' V»v* w/ xm'S 1 <*.. * ^0 > • #* . »_rfSSh«»^ O 0* *o V £$»**«. ^ ^ V^^> <,-W>^ X**^> ' * »*» %**++ : ***+ »«^^k* O 4* *.*-*yffe^f «• » • * * «Cr \b * •bl? \ v . t • O 4 o° % »• "^ ,.0* .i^'..V .4 c° % .« *°% spogsj %J^9> *\$Wj? °*< LENIN BY M.-A. LANDAU-ALDANOV Authorized Translation from the French NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 681 Fifth Avenue 79U. Copyright, 1022, By E. P. Dutton & Company All Rights Reserved 23- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ©CI.A659137 HARtS'22' V ^ AUTHOR'S PREFACE npHIS book has two purposes in view. * It studies on the one hand a very strong and a very curious personality. No man, not even Peter the Great, has had more influence on the destiny of my country than Lenin. No man, not even Nicholas II, has done it more harm. In speaking of a despot it is natural that I should look for comparisons among men of his own kind! Eussia has given the world great geniuses and profound thinkers. In their effect on the West- ern world not one of them has had an influence at all comparable to that of this doctrinaire who is perhaps not even very intelligent. For this disconcerting situation to become a fact, two world calamities were necessary : the war and the social revolution. They paved the way for the destroy- ers — the Ludendorfs and the Lenins. On the other hand, this book is meant to be a study in social philosophy. The idea of a com- munist revolution is its principal concern. A search for the origins of Bolshevist doctrine leads us back to the theories of Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin and Georges Sorel, who today, after the vi AUTHOR'S PREFACE "acid test" of 1914-1919, stand revealed in a new light. At the very beginning, I want particularly and frankly to forewarn the reader of the general standpoint from which my book is written; so that he may read it or lay it aside according to the character and the strength of his political con- victions. The anthor of this study is a socialist 1 who is, at the same time, a counter-revolutionist and an anti-militarist. These two words are used here not in the factitious and artificial sense in which they circulate in soap-box oratory, but in their strictly literal and precise meaning. One can be an anti-militarist without insisting that the flag be relegated to the dung-heap. One can be a counter-revolutionist without sharing the political ideals of Stolypin. What these words really mean is this : We do not want wars or revolutions, either to- day or in the future. We have seen them close at hand and have had enough of them. These 1 The author belongs to the labor party led by Miakotine and Pechekhonof, former colleagues of Mikhailovsky, and of Tchaikovsky, the present head of the government at Arch- angel. This party is probably the only one in Russia which has stuck to its original platform, the main planks of which are: national defense, free from all chauvinism and all im- perialistic policies; fidelity to alliances; the democratic "bill of rights"; a constituent assembly; a union of all forces recognizing the sovereignty of universal suffrage; the most far-reaching social reforms brought about in a legal manner. This is also the party which took the initiative in the con- ferences leading to the Union for the Rejuvenation of Rus- sia (Revolutionary Socialists, Social-Laborites, Social-Demo- crats and Cadets of the Left). AUTHOR'S PREFACE vii two phenomena are about equal in value whether considered from the point of view of morals or from that of human progress. They are as alike as two peas. We consider them the worst calami- ties that can befall free peoples. All countries of Europe except Eussia have institutions which permit of the conflict of ideas without resort to barricades and machine guns. That is why we hope that the revolution destined eventually to upset Bolshevist tyranny will be the last one. If this is a mistaken hope, so much the worse for Eussia! In another book, Armageddon, written during the years 1914-1917 (in Eussian), I tried to show that the World War meant a terrible crisis (and perhaps ruin) for certain principles which guided the partisans as well as the adversaries of the so- cial order of the old civilization. I was glad to find a similar idea expressed in a recent article by Guglielmo Ferrero. 1 The well-known historian draws a parallel between the crisis of today and that of the third century of our era brought about by the civil wars which followed the death of Alex- ander Severus and which led to the overthrow of the authority of the Eoman Senate. Ancient civili- zation did not survive that crisis. Will ours have a better fate? Has it, or will it find, a principle on which to base a stable social order? This is the problem with which we are faced. It is 1 Guglielmo Ferrero, "La Ruine de la Civilization Antique," Revue des Deux Mondes, September 15, 1919. viii AUTHOR'S PREFACE" certain that one wonld look in vain for such a saving principle among the men who are responsi- ble for the late war, as well as among those who wonld now plnnge us into the abyss of universal Bolshevism. The nightmare which started in 1914 is not yet over. The wine is drawn and we mnst drink. Nothing trner or sadder than this was ever said ! Yes, we must drink the wine that others have drawn. We mnst drink it to the dregs! CONTENTS PAGE Author's Preface v CHAPTER I. The Stages in Lenin's Career ... 1 II. Lenin's Writings from 1894 to 1904 . . 20 III. Lenin's Ideas and Policies during the First Russian Revolution (1905-1906) 33 IV. The Philosophical Ideas of Lenin . . 45 V. Prophecies in General and Those of Lenin in Particular 59 VI. The Personality of Lenin 71 VII. The Theories of the Social Revolution: Marx, Bakunin and Sorel .... 93 VIII. Some Fundamental Ideas of Bolshevism 123 IX. Lenln and the French Revolution . . 142 X. Semi-Bolshevism : the Platform of the French Socialist Party 165 XI. The Socialism of the Near Future : Jean Jaures 186 XII. Theories That Are Dead and Ideas That Endure 210 IX LENIN PART I CHAPTER I THE STAGES IN LENIN'S CAREER IT is not my intention to give the reader a detailed biography of Lenin. A few facts of his life are necessary, however, to fulfill my larger purpose. I have taken them almost entirely from Bolshevist sources, especially from the volume which Zinoviev, the intimate friend and colleague of Lenin, has devoted to the present master of Russia. 1 The tone of beatified admiration which penetrates this book is very striking. So true is it that every Don Quixote has the Sancho Panza he deserves! Let me begin by marking some of the crucial stages in Lenin's life, reserving for later chap- ters an account of the ideas of the Bolshevist leader and their evolution. Vladimir Iliitch Oulianov, who has won world- wide notoriety for himself in the last few years under the pseudonym of " Lenin,' ' was born on April 10, 1870, at Simbirsk. His father, a "state 1 G. Zinoviev, N. Lenin, W. J. Oulianov (in Russian), Pe- trograd, 1919. 1 2 LENIN counselor," was superintendent of the public schools there. This school superintendency was a rather high position under the old Ministry of Education. Its incumbent had a right to the title of "Excellency" in Russia. Lenin conies from the hereditary nobility. A legend, now widely circulated, even boasts of the antiquity and the riches of the Oulianov family. But Zinoviev says, perhaps as a sop to the demo- cratic sensibilities of the public, that the father of Lenin was of peasant origin. It would in any event be very difficult to draw conclusions as to the " influence of environment and heredity" on the personality and actions of Lenin. His nature is a remarkable combination of the pretentious violence of the country squire with the elementary shrewdness of the peasant. Lenin was still in school when a tragedy — one of the common tragedies of the old Revolutionary agitation — took place ; and in it his elder brother played the leading role. At this time the Narod- naia Volia 2 party which was carrying the entire burden of the revolutionary struggle at the end of the reign of Alexander II, had been driven out of existence. This party organized a series of attempts on the Czar's life, the last of which, that of March 1 (March 13), 1881, was successful. A large number of the conspirators were hanged. 2 "The Will of the People." The word Volia has a double meaning in Russian: will, but, in poetical language, also liberty. THE STAGES IN LENIN'S CAREER 3 Herman Lopatine, 3 the last of the party's leaders, was arrested and thrown into the Schlusselburg prison. The unequal struggle between a handful of intellectuals and the most powerful autocracy in history seemed tb" be over. Brutal reaction ex- emplified in Alexander III and in Pobiedonostsev, his favorite adviser, triumphed. But the ideas which inspired the party, and especially the idea of fighting absolutism by terrorism, had not lost value in the eyes of the Russian intellectuals. The principal theorist of the Narodnaia Volia party, Nicholas Mikhailovsky (the famous publi- cist, sociologist, and literary critic), maintained, later on, that the terrorist attacks failed to realize their objective — the political freedom of Russia — not because they were pushed too far, but because they were not pushed far enough. The impression produced on the Russian mind by the assassina- tion of Alexander II was very great. If Alex- ander III, who was much more reactionary than his father, had met with the same fate in spite of all the precautions of an improved police sys- tem, reaction might, quite possibly, not have been able to stand this second blow. That, at least, was the belief of the younger revolutionary set to which the student, Alexander Oulianov, Lenin's 3 This famous revolutionist, the intimate friend of Marx, and admired by Herzen and Turguenev, died in 1919. In spite of the extreme poverty of his last days he disdainfully refused the pension offered him by the Bolshevist government which he hated. 