattered and held up to contempt. The rush towards the professed ideals of a new age—fraternity, the rule of the workers, community of all advantages and enjoyments—set in as a kind of danse macobre led by violence,- hypocrisy, blasphemy, lust. Even men who had read honks on history, economics, philosophy, lost their heads over this wild scene. For the illiterate peasants, half-educated workmen, desperate soldiers, Ihe ancient Troubled Age had arisen again"—Unit age at the beginning of the ITlh century when savage hordes of Tartars were swarming in (•very direction, when whole districts were desolated, and the lirsl of the Romanovs on his way from Kostromi In he crowned til Moscow encountered hundreds of people nf all classes rubbed to Ihe skin, hleediiic:. blinded, maimed, covered with bruises and sore? The economic and industrial failure of Communisl management has, say; .•'■'ir Paul, been flierrAnl and appalling. The educational failure, involving as

it has done the corruption cf thousands of children, and the substitution of propaganda for free research, has been more deadly still. Famine, insolvency, a muzzled press, a Government resting frankly on bayonets—these are some of the refreshing fruits the Bolsheviks have bestowed on Russia. But their soldiers have, after all, fathers and mothers. A succession of Communist rulers is, so Sir Paul holds, inconceivable. The tyranny in time, like other tyrannies, will wear itself out- Salvation will not come from the migrants, or from the Allies. It can only be expected from the elemental crisis in an which is bound to be a'protracted and an agonising one." Sir Paul Vinogradoff is in too close touch with reality to refuse to accept the teaching ,of facts. Easy optimism, and the wearing of rose-coloured spectacles, work no genuine miracles. Truth, as he sees it, is full of pain.