Leftism

It was not in the industrial West, as Marx had predicted, but in Eastern Europe that socialism reaped its first concrete, tangible victories. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto they also provided for a Danish edition but not for a Russian edition. Yet the Socialist victory in Russia is one of the most important facts in modern history and is worth being a subject of special study. However, there are only three aspects of the Russian Revolution we would like to put under the magnifying glass.

Problem One concerns the question of whether there is something inherently “communist” or collective in the Russian soul.

Problem Two poses the question of whether the Russian Revolution was in any way the “natural reaction” to the “horrors of Czarism,” a swinging of the pendulum to the other side, if not a continuation of the old regime in a new form.

Problem Three leads us to the examination of the factual strength of “Maximalist Socialism,” i.e., of communism at the time of the Revolution.

As to the first question, we must state emphatically not only that there is nothing inherently collective or conformist about the Russian mind and outlook, but that the Russians are extreme individualists with an anarchical bent of mind. Those who defend the theory of the “inborn trend toward collectivism” usually cite the institutions of the mir (land communities) and of the artel’ (common workshops) as well as the principle of sobornos’ (commonalty) in the theology of the Eastern Church. Yet the mir was such an abysmal failure that Stolypin had to liquidate it in the early twentieth century, and sobornost’ has its (admittedly not too close) analogy in the Catholic concept of the Mystical Body. Still the Catholic world no less than the world of the Eastern church has always been the cradle of anarchist parties. It is the world of the Reformation Churches which cultivated strict order, discipline, frugality, conformity, sticking to rules, cooperation, and consensus through massive persuasion and compromise. (In Europe black has always been the symbolic color for Catholics and anarchists!) Russia stood for extremes at all times, but conformity is only possible where the accepted norm is the “happy medium,” the spirit of “fifty-fifty” remote from all absolutes, the juste milieu which Alexander Herzen despised so much.

Russia, Spain, Italy, and France had, by no means accidentally, the largest anarchist parties at the turn of the century. In Russia the Anarchists (S.R., “Social Revolutionaries”) were the ones who committed practically all the acts of violence. The Communists were too shrewd, too clever to engage in mere terrorism. Conspiracy, organization and mass risings were their means.

The anarchical bent of the South and East Europeans (and of the Catholic or Orthodox nations living in other parts of the world) also makes for a proliferation of parties which, together with an uncompromising extremism, render parliamentary life difficult if not impossible. Hence the almost inevitable failure of the “democratic experiment” in that area.

Point Two is concerned with the swinging of the pendulum. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is an often quoted proverb in America and Britain, presupposing a certain “rationality of emotions.” Yet history (like nature) shows that a big fire can produce very little smoke, and a small fire a lot. And before answering the “pendulum” argument, let us remember that the bolsheviks did not replace an absolute or even a constitutional monarchy, but a democratic republic—the republic of Alexander Kerensky, a moderate Social Revolutionary. And if we apply the smoke-fire theory to Germany, then the Weimar Republic must have been unmitigated hell—which was not the case either. Let us therefore burn many of our history textbooks and give up the idea that history makes “sense” in a mathematical or mechanical way. Neither does great drama.

When we talk about Imperial Russia we ought to bear in mind that after 1905 it was in many ways very different from what it had been in, let us say, 1890. One might easily imagine a bearded man with a newspaper under his arm walking across a street in St. Petersburg in 1912. Who is he? A deputy of the bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party—in other words, a bolshevik sitting in the Duma. What sort of paper does he carry under his arm? Pravda. Where did he buy it? There, at the street corner. Of course, before 1905 people were less free, but Vyera Zassulitch, who tried to assassinate the police prefect Tryepov, was acquitted by a jury. Trotsky described how delightful Russian jails were, with what respect political “criminals” were treated by their wardens. Lenin suffered ssylka, exile in Siberia, but simple exile merely meant that one was forced to live in or near a certain village, received a meager pension but was still able to read, write, hunt, and fish. Life in Siberia around 1900 was no worse than life in North Dakota or Saskatchewan at that time. A friend of mine has even seen the copy of the letter Lenin’s wife wrote from Shushenskoye to the Governor in Irkutsk protesting against the insufficient staff she had been alloted.

No doubt certain aspects of the Imperial regime had not improved much even after 1905. There was discrimination against Catholics (but not against Lutherans) in the higher ranks of the administration, but this was also the case in Scandinavia. The Jesuits were outlawed, but they still are in Switzerland. Jews could not reside in the northern and eastern provinces unless they held university degrees or were “merchants first class.” (These restrictions were lifted for those who became Christians: The discrimination was purely religious, not ethnic nor racial.) Only a certain percentage of the university students could be of the Jewish faith, but a numerus clausus of this sort was not unknown in American universities, especially in medical schools priding themselves on their “liberalism.”

It was evident, however, that in Russia the fall of the monarchy in March 1917 had destroyed the center and object of all loyalty. It was impossible to stabilize the country on a juste milieu, in a middle of the road position. Effective opposition against the victorious Communists came only from the right and from the Anarchists. A series of civil wars (1918-1920) followed, fought on a military rather than a revolutionary basis. From these wars the Communists emerged as victors not only because they held the center of the Russian railroad net but also because they had the support of the peasantry which was thoroughly intoxicated by dreams of further land gains.

The Communists promised to divide all estates not owned by peasants. The result was a fairly general adherence of the peasantry to the Communists. (This was less true in the Ukraine or in the Cossack—Don and Kuban—areas.) The “Whites” fought a losing battle because the soldiers (practically all of them peasants and peasants’ sons) ran over to the Red Army which promised them land. After the collapse of the White Armies (which had some battalions consisting of officers and noncoms only), the peasants failed to till the land they had, and new famines were the result, whereupon the Red authorities started to confiscate food. The reaction to this was a further lessening of production: Money, after all, was worthless. Then collectivization had to be enforced. First the kulaks were denounced, attacked, expropriated, and frequently deported. Next the lesser peasants were enslaved. The Russian countryside, far more so than the cities, went through incredible agonies. In a sense this was poetic justice. To this day the agrarian sector of the USSR is the poorhouse of the nation—and its unhappiest part too.

In Russia, however, (and some time later in Germany) these cavities were not only of a religious but of a political nature. It is important to remember that there always will be a more or less obvious, a more or less subtle, a more or less invisible connection between the two. In the case of Russia it was the small, evil glow of communism that lit up the entire dark void until, at last, in our days the residue of Christianity along with the natural protest of man against an inhuman ideology generated a spirit of resistance.