4 LENIN elder brother, belonged. A new attempt, this time on the life of Alexander III, was prepared by a small gronp of young men of which he was the leader. It was to take place March 1 (March 13), 1887, on the sixth anniversary of the death of Alexander II. The Czar was to be bombed on the Nevsky Prospect. But the police, warned ahead of time, caught the terrorists red-handed with the bombs in their pockets; and success- fully forestalled the attack. Alexander Oulianov and four of his comrades were hanged in the jail- yard of the Schlusselburg fortress. This tragedy, known as "the affair of the second First of March,' ' gave the death-blow to the Narodnaia Volia. This party held to theories known in the history of Eussian thought elieve that the proletarization of the peasant nasses could contribute to the cause of universal )rogress. At the beginning of the '90s this mixture of itopian and of sound ideas, for which so many Russians struggled and died, met with very dolent opposition from the younger generation low being brought up on the theories of Karl tfarx. A struggle started between Mikhailovsky tnd his school, on the one hand, and, on the other, he Marxians, whose main protagonists were ?lekhanov, the leader of the Social-Democrats, md Struve, who now belongs to the Right of the ^adet Party. This famous controversy between ^opulists and Marxians is really not yet over. tWen today two Russian socialist parties, the Social Laborites and the Revolutionary Social- sts, follow the ideas of Nicholas Mikhailovsky rejecting, of course, those which have been re- lated by experience 4 ) ; while Marxism remains he theoretical basis of the Social Democratic 3 arty. Alexander Oulianov belonged, so it seems, to 4 Mikhailovsky himself realized that it was impossible for tussia to avoid the capitalistic stage of economic develop- nent. 6 LENIN the generation of Populists which was already- familiar with the ideas of Karl Marx. Just before the attack of March 1, 1887, he was planning, with M. Koltzov, the publication of a " socialist library," the first pamphlet of which was to be an article of Marx's on Hegel's philosophy, trans- lated by him. 5 Vladimir Oulianov (Lenin), after finishing his course in the lycee, went to study law at the Uni- versity of Kazan. At that time he frequented the small groups of students engaged in studying Populist literature; but he deserted this camp the moment he discovered Marx. Having been expelled from the University of Kazan for "tak- ing part in agitation," he went to Petrograd where he passed the State examinations in law. This was the Eussian equivalent for admission to the bar. "The legal career," says Zinoviev, "did not appeal to Comrade Lenin. Vladimir Iliitch often spoke humorously 6 of his few days 'in the toga.' " He gave up legal practice almost immediately and became a "professional revolutionist." Rus- sia is the only country left where revolution is a profession; and this "Russian trait" is of no slight importance in the history of modern Russia ; a great many of the politicians who played an important part in the events of 1917-1919 5 D. Koltzov, "The End of Narodnaia Volia and the begin- nings of Social-Democracy. The '80s" (in Russian). e Humor is nevertheless a quality which Lenin seems to lack entirely. THE STAGES IN LENIN'S CAREER 7 are revolutionists by profession and have never learned any other trade. ' ' When Lenin was expelled from the University of Kazan," M. Zinoviev tells us, "he came to Petrograd. Already inoculated with the ideas of Marx at Samara, he went through the capital on a hunt for Marxians. But he did not find any. The Populists were masters still; and the work- ing class was just beginning to take an interest in politics. Young Comrade Lenin, however, in less than two years, organized the first groups of working men and gathered about him a small number of Marxian intellectuals." In the early '90s Lenin took part in the forma- tion of the "Union of Struggle for the Freedom of the Working Class." "Acting in the name of this organization, he managed our first strikes, and wrote his first simple and unassuming pam- phlets — they were circulated in mimeograph copy —in which he voiced the economic needs of the workers of Petrograd. He spent day and night in the workers' tenements. The police persecuted liim. He had only a small circle of friends. Almost all the self-styled ' revolutionary intel- lectuals' of the day greeted him coldly; for about this time the Populists were proscribing Marxians rnd burning the first Marxian works of Pelk- lanov in which Lenin had studied." One can see from this quotation the "passion ? or style" (as one of Gogol's characters said) vhich is characteristic of M. Zinoviev 's talent and 8 LENIN which leads him to exaggerate the truth (exag- geration is also one of his accomplishments) by making the young Lenin a kind of unappreciated prophet persecuted by the wicked Populists, who, by implication are represented as acting in con- junction with the police! In reality Lenin was doing in Petrograd just what hundreds of other men were doing at that time. He was attracting no particular surveil- lance from the authorities; and certainly "almost all the self-styled revolutionary intellectuals of the day" were paying very little attention to him. Let us remark in passing, that Lenin's im- prisonment (to say nothing of Zinoviev's) was very short and does not bear comparison 7 with the real martyrdom suffered by many of these Populists who are today being treated as "reac- tionaries" by the Bolshevist rulers of Eussia! The persecution he is said to have undergone at the hands of the mysterious Populists who "burned the books of Plekhanov" is pure fiction. On the contrary, the period which Lenin himself called the "honeymoon of genuine Marxism" was approaching. "Marxian books," as he writes, "were appearing one after the other. Marxian newspapers and Marxian magazines were being founded; everybody was posing as a Marxian. Followers of Marx were being coddled and made much of, and publishers were rubbing their hands 7 This is equally true of Trotsky, Lunatcharsky, Kamenev, and all other outstanding Bolshevist leaders. THE STAGES IN LENIN'S CAREER 9 in glee over the unheard-of vogne of Marxian books." 8 Towards the end of the '90s, Lenin was arrested and sent into exile. From that time on he became an " emigre' ' and remained one, save for a few short interruptions, nntil 1917. In 1901, together with Martov and Potressov, Lenin founded a magazine called Iskra (The Spark), which has played an important part in the history of the revolutionary movement in Kussia. For two years later the Russian Social- Democratic Party, founded in 1898, split into two factions, Bolshevist and Menshevist. Lenin re- signed editorship of Iskra (Menshevist) and founded the first Bolshevist organ, Vpered (For- ward). In 1905 "the first, the historic, Congress which laid the foundations for the Communist Party of today" (the third Congress of the Social-Democratic Party) was held. This Con- gress was inspired and directed by Lenin. With the division of the party into two factions, he became the undisputed leader and the recognized mouthpiece of the Bolshevists. In 1905 the first Russian revolution began. M. Zinoviev characterizes the part which Lenin played in it as "something immense, something decisive." He is quite right ! Lenin lost the first Russian revolution. The measures he was advocating at this time 8 N. Lenin, the essay entitled "Que Faire?," in Twelve Years (in Russian, Vol. I, p. 195. 10 LENIN were as follows: boycott of the Duma; struggle against the "counter-revolution of the Cadets ;" organization of an armed uprising for the estab- lishment of a revolutionary and democratic dic- tatorship. We will have something more to say of these ideas, when we come to consider his pamphlet on "Two Tactics of Social Democracy.' ' Lenin had a wrong impression of the respective strength of the two camps in this struggle; and the Menshevists speak of his error as a crime. But the events of 1917, though they took place under conditions far different from those of 1905, have shown that the Menshevists probably exag- gerated the importance of the conservative forces in Bussia. From an external point of view, the role of Lenin in the revolution of 1905 was somewhat overshadowed. The Soviet of Workers' Deputies of Petrograd was founded and run by the Men- shevists. Its first president was Khroustalev- Nossar, and its second, Trotsky. Lenin did not take any part in it. "He was present," says M. Zinoviev, "at only one or two of the meetings of the Soviet of Petro- grad in 1905. Comrade Lenin told us how he attended the session of the Soviet in the hall of the Free Economic Society, sitting in the gallery, invisible to the public, and for the first time watching the Soviet of Workers' Deputies of Petrograd in action. Comrade Lenin was living in Petrograd illegally, and the Party forbade him THE STAGES IN LENIN'S CAREER 11 to appear in public too openly. The official repre- sentative of our Central Committee at the Soviet was A. A. Bogdanov. When the tip was passed around that the Soviet was to be arrested, we forbade Comrade Lenin to go to that last historic session so that he would not be involved. He saw the Soviet only once or twice in 1905. But I think that even then, while he was looking down from the gallery of the Free Economic Society upon this original 'workers' parliament,' the po- tential power of the Soviets first dawned upon his mind. ' 9 In 1907 Lenin went abroad again. "Lenin was an exile twice," M. Zinoviev tells us. "He spent several years abroad. Some other comrades, myself among them, shared his second period of exile. And whenever we were sad and dejected, especially toward the last, dur- ing the war, whenever we lost courage (those comrades who have been exiles like us know what it means not to hear a word, of one's native tongue for years and years), 9 Comrade Lenin used to say to us: 'What are you fellows com- plaining for? Do you think you know what ban- ishment means ? Plekhanov, Axelrod — they knew real exile. They had to wait twenty-five years before seeing the first revolutionary workingman ! ' 9 One is agreeably surprised to learn that Zinoviev suffered so much in the cafes of Geneva at not hearing his "Russian native tongue." But he naturally says this out of that same "passion for style" and for the benefit of comrades who have not been in exile; because those who were know very well that our exiles hear nothing but Russian. 12 LENIN "Vladimir Iliitch, indeed, suffered in exile like a caged lion. He could make no use of his great and inexhaustible energy; and he got along only by doing what Marx had done under similar circumstances. He spent fifteen hours a day in the library, and it is partly due to this that he is today one of the most learned Marxians, and on the whole one of the best read men of our age." M. Zinoviev is undoubtedly an entirely com- petent judge on this point. Lenin published several pamphlets abroad and supervised the publication of several Bolshevist papers. In 1912 he settled in Cracow in order to direct the Bolshevist movement in Russia at closer range. His devoted friend and most in- timate collaborator in the movement in Russia was then Malinovsky, a Social-Democratic mem- ber of the Duma. Malinovsky had been a secret agent of the Police Department. There were y means of which the philosophers, in the pay of capital, have been able to cheat the proletariat for centuries. And his book does indeed reveal the most carefully guarded mysteries of bourgeois philosophy. The proletariat can learn, for example, that "according to the system of Descartes, the world is organized like a manufacturing enterprise ' ' and that "the Cartesian concept of man is a repro- duction of the organization of a factory" (p. 27). The conception of time with the same philosopher is the result of an "innovation brought in by in- dustry,' ' of which, as the author confides, some idea can be had from the description given in the 16th century by a certain Meudorger of the typo- graphical plant of the Kobergers where the work- ers had to start working at a "fixed hour" (p. 30). Spinoza is presented in a still worse light: Spi- noza's concept of the world is "a hymn to tri- umphant capital, to capital which absorbs and centralizes everything! ... A sublime, an en- chanted system! — such is the almost universal idea of the Spinozian concept of the world. . . . A man far removed from all earthly thoughts, the ideal type of the thinker devoted entirely to pure speculation! This is the almost universal idea of the personality of Spinoza. . . . But . . . when Spinoza died, the hearse which carried his remains was, as everybody knows, accompanied THE PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF LENIN 55 with great pomp by the flower of the Dutch bour- geoisie; and if we look more closely at the circle of his friends and acquaintances we find there the flower of the bourgeoisie not only of the Nether- lands, but of the whole world. The bourgeoisie thought of Spinoza as its 'bard' " (p. 42). After this the reader will not be astonished to learn that "the God of Liebniz is the proprietor of a wonderfully organized factory" and that the "philosophy of Liebniz is the deification of the constructive genius of the manufacturing inter- ests" (p. 45). But the most notorious represen- tatives of "manufacturist thought" are Hume and, especially, Kant (pp. 72-79): "As long as the elasticity of the manufacturist capital of the 18th century is not very great . . . the icleal- ogist of the German bourgeoisie [Kant] finds it possible to defend the static conception of the soul" (p. 79). Chouliatikov has also revealed the secret meaning of Fichte's syllogisms: "They are a hymn to specialization: differentiation between concept and function" (p. 92). Nor does he hide from us the fact that the whole of contemporary philosophy serves to justify mod- ern capitalism. "The doctrine of Avenarius on coordination, that of Mach on the relation between the physical and the psychic, that of Wundt on object representation, all are doctrines of the same sort, examples of the solution of the same problem put before the ideologists of the van- 56 LENIN guard of the capitalistic bourgeoisie — examples of attempts to reproduce by means of philosophic symbols the way in which the bourgeoisie explains the increase, and, at the same time, the defeat of the forces of its organizing geniuses ! ' ' The reader who comes across this gibberish will probably enjoy a few moments of subdued mirth. Let him not forget, however, that we are here confronted by a manifestation of a mania for per- secution which, under certain political conditions, can prove to be far from inoffensive. So long as it is a question of accusations brought against Spinoza and Leibniz all this is not very serious. But we must realize that Eussia is governed to- day by Chouliatikovs, that Lenin is a Chouliatikov, and that the Extraordinary Commission — in addi- tion to all kinds of common bandits— is made up of a goodly number of Chouliatikovs. I am not exaggerating when I say that thousands of Eus- sians were shot by the Bolshevists on accusations of counter-revolutionary conspiracy just as well grounded as the charges of a secret alliance be- tween Spinoza and the bourgeoisie of the world, or the attributions of a "manufacturist" char- acter to the philosophy of Liebniz and Kant. Without making Lenin responsible for all the "philosophic" notions of Chouliatikov, we can see exactly the same mentality working in the two authors ; and we can well understand that the com- ing into absolute power of a man who was able THE PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS OF LENIN 57 to write such a book is a very serious danger to our thirty centuries of civilization. For what, indeed, is the difference between Lenin and the Kaliph Omar who burned the library of Alexan- dria? "If these books contain what is in the Koran they are useless. If they contain what is not in the Koran they are harmful I ' ' If you sub- stitute the word "Anti-Duhring" for the word "Koran," you will have the exact attitude of Lenin. Moreover, he has said himself that "books will be the undoing of the social revolution, ' ' and he was perfectly right. If he were disposed to be absolutely consistent today, if his actions were not limited to some extent by the more enlightened influence of Lunatcharsky and others, to what fur- ther trials would unhappy Eussia not be exposed? In the Soviet Republic the natural sciences might be tolerated at a hazard ; for a Judas Mach would not be able to exploit them for reactionary deduc- tion. But mathematics, which are infected with the germ of idealism, might present some danger. Philosophy and the humanities would be forbid- den outright; for the Humes and Kants have no other aim but that of cheating the worker at the pleasure of the employer who gives them their pay. As for the Avenariuses, the Schubert- Solderns, and the Menchekovs, their place would obviously be in prison . . . unless they were to be shot, as the real Menchekov was actually shot. The affair of the "cowardly" Chwolson and of 58 LENIN the " Black-Band' ? Lopatin would directly con- cern the Extraordinary Commission in its strug- gle against counter-revolution, against speculation, and against philosophy. It must be seen to that professors teach only what is in the "Anti-Diihr- ing." As for art, it is, in its very essence, abso- lutely "Meistic," and as such would be merci- lessly suppressed! Do not imagine that this is an exaggeration of Lenin's views. What other conclusion could be consistently reached by one who knows all the truth, the supreme truth ; and who calls everything which does not agree with the truth, to be mad, reactionary and ' ' cowardly. ' ' The Shakespearian imagination of Ernest Eenan conceived the ter- rible spectre of a savage threatening civilization, of a drunken Caliban taking vengeance on every- thing that came his way. Bolshevism is the realization of that dark vision. Calibanism in philosophy! Cannibalism in politics! That is what Lenin has given to the world. CHAPTER V PROPHECIES IN GENERAL AND THOSE OF LENIN IN PARTICULAR REALIZE that in this chapter I must attack A a legend which seems to be indestructible: in the minds of many people, often of people who are far from being his admirers, Lenin remains ' ' the man who foresaw everything. ' ' Not long ago Humanite, the French socialist organ, published the following statement which shows a certain phase of the voluntary blindness one notes in the Parisian cult of Russian heroes : "More than a year ago," says Humanite ', "at the time when Viscount Grey was publishing his pamphlets on the League of Nations, the People's Commissar, Lenin, denounced him as the instru- ment of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy. Lenin has a genius for sensing unsuspected connections be- tween things, though he paints them so black that his revelations, because of the surprise they cre- ate, often find many of us incredulous at first. But as time goes on and as we become more famil- iar with the style and thought of this great mind, we eventually have to admit that besides a rich and highly-developed philosophic insight, he has 59 60 LENIN a keenness of perception which alone would make him one of the most famous statesmen in history. The article from the Times which follows is a complete justification of Lenin's prophecy.' ' This extraordinary preface is followed by a quotation from the Times, which says that Eussia must choose between "becoming a part of the family of nations," or "falling into the position of being a vassal of Germany." Without touch- ing upon this question in any way, we may express some astonishment at the fact that denuncia- tions of the "bourgeois" foundation of Viscount Grey's ideas, which during the war were common enough in the Socialist Press of Germany, should be considered as proof of Lenin's genius, of his "powerful mentality," "philosophic insight," and "keenness of perception." Moreover, all the praise of the Bolshevist leader's genius for polit- ical prophecy is practically of the same character. When one asks Lenin's admirers for details of his prophecies, they usually say that the Bolshe- vist leader predicted that the war would end with the revolution. I do not dispute this claim of his to glory (granted that it is one) ; nor do I dispute the fact that he has a certain narrow-minded sagacity. I think, however, that he has shown this much more brilliantly in other matters (especially in his leadership of the Bolshevist movement) than in this famous prophecy. PROPHECIES 61 For indeed, what was it to predict that the Euro- pean war would end in a revolution? What was it to say that "the guns of the proletariat of every country will be turned in a very different direc- tion from that in which the aggressors of the im- perialistic bourgeoisie would wish to see them turned f" This is only repeating a commonplace of rev- olutionary talk, one which was familiar every- where before the war, in all propaganda pam- phlets, in all speeches at Socialistic meetings, and on all occasions when people discussed questions of capitalist politics, colonial enterprises, arma- ments, disarmaments, the chauvinism of the bour- geoisie, or the brotherhood of the proletariat. Lenin remembered this platitude at the time the Great War broke out ; and it is on this little exer- cise of memory — let us admit it was a lucky guess ■ — that people are basing his claim to immortality today. For that matter, we must remember that Lenin shares this title of "seer" with Zinoviev; 1 and yet everybody knows from all accounts, the limitations, as regards foresight, of Lenin's dis- tinguished alter ego. The prophecies — by all sorts of people — relat- ing to the great tragedy which began August 1, 1914, generally fall into three distinct classes: 1 The articles which these two writers published in Switzer- land during the war were compiled in Petrograd in 1918, in a large volume which bears the title "Against the Current/' The name of Zinoviev ctfmes before that of Lenin. 62 LENIN 1. Most of the witnesses of this drama, men of all parties and intellectual leanings, thought that this war wonld develop like all others; that there wonld be victories and defeats, victors and vanquished, secret negotiations and open nego- tiations; that there wonld first be an armistice and then a treaty of peace ; after which life wonld go on again pretty mnch as it did before the war. Opinion, of conrse, was very mnch divided on the question as to which of tire two coalitions wonld be victorious ; everybody also thought that the war would be infinitely shorter than it turned out to be. In this class (in the pro-Ally camp as well as among the pro- Germans) there were a majority and a minority. It was the majority view to believe — and sincerely — in the possibility of a " righteous ' ' victory and a "righteous" peace. The Fourteen Points had not yet been formulated ; but the political aspirations which later found a badly written expression in the program of Pres- ident Wilson were in evidence in both camps. People did not agree as to which side represented "righteousness"; but in any event, "righteous- ness" was to prevail. On the contrary, the minority, "those who re- fused to be fooled," attached much less impor- tance to "righteousness." They believed, often without caring to proclaim it too openly, that victory would be the triumph of force; and that PROPHECIES 63 the war would not only be very nrach like all other wars, but that the peace which would mark its end would be very much like all other pacifi- cations: the triumph, that is, of the national ra- pacities of the victors. They were certain that the " noble candor" of the men who were looking for noon at ten o'clock in the morning, and for justice where there could be no justice, would be disappointed once more. Now, as is well known, nobody, except every- body, has more wit than Voltaire. Taken all in all, everybody was more or less right. The war, as both majority and minority expected, had its victories and its defeats, its conferences and its Armistice; and finally its Treaty of Versailles which, while it incarnated the victory of the " righteous,' ' as half the world believed, is not as the cynics predicted, without some likeness to that of Brest-Litovsk or to those of Frankfort or Campo-Formio. The Paris Conference, with its mysterious Councils of "Four" and "Ten," was not very different from other assemblies of the kind; it was practically the Congress of Vienna — without the fancy dress balls. Nevertheless, from a more general point of view, both the "majority" and the "minority" were not quite right. They mistook the scale of the great war. They failed to grasp the reality of those phenomena which bear the names of Bolshevism, civil war, and Terror. Whatever the outcome of these formidable disturbances, which 64, LENIN are to be noted in some form everywhere, Europe will not be the Europe it was before. In this sense the late war was decidedly not like other wars. 2. But to other observers the question of the World War had a very different aspect. They took no stock in the " righteous peace" business; but neither did they think that this war was like other wars. They thought that it would lead to revolutions as savage and bloody as the war itself. But not convinced of any Providential mission assigned to the proletariat, they expected only an increase in universal savagery to result from the world conflict. A priori they could not grant that a catastrophe such as the World War could have any really good results, whether in progress toward the brotherhood of the peoples or in increased material well-being brought about by revolutionary changes in the economic regime. In their eyes the idealists who thought that uni- versal brotherhood would be the outcome of the most bloody of all wars were being as roundly fooled as the " realists' ' of the various imperial- istic schools who expected victory to bring an increase in the riches of their respective coun- tries. To expect five years of savagery to en- gender the brotherhood of man was, in their view, as naive as to think a Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway would pay the billions the war would cost. The people in this category were, as the event proved, those nearest the truth. I trust I may PROPHECIES 65 be allowed to make that statement although I am of their number. 2 Yes, they were right in saying that nothing good could come out of the world catastrophe; and that, if this war ended in a decisive victory for either side, the victor would impose his stern will on the vanquished without bothering much about justice and ethnographical frontiers. Yes, they were right in saying that the brutality of the human animal, which was let loose in 1914, would of necessity give a stamp of horror to those subsequent convulsive movements which the Zimmerwaldians had heralded as "liberating revolutions.' ' Yes, they were right in pointing out, at the height of the military successes of the Germans in 1918, when Hindenburg's army was at Chateau-Thierry and when German imperial- ism seemed to be triumphant, the great fragility of this triumph and of the entire political struc- ture of Bismarck. Yes, they were right in think- ing, with Lenin and contrary to opinion in gen- eral, that revolution was a great probability in the country which suffered most from the war. And the near future will show that they were all right, as against Lenin, in holding that the communist regime could not become firmly grounded in a ruined and devastated Europe ; and that its famous social revolution, the "last revo- 2 I developed these ideas in an article entitled "The Drag- on," written at the beginning of the war; and in my book Armageddon (July, 1918), in which that article was incor- porated. 66 LENIN lution," was just as absurd, and even more savage and hateful, than the "last war!" In view of the abstract evidence for such prophecies and their generality in bearing, there is no ground for vanity in having made any one of them. I consider the historical prophet, in a true sense of the word, an impossibility, except for a few exceptional cases. So long as philoso- phers have not found any way of disposing of "His Majesty Chance," we will have to give that gentleman credit for a very great part in the direction of human affairs! For that reason, when we hear that So-and-so "foresaw everything from the first day of the war," we are, a priori, dealing with a legend. 3. Lenin and his few acolytes made up the third class of intellectuals in 1914. They believed that the World War would end in a world revo- lution which would overthrow the capitalist regime and set up the era of communism in its stead. From the beginning of the war, Lenin expressed his ideas on the course that should be taken, as follows : "War is not an accident nor a sin as the Chris- tian popes (who like all opportunists preach patriotism, humanitarianism and pacifism) be- lieve; but an inevitable part of capitalism, as legitimate a form of capitalistic life as peace. The war of the present day is a war of peoples. ... Conscientious objectionism, strikes against PROPHECIES 67 war, and all such stuff are utter rot — a miserable, cowardly pipe-dream! What idiot believes that an armed bourgeoisie can be whipped without a fight? It is sheer lunacy to talk of abolishing capitalism without a terrible civil war or a series of terrible civil wars! The duty of socialism rather is to agitate for the class struggle during war. The task of turning a war between peoples into a war between classes should be the only concern of socialism, when an armed imperialistic conflict arises between the bourgeoisies of the various nations. Away with this sentimental, hypocritical and foolish claptrap of " peace at any price !" Up with the flag of civil war! "The Second International is dead, the victim of opportunism! . . . The Third International inherits the task of organizing the forces of the proletariat for a revolutionary attack upon the capitalistic governments, for civil war against the bourgeoisie of all nations, for the attainment of political power, and for the victory of social- ism !" 3 As for the immediate causes of the catastrophe, Lenin seemed to believe, along with a general ac- cusation against international capitalism, that the war was a defensive war for Germany who was threatened on all sides. "We know," he said, "that for scores of years three brigands (the bourgeoisie and gov- 3 N. Lenin, The Social-Democrat, No. 39, November 11, 1914. 68 LENIN ernments of England, France and Eussia) were preparing to attack Germany.. Should we be surprised because two of the brigands started the attack before the three received the new knives they had ordered?" 4 Hence the socialists should attack the two coalitions of brigands at the same time. This is the general idea which influenced Lenin's policies on the extreme left at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, where his influence was predominant. From this point of view he did not deviate, in theory; though, practically, his action was useful to Ger- many, since his work of disorganization attained in no Teutonic country the degree of perfection it reached in Eussia. However, to repeat, this theory of Lenin was a commonplace in revolutionary pamphlets before the war. For real prophecies — and here I direct- ly approach the legend I mentioned above — for real prophecies, however vague and general in language, one looks in vain in the articles of Lenin dealing with this period. He gives only imperatives: he did not foresee; nor did he even try to foresee, the course political events were to take; although he hoped, of course, that they would tend toward world revolution. He was not even sure that the proletariat would follow him: "We cannot guess," he wrote in 1916, "no one can guess, just how large a section of the pro- 4 N. Lenin, "The Russian Sudekums" (in Russian) , in The Social-Democrat, February 1, 1915. PROPHECIES 69 letariat will go over to the Socialist-chauvinists and the Opportunists. That, the summons to bat- tle, the call for the social revolution, alone can tell. But we know one thing for certain: the * defenders of the flag' in imperialistic wars rep- resent only a minority of the population." 5 It is therefore pure fiction to say that " Lenin from the very first day of the war foresaw the outcome of events." He did not foresee even the attitude of the western socialists toward the catastrophe. Zinoviev reports that he had a dis- cussion with Lenin on this latter subject in which Lenin thought that the German socialists would vote against the military appropriations; while Zinoviev was sure that they would refrain from voting at all. As the event proved, they voted for the appropriations. Now, if Lenin was so far off the track in judg- ing the temper of the Second International, he is quite possibly mistaken as to the internal stabil- ity of the Third. In the mass of writings he pub- lished in Switzerland (and later in Russia) in 1914-1917, there are not many political prophe- cies. Most of them are false: as, for instance, his famous postulate that the war would end by the fraternizing (bratanie) of the soldiers at the front. The Russian army disintegrated in 1917; the Bulgarian, Austrian, Turkish and German armies met with the same fate a year later; but 5 N. Lenin, "The Order for Disarmament" (in Russian), in The Social-Democrat, No. 2, October, 1916. 70 LENIN there was never any serious question of fraterni- zation between enemies. It was a case of con- quered soldiers taking to their heels to get away from victorious soldiers. We do not blame Lenin for not having been a better guesser. But since people say that he " predicted everything,' ' I am merely setting the matter right. Lenin has shown his political talents, not in prophecy, but in his skill at turn- ing the great mass of hatreds that the war built up to the benefit of his own ideas. CHAPTER VI THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN LENIN is a man who combines ideas which he believes to be the ideas of the future with a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages. We must first deal as cavalierly with one of the slanders against Lenin as we dealt with one of the fictions invented to glorify him. People saw, or pretended to see, in Lenin a paid agent of the Germans. That is absolutely false. Lenin did more for Germany (in signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk) than all her paid agents put to- gether; but a German agent he never was. He never served Germany for the sake of serving Germany (which, by the way is more than can be said for all of his associates and subordinates). He did not touch a cent of German money for himself. I have not the shadow of a doubt on this point. Why, indeed, should he have done so? He has always lived frugally, not to say in hardship ; people who have known him for a long time cannot point to a single indulgence, to a single extravagance, habitual to him. Nowadays when the Bolshevists have millions within reach and while the most scandalous rumors (often well authenticated) are circulating about his col- 71 72 LENIN leagues, no one breathes a word against Lenin. In a flock of black sheep, he is "the Bolshevist who has remained poor." He has won general admiration for his scrupulous honesty. Did he take German money for his propaganda ? I must say that in 1917 socialists who had known him for a long while and who had formerly been his friends (I could mention some very well- known names) were frank to say that they con- sidered this not only possible but very probable. One of them put himself on record to that effect: "For the ' Cause/ Lenin would steal a pocketbook, if necessary. He would stop at nothing if he considered it beneficial to the revo- lution." Such is the almost unanimous opinion of his intimates, who, despite party animosities, have always been the first to recognize his per- sonal disinterestedness. History may perhaps discover a final answer to this question some day. Meanwhile impar- tiality obliges us to mention two facts that seem to weaken this "German money" charge. Today all the German archives, all the records of secret expenditures abroad, 1 whether by the military or by the civil authorities, are at the disposal of the present German Government, which has good reason for not liking the Bol- shevists. If these archives contained documents or evidence at all compromising to Lenin, why 1 To those who know Germany, there cannot be any doubt as to the existence of a model system of accounting for the most secret expenditures. THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 73 should Scheidemann, Bauer, David and Miiller, not make use of them? Why should they spare such a dangerous adversary? 2 Moreover, General Ludendorf who, as dictator, must have known what was going on, said nothing in his memoirs about money which Lenin is al- leged to have received from Germany. He even considers it a mistake on the part of the civil authorities to have granted the Bolshevist leader the famous "pass" in March, 1917. 3 One might answer that Scheidemann and Bauer, as well as Ludendorf, probably have too much respect for state secrets of such importance to reveal them lightly. As it is not so absolutely certain that the late war is to be the last, Germany may still need the help of all kinds of secret agents in the future. So, under such circum- stances, it would not be wise to reveal, for any reason whatsoever, the names of those who once were of service to her. And, indeed, so far as I know, the government of democratic Germany has taken no action against those numerous agents in all countries who were paid for service 2 It goes without saying that the German Government could have nothing to gain by compromising a Ganetzky or any other poor wretch of Russian Bolshevism. To publish such expenditures would serve no positive purpose; and it * would have been an obvious mistake to show up the venality of the lesser Bolshevist agents. 3 There is this much truth in General Ludeudorf's judg- ment on this point: since the great service which Lenin did for Germany could not save her from disintegration and^ de- feat, it would have been better for her not to push things quite so far in Russia. 74 LENIN rendered the government of imperialistic Ger- many. 4 So, unquestionable as is the role which Germans played in the development of Bolshevism in Rus- sia, 5 it cannot be said that Lenin received money from the Government of William II. What can be said with certainty is that in all his policies, before as well as after the Eevolution, he has shown absolute political immorality. Nothing exists for him except his idea. He has no other rule of conduct except the interests of the cause of Bolshevism. The bad faith he so often showed in his opposition days is equalled only by the cool versatility of his policies at the head of the Bolshevist government. What did he not say against Kerensky for having applied the death penalty at the front to preserve dis- cipline? Well, a few months later, without any reason whatsoever, he is shooting tens of thou- sands of men himself. Trusting that any liberties with the truth were possible in view of the age- long ignorance of the Russian people, he did not 4 It was only by mischance that von Jagow's telegram, which served as a basis for charges against Judet, fell into the hands of the Allied powers. Nevertheless, in that case also, it was to the advantage of the Germans to make things disagreeable for the French nationalists, their life-long ene- mies. . 5 # Trotsky innocently gives the following account of con- ditions on the Russian front before the Bolshevist revolution (The Advent of Bolshevism, p. 63): "Circulating among the soldiers were a number of sheets which they wrote them- selves in which they were invited not to stay in the trenches longer than 'from now till the first snow flies.' " Written by themselves, you see! The Germans and the Bolshevists did not figure in the matter at alll THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 75 mind if his accusations were always as stupid 6 as they were spiteful. I will quote, for an example, the fact that he charged the Constitutional-Democratic Party (The Cadets) with having organized the Pyanys Pogromy — the pillaging of the wine cellars of Petrograd. To appraise this accusation it is suf- ficient to name the party leaders : Miliukov, Nabo- kov, and Vinaver, all lawyers and university pro- fessors! As for the leader of this party, Lenin characterizes him in one of his speeches as an " absolutely, hopelessly, ignorant man." Many faults have been found with the strong person- ality of Miliukov; but this is the first time, I believe, that he has been accused of " ignorance.' ' Lenin, for that matter, has often acknowledged that he considers slander a legitimate weapon in political combat. But this slanderer is at the same time a despot ; and has always been one; today he rules as an 6 He has a very close rival in Trotsky in the stupidity of his slanders. Here is an example: The Russian soldiers who came to Marseilles in 1916 assassinated one of their officers, Colonel Crause. It seems a copy of the paper which Trotsky was then publishing in Paris (Nache Slovo) was found in possession of one of these soldiers; and that was one of the reasons for the expulsion of Trotsky from France. Was Trotsky embarrassed? Not at all! Trotsky made a sensa- tional "statement" with reference to the matter: "The Rus- sian Government organized a little assassination in France through its agents-provocateurs in order to give weight to their argument against me." (See Twenty Letters of Leo Trotsky, Paris, 1919, p. 20.) That the Government of the Czar should have had one of its Colonels assassinated to give an argument in favor of deporting Trotsky to Spain is a discovery which seems to show the sheer folly of its author. 76 LENIN autocrat over a country of a hundred million people, just as yesterday he ruled with iron hand over a dozen or more Eussian exiles in Switzer- land. His own colleagues and friends have often accused him of arbitrary and autocratic ways. In one of his old articles he ironically indexes the epithets which his comrades in the party gave him: "Autocrat, bureaucrat, Formalist, Central- ist, one-sided, pig-headed, stubborn, narrow, sus- picious, unsociable." 7 We will not deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting an opinion which a man who is not sus- pected of anti-Bolshevism today, for it is no less than Mr. Trotsky himself, formerly had of Lenin. It is well known that this "brilliant un- derstudy" of the President of the Council of People's Commissars hates his chief, although he pays him the most elaborate compliments. This enmity does not date from yesterday, although it may be somewhat intensified today by jealousy on the part of the ambitious .man that Trotsky has become. 1 I have before me a pamphlet 8 which Trotsky devoted to the Second Congress of the Social- Democratic Party, or, rather, to Lenin. I will make a few quotations from it: "History, with the ruthlessness of Shake- speare 's Shylock, has demanded its pound of flesh 7 N. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Backwards (in Russian), Geneva, 1904, p. 137. 8 Trotsky, The Second Congress of the Social-Democratic Labor Party in Russia (in Russian), Geneva, 1903. THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 77 from the living organism of the party. Alas! We have had to pay it! 9 "We speak of the need for looking at history impersonally. But we need not push that virtue so far as to ignore the personal responsibility of Comrade Lenin. At the Second Congress of the Social-Democratic Party of Russia, that man, with all his energy and skill, played his role as disorganizer of the Party" (p. 11). " 'The state of siege' which Comrade Lenin insisted upon so energetically needs a strong authority. The practice of organized distrust needs an iron hand. The system of terror 10 is crowned by Robespierre. "Comrade Lenin mentally reviewed the per- sonnel of the Party and arrived at the conclusion that the iron hand needed was his own and his alone, and he was right. The hegemony of Social-Democracy in the struggle for freedom meant, from the very logic of the state of siege, the hegemonv of Lenin over Social-Democracy" (p. 20). "In demonstrating, before the Congress, the purpose of the Central Committee Comrade Lenin showed his fist (I am not speaking metaphorical- ly) as its real political symbol. We do not re- 9 # Trotsky wrote then as he talks today. No audience can resist the grandiloquence of this Mirabeau of grocery clerks. 10 All these terms had reference to the internal organiza- tion of the Social-Democratic Party; they had, so to speak, an ironical and symbolical meaning. Did Trotsky think that the time would come when terror, to himself and Lenin, would be anything but a symbol? 78 LENIN member whether this pantomime for centraliza- tion was duly incorporated in the resolutions of the Congress. It was a serious oversight if such was not the case. That fist would have been the appropriate weather-vane for the entire edifice ! ' ' (p. 28). " Comrade Lenin made of the modest Council an all-powerful Committee of Public Safety in order to play, himself, the role of the * incor- ruptible Robespierre' " (p. 29). We know that Lenin, for his part, is not among the admirers of Trotsky. Without mentioning the affectionate remarks which he formerly hurled at Trotsky before and during the war, he wrote, in 1918, at the conclusion of the Peace of Brest- Litovsk, one of the bitterest arraignments (signed with the nom-de-plume of Karpov) of the cult for "grandiloquent hot-air' ' among revolution- ary orators — a cult of which Trotsky has always been the high priest. The despotism of Lenin and the absolute im- morality of his political conduct, which often seem cynically humorous, 11 have gradually alien- ated all the independent members of the Social- Democratic Party of Russia from him. He was formerly bound in warm friendship to Plek- 11 We could quote as an example the delicious story of a certain inheritance which was finally put at the disposal of the Bolshevists, that is to say of Lenin. ^ I emphasize the fact that it is not a question of personal dishonesty. Lenin has always lived simply, though all the funds of the Party were at his beck and call. THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 79 hanov, 12 who later became his mortal enemy. Alexrod, Potressov, Alexinsky, and Martiv were all very intimate with him. But only docile, mediocre men, fawning courtesans like Zinoviev, have been able to enjoy the good- will of Lenin for any length of time. Even today he treats most of his distinguished colleagues as errand boys. In 1918, the Social- Eevolutionary paper, The People's Cause (Dielo Naroda), published an extraordinary reprimand which he addressed to Zinoviev, President of the Commune of Petrograd, who was guilty of let- ting a " bourgeois' ' reporter get into the Bol- shevist sanctuary at the Smolny Institute. He treats this high dignitary the way Peter the Great treated his gentlemen-in- waiting. Lenin, moreover, has always tolerated the worst characters about him. Today he is sur- rounded with all kinds of common criminals, es- pecially thieves. Incorruptible as he is person- ally, he seems to feel quite set up, in the midst of this ignoble crowd. In this respect his relations with Malinovsky are very interesting. Accord- ing to Bourtzev 13 Malinovsky confessed his past crimes to Lenin and went so far as to say he could no longer be a member of the Duma, as he was too severely compromised. Lenin is said to have interrupted him, refusing to hear the story out, and observing that "such things could 12 "Lenin was in love with Plekhanov," says M. Zinoviev. 13 Bourtzev, "Lenin and Malinovsky," in Struggling Rus- sia, No. 9-10, May, 1919, p. 139. 80 LENIN be of no importance in the eyes of a real Bol- shevist. ' ' This story is probable enough : did not one of the best known Bolshevists, Badek, who was expelled from the German Social-Democratic Party (before the war), begin his political career by stealing a watch? What we refuse to believe is that Lenin conld have known or guessed Malin- ovsky 's role as an agent-provocateur ; though our assurance that he did comes from Malinovsky him- self. 14 This weakness of the Bolshevist leader for the w T orst type of adventurers can easily be explained, however. Lenin's great strength, the strength which has made him the true prophet of our plunge to the depths of revolution, lies in his ability to ap- peal to the lowest instincts of human nature. The worst cynic would not have carried on a revolution any differently from this experienced agitator. For the work of destruction which the Bolshevist regime involved, he exploited with masterly hand the powerful social weapon which hatred supplies. For the benefit of his ideas he turned to account every animosity arising from the normal hard- ships of life increased by the additional hardship of the war — the hatred of the worker for the cap- italist, of the employee for his employer, of the peasant for the landed proprietor, of the prole- tarian Lett for the Lett of wealth, of the Chinese 14 "According to Malinovsky, Lenin understood and could not help understanding that his ( Malinovsky 's) past con- cealed not merely ordinary criminality, but that he was, in the hands of the gendarmes, a provocateur** (Ibid., p. 139.) THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 81 coolie for the country which maltreated him, of the oppressed Jew for the Jew-baiter, and (above all) of the soldier and sailor for the officer who enforced harsh and irksome discipline. Hatred, hatred, nothing but hatred ! Such was the Archi- median lever which Lenin used to pry himself into power with such ease! But nothing permanent can be built on the foundation of hatred alone. Sooner or later Lenin will be the victim of the Frankenstein whose parts he assembled in order to master Russia ! But it would not be right to depreciate the re- markable qualities of the man. It is said that politics is a matter of the pen and of the tongue. Lenin, too, is a publicist and an orator. But as such he is only second rate. His pamphlets are badly and carelessly written. No translation, unfortunately, can render quite the banality of his style. He uses the most common- place metaphors, the most hackneyed expressions, and he indulges in epithets that show an extreme of vulgarity. 15 His writings accordingly are al- ways tiresome and hard to read, in spite of the psychological interest his sectarian logic might arouse. As we suggested, Lenin knows very little outside of political economy. Russian and European civil- 15 I tried to count the number of times in one of Lenin's recent articles that the Menshevists and the Social-Revolu- tionists (many of whom spent several years in the convict- prisons) are treated as "lackies of the bourgeoisie;" but the task took too much time. 82 LENIN izations are still strangers to him. In them he sees a manifestation of the capitalist world which he hates with all the violence and venom of which a fervent and narrow-minded man is capable. Maxim Kovalesky has said that Lenin would have made a good professor. He might have in polit- ical economy, were it not that he despises every idea not agreeing with his own. He speaks violently but without recourse to smooth periods, witty expressions, or impassioned flights. Trotsky and some of the other Bolshevist leaders are certainly far better orators than Lenin. A Bolshevist laborer, however, told me that he preferred the simple manner of Lenin to the musical sing-song of the nightingales of the Party. Can Lenin's be the real eloquence that scorns rhetoric? I suspect, rather, that it is a case of Lenin's profound knowledge of his audience; for he is a past-master of mob psychology. It cannot be denied that Lenin is a born leader, a magnificent " handler of men." I have often had the opportunity of witnessing the great influ- ence he has over people, especially people who from temperament, opinions, and social position, ought not easily have fallen prey to such a man. Let me, if I may, mention two cases which im- pressed me particularly. They deal with the first days of the triumph of the Bolshevists in 1917, and the people concerned were of a different stamp altogether from those who later succumbed tinder the spell of Lenin's personality. THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 83 The first case was that of a mechanic in a fac- tory in Petrograd, a man some fifty years old, a hard worker, father of a family of children, a calm, easy-going sort of fellow, not over-intelli- gent and qnite uneducated, but very honest withal. He called himself, and probably thought he was, a Revolutionary-Socialist; but like most of the workingmen of Petrograd he had been influenced since the spring of 1917 by the active and well or- ganized propaganda of the Bolshevists. The fac- tory was a very old-fashioned one; the workers for the most part were not skilled laborers, but peasants who had secured jobs there at the begin- ning of the war. Most of them could not have had any serious political convictions; but almost all called themselves either Menshevists or Revolu- tionary-Socialists. Those were the most moderate political parties to which a workman could de- cently belong ; and it was considered bad taste not to be a member of any party. Times have changed very much since then: today, it seems, the work- ingmen of Russia refuse to have anything to do with political parties! And with good reason! The Bolshevists were not very numerous at this time; but they formed a compact minority, re- ceived tactical instructions continually, and were able to browbeat the other men; suffice it to say that they managed to force all the workmen and foremen in the factory in question to subscribe to the Pravda, the Bolshevist newspaper run by Lenin. They themselves were bossed by a very 84 LENIN intelligent and arrogant young workman who knew how to look after his own personal interests very well, and who had belonged to the Union of the Russian People (the " Black-Bands") before going over to Bolshevism! Immediately after the Bolshevist coup d'etat, the workers of this factory went to a local meet- ing and " swore allegiance to the new regime.' ' They worked out and adopted a pompous resolu- tion where the spelling was inclined to be some- what capricious but the meaning of which was perfectly clear: the former Revolutionary-Social- ists and Menshevists hailed the power of the Soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the immediate conclusion of a general peace "without annexations and indemnities," and so on — all according to instructions received by the Bolshe- vist group in the factory. Hundreds of resolu- tions of this sort were being railroaded through all the factories and all the regiments in Petro- grad. The man of whom I am speaking was commis- sioned to carry this resolution to the Smolny Institute, which was then the seat of the Bolshe- vist Government. He took it there and was imme- diately received by Lenin himself, an attention the man had not in the least expected. The sly old demagogue, who was "too busy" to see the ambassadors of foreign powers, who later passed on Count Mirbach, the omnipotent German gov- ernor, to a clerk, Sverdlov, designating the latter, THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 85 ironically, as the "highest official of the Soviet Bepublic," had plenty of time to receive an un- known mechanic who was bringing a resolution from a quite negligible factory! . . . Let the ad- mirers of Bolshevism shed tears of tenderness at this democratic " trait' ' in the President of the Council of People's Commissars! For my part, I admire the surpassing art of the demagogue. That was just the way to become popular in a country where the lower classes had been treated like cattle for centuries and centuries. 16 Well, I saw this laborer just after he had come back from his interview with Lenin. He was quite beside himself and hardly to be taken for the same man. Ordinarily calm and discreet, he was now talking like an energumen. "There's a man for you ! " he kept saying over and over again. "There's the man I'm willing to risk my skin for! . . . Now there's going to be something really doing. . . . Ah, if only we had had a Czar like that! . . . Then what would have been the use of the Bevolution?" This last sentence was so striking it clung indelibly in my memory. I have given it word for word. The poor man, like M. Jourdain, was talking Shakespeare without knowing it: "Caesar is dead, let his murderer be Caesar!" "But what did he say to you?" I asked him 16 1 have been told that Lenin often went with his wife to public balls given by the Bolshevists and attended by ser- vants, sailors and cab drivers; and talked politics there like Haroun-al-Raschid, but without any incognito. 86 LENIN later on, when he had calmed down a bit. I re- ceived only a vague answer. * ' Everything belongs to you people," — or something of the sort, Lenin must have said to him. "Everything belongs to you people! Take it all! The world is for the proletariat. Don't listen to anybody but us. . . . The workers have no other friends. We alone are the ones to look after the people who work for a living.' 9 The old laborer must have heard those mean- ingless phrases, that promise of heaven on earth replacing his long life of poverty, at least a hun- dred times. Was it the contagion of real faith that seemed to give them new meaning in his eyes ? Was it the magnetic influence of an overwhelming personality? 17 • My second example is of a very different na- ture. A young man some twenty years of age, of an excellent and wealthy family, very intelligent 17 1 must add here what the results of Lenin's interview with the workers' envoy were for this particular factory. It must be a fairly typical case. It goes without saying that the Menshevists and Revolutionary-Socialists in the factory immediately became members of the Bolshevist Party. A few days later there was a violent demonstration against the superintendent who was a very honorable man with liberal convictions. Then the workers followed Lenin's advice lit- erally and "took everything," at the same time letting the company pay their wages. They began to sell the machinery and raw materials to junk dealers. In January, 1918, the factory shut down for good. The peasant-laborers went off to the country. As the war was over, they were no longer afraid of conscription; and could they foresee civil war? The skilled laborers entered the pay of the State (if the term can be applied to Bolshevist Russia), either as employees on the payrolls without jobs, or (a small minority) as Red Guards^ THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 87 and well educated, a complex and delicate nature, a talented poet, a student at the Polytechnique School and for the time being at the School of Artillery, found himself by chance the night after the Bolshevist coup d'etat in the hall of the Smolny Institute. On that night of triumph all the Bolshevist leaders were making inflammatory speeches to the excited, undisciplined soldiers gathered there. While neither Trotsky nor the others made any impression on the young man, Lenin, on the contrary, who was greeted with a magnificent ovation, quite upset him. "It was not a political speech," he told me. "It was a cry from the very soul of a man who had been waiting for that moment for thirty years. I thought I was listening to the voice of Girolamo Savonarola." This young man, moreover, was not a Bolshevist and did not become converted. He was the unfortunate Leonid Kannaguisser 18 who a year later shot and killed the Bolshevist Uritsky, the executioner of the Commune of Petro- grad. Savonarola? Yes, perhaps! Lenin has some of the characteristics of Savonarola; but more, probably, of those fanatics one meets so frequent- ly in the history of religious sects in Russia. From a moral and intellectual point of view this man takes after Savonarola and after Tartuffe. He 18 This unfortunate young man, whose brilliant talents and noble character gave so much promise for the future, was shot by the Bolshevists. Dark rumors went through the capital that he had been subjected to torture four times. 88 LENIN has a nature at once complex and arid; for spir- itual involution does not mean spiritual richness, necessarily. Lenin is a madman with the luna- tic's cunning; a sort of scholar, and at the same time a visionary in a small way ; a man who knows the masses without knowing anything of men. He is a complex primitive type, a combination of sim- ple traits : elementary fanaticism, elementary cun- ning, elementary intelligence, elementary mad- ness. This is perhaps the reason for his strength ; for what is more elementary than the half-edu- cated unfortunates who make up the mass of Eussian workers'? A socialist writer told me of his disappointment the first time he heard the Bolshevist leader speak. Lenin's eloquence seems to impress young poets and old workingmen much more deeply than it does men of scientific mind. "I expected a sociological analysis of the crisis pending ; I heard nothing but shouts of fury and cries of hate: ' Arrest the cap- italists!' * Hustle them to jail!' I could hardly believe my eyes and ears. Was this maniac really Lenin, the famous Lenin V 9 " And how did the audience take it all?" I asked him. "They gave him a tremendous ovation," he answered, shrugging his shoulders. "Quod erat demonstrandum! What else could you expect? All his catch-words have a terrible directness and simplicity. 'Down with war!' ' Arrest the cap- italists!' ' Workingmen of Eussia, take every- THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 89 thing you can find!' But it was with their help, just the same, that he gained control of Russia ! ' ' "Timeo homines unius libri," said Thomas Aquinas. But "men of one newspaper" are much more dangerous than "men of one book," es- pecially if that paper is called the Pravda. The simplicity of the Bolshevist formulae is Lenin's first source of strength. I have already mentioned the second, which is the misanthropic character of his policies. The third is the faith he has in those policies and in himself: an emigre, living in poverty and leading a mere handful of refugees, he ever nourished the hope of conquering Russia, Europe, the whole world! Ernest Renan, in Don Luigi Tosti, speaks of 1 ' that contempt for the mob, that combined feeling of revolt and impotence, that something — strong, harsh and stoical — which is the distinctive char- acteristic of brave Italian souls." Lenin has all of that. He has been credited with that dreamy temperament, which according to the stock crit- icism of foreigners, is essentially distinctive of the Slav. I am not very fond of generalizations on the traits of nationality or race, so very often are they mere banalities, and often false banal- ities at that. Lenin, I will nevertheless venture, is very Russian; and yet in many respects he is the opposite of the Slav, in the sense in which that word is commonly used by specialists in national psychology. Slavs are said to be weak; Lenin has a will of iron. Slavs are said to be 90 LENIN romantic; Lenin has not a single trace of emo- tionalism. Slavs are said to have a passion for metaphysics; no one could be less interested in abstractions than Lenin. His dream, if dream he has, is the acme of the commonplace; a string of barracks ruled by Bolshevists, that, more or less, is his ideal. And what is the objective of his political pol- icies? Great social experiments, first of all; for this man is an experimentalist gone mad. With all his faith in himself and his ideas, can he really believe seriously in the immediate and permanent success of his wonderful experiment at the Krem- lin (or shall I say Bicetre) ? That is doubtful, at least. A few months ago he told Maxim Gorky (I got this from a French friend, who, in turn, heard it from Gorky's own lips), that "the most astonishing thing in this whole business is that no one has yet put us out." But is not a negative result of this experiment in anima vili worth something? A great lesson in Communism will come out of it in any case. That, it would seem, is the opinion of all the Com- munists of the Kremlin. "If we fail," said one of the most famous Bolshevists, "we will put off our work until later on, that's all. The social revolution will take place some other time." It is all so very simple, when you think of it ! The destruction of a State, the ruin of a people, a few million dead, does all that matter, is that of the THE PERSONALITY OF LENIN 91 slightest importance, in the eyes of men who have such lofty aims? And the final result of Lenin's policies? The lasting hatred of the Eussian masses for every- thing socialistic! "I see in the events of our time a real triumph of the defeated and humiliated bourgeoisie; its conquerors are more bourgois than the bourgeoisie itself. "Lenin is right; the life which was upset by the Communist Revolution will bring to the Rus- sian village the 'gospel of a new truth.' Except that this gospel, with a few possible modifications, may well prove to be nothing but our old Civil Code. The law will recognize the 'accomplished fact,' close its eyes to many things, and register as 'bought' what in reality was 'stolen.' "The bayonet has created a new upper class in Russia, a plutocracy of recent date, capitalists in khaki, profiteers in the red cap. I saw men dancing at their parties, their tanzouTki, in the palaces of the Raiewskys and of the Pobedonost- sevs. The aristocrats of today do not dance so well as those of yesterday, but they know much better how to defend their rights. "To amateurs in historic teleology, I must offer an answer to the question: 'Why Lenin?' The Destiny that rules us appointed Lenin to fix eter- nally the triumph of private property! Such a role for the Bolshevist pope is probably the cruel- 92 LENIN est jest History ever played on one of its favored darlings. "Protopopov 19 ever seemed grimly bent on compromising the reaction and hastening the out- break of revolution. Lenin is doing just the op- posite : he is compromising the revolution and pre- paring the ground for reaction. As between these two autocrats, you may take your choice. "Our revolution resembles our war as a daugh- ter resembles her mother. Lenin is the legal heir of the grand-duke Nicholas Nicolaievich. The of- fensive Lenin is carrying on against capitalism is in every respect like the campaign of Nicholas in the Carpathians, save that after his retreat, where will 'the positions prepared in advance' be? "There is a beautiful statue by Turgan in the Luxembourg Museum, called The Paralytic Led by the Blindman. Russia led to destruction by this deadly man might well adorn her armories with copies of that statue." 20 19 A Russian minister who was very unpopular during the latter part of the old regime. 20 Landau-Aldanov, Armageddon, Petrograd, 1918. CHAPTER VII THE THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION: MARX, BAKUNIN AND SOREL I T is a very curious fact and one perhaps with- ■*■ out precedent except in the history of Chris- tian doctrine, that almost all the elements involved in the desperate social struggle now raging over the four corners of Europe, go back to a single man : Karl Marx. In Germany, Schei- demann and Hasse, Noske and Liebknecht, David and Ledebur, Ebert and Rosa Luxemburg ; and in Russia, Lenin and Plekhanov, Trotsky and Pot- resov, Martov and Tsereteli, Kamenev and Dan! Even the theorists of the bourgeoisie, to show the impossibility of a communist regime in Rus- sia, have not failed to appeal to the writings of the author of Das Kapital. On the purely theoretical side of the question, this has long been the case. Twenty years ago, in the famous controversy between Kautsky and Bern- stein, both contenders appealed (more or less suc- cessfully!) to the works of Marx; much as theolog- ical contenders of old brought out the Bible to prove (successfully) the positive and negative of every proposition. But twenty years ago, the lusty give- 93 94 LENIN and-take was carried on in the Neue Zeit, in the Sozialistische Monatshafte, on the floors of so- cialist conventions. Now the belligerents have "stepped out side' 9 into the streets of Berlin, of Munich, of Dresden; and syllogisms use machine guns and bayonets in their major premises. Who is right? What in fact, would be the atti- tude of Marx and Engels if they were still alive today? Is Bolshevism the necessary outcome of Marxism; or is it rather the negation and the opposite of Marxism? Bolshevism is, we can all agree, not literal Marxism; but it seems to be the logical corollary of certain ideas which Marx held as a young man, combined with elements borrowed from anarchism and syndicalism. Eosa Luxemburg said once that the Marxist theory was the child of bourgeois science; and that the birth of this child had cost the life of its mother. It could be said more cor- rectly that Bolshevism is the illegitimate child of Marxism and anarchism, that it has caused both its parents great sorrow, and will continue to do so. Karl Marx's affirmations were clear and pos- itive, so long as he was dealing with the past and present of the capitalist system. But he became more vague and less cocksure as the question of the future came up. Perhaps Marx thought he knew how the capitalist world would end. But the event proves he was mistaken. The failure of this extraordinary mind shows once more the THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 95 folly of historical prophecies. That he did fail as a prophet is quite obvious today. In saying all this, I am not thinking of those statistical arguments (relating to division of wealth in the period from 1850 to 1900) which were brought up long ago by Edward Bernstein and his school. Suffice it to compare the excellent analysis of economic facts which we find in the first volume of Das Kapital with the political prophecies of Marx, which were nearly always false, to understand what danger there is in def- inite prophecy even for minds as powerful as his. We read in the Communist Manifesto of 1847 : i i The bourgeois revolution can be only the imme- diate prelude to the proletarian revolution. ' ' Two years later Marx tried to prove to Lassalle that the proletarian revolution would break out the next year at the latest. In 1850 he was preach- ing the idea of a revolution that would continue agitation "till the day when the power of the State shall be taken over by the proletariat, and when the forces of production (or at least the main ones) shall be concentrated in the hands of the proletariat.' ' In 1862 Marx wrote to Kugelman: "It is evi- dent that we are on the verge of a revolution. I have never doubted that, since 1850.' * In 1872, in a letter to Sorge, he maintained that "the conflagration was starting all over Eur ope.' ' As for Engels, he said, some thirty years ago: "The government of the Czar will not be able 96 LENIN to survive this current year; and if they start something in Russia, good day and good night !" Which provokes the comment that faith is faith, even when it calls itself science ! I will not stress the prophecies of Marx and Engels with reference to foreign affairs. It is sufficient to recall that Marx considered Bismarck "a mere tool of the cabinet of St. Petersburg ;" and that Engels said, in one of his letters to Sorge : "If war breaks out one can say with absolute certainty that after a few battles Eussia will come to an understanding with Prussia at the expense of Austria and France. " But has not the very foundation of "scientific" socialism, the famous "catastrophic collapse of capitalism," been reduced to nothing by the ex- periences of these last five years'? In the begin- ning of 1918, I wrote in Armageddon: "The authors of scientific socialism did not de- scribe the form which the social revolution would take, nor the length of time necessary for it to gain the upper hand over the master class. Engels maintained that the debacle of the capitalist regime would be preceded by a great war, and Karl Kautsky expressed a similar opinion. "Que may therefore suppose that in July, 1914, the over-production of commodities predicted by Marx began, which brought on the war and eo ipso determined . the "catastrophic moment" of the social revolution. It can be easily seen, how- ever, that in the course of the last four years of THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 97 European history the laws immanent in the cap- italist system have ceased to be so immanent, and tendencies have developed which work in exactly the opposite direction: instead of a socialization of wealth, which the Marxians predicted, the war brought on an unprecedented destruction of wealth. When the long-awaited day for the " expropriation of the expropriators'' came, it was discovered, unfortunately, that in spite of the great number of " capitalists" there was nothing left to expropriate. The world, which is now be- ing rebuilt on a new principle, receives, as its main heritage, devastated countries, sunken ships, burned powder, exploded shells, the obligation of feeding millions of invalids and orphans, and a few hundred billions of national debts which will never be paid. "As for Eussia, her only implement of produc- tion today is the bayonet. In reality the Jacquerie of Pougatchev in the 18th century presented al- most as many possibilities of socialism as our own Apocalyptic days. "It is evident that henceforth socialism will be- come more and more a problem of the develop- ment of the forces of production. But as there is always, in socialism itself, a problem of redis- tribution, terrible conflicts will probably take place in the future, especially with reference to the colonial question. ' ' More than a year after writing these lines I had 98 LENIN the satisfaction of finding some of the ideas I had expressed in them in an article by Karl Kautsky. This — I quote from an Italian reviewer — is what the eminent theorist of Marxism says : * ' The economic basis from which socialism was to rise was the great wealth created by capitalism making possible the inauguration of a regime of material welfare for everybody. This wealth has been almost entirely destroyed by five years of war; and hence the economic basis of socialism has all but vanished. "Part of the proletariat has deduced from its acquisition of political power that it is entitled to material welfare immediately, which, of course, is impossible under present economic conditions. The other part is tired of these exaggerations and feels the impossibility of realizing them. Having lost all judgment on economic matters, our work- ingmen have no thought-out programme; and therefore remain undecided, instead of energet- ically opening the way for radical reforms now more necessary than ever before because of the universal misery. "Another and a worse heritage which the war has left the revolution is the cult of violence. This long war has inclined the proletariat to ignore economic laws and given it faith in the strong arm. The 'spirit of Spartacus' is, at bottom, the spirit of Ludendorf ; and just as Ludendorf has not only ruined Germany but at the same time strength- ened militarism in the enemy countries, in France THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 99 especially, Spartacus is likewise leading his own cause to ruin and encouraging a policy of violence in the majority. Noske is the natural counter- poise of Spartacus." Now it would be difficult to see in the assertions of Kautsky anything but a confession of the fail- ure of the prophecies of scientific socialism, a confession which is even more remarkable for its honesty in that it is made by the foremost theorist of that doctrine. And if it be true, as the anti-socialist press maintains, that Karl Kautsky has abandoned some of the Marxian po- sitions which seemed to be almost impregnable, that would appear to be due to the surprises the Great War has brought him. Does this mean that the socialists did not fore- see the war? Such an assertion would be alto- gether unwarranted. It is true that many social- ists have been responsible for one terrible mis- understanding. In the famous phrase of the Communist Manifesto, "the proletariat has no country," they saw the indicative instead of the imperative (did Marx himself see the imperative save at a few scattered moments of Messianic exaltation'?). To such the World War must have brought a bitter disappointment ; it happened that the proletarians did have their countries, good or bad as the result may have been; it happened, also, whether for better or worse, that the Ger- man workingmen, instead of hurling themselves upon the German capitalists, rushed against the 100 LENIN French workingmen and the French capitalists. But it would be absolutely unjust to say that the socialists did not foresee the war. They inces- santly warned against this terrible danger threat- ening the world — in their press, and in their in- ternational congresses (in Brussels in 1891, in Zurich in 1893, in Stuttgart in 1907, and in Basle in 1912). But what the socialists, and especially the Marxians, did not really foresee was the great effect a world war would necessarily have on their doctrine and destinies. With the war, chaos began, a chaos in doctrine and a chaos in practice. And chaos reigns today more widely than ever. It is not so long ago that Haase, Scheidemann, and Liebknecht were friends and comrades, members of the "greatest and most efficiently organized party in the world," which polled four million votes at elections and had a theoretical common ground which was as intellec- tually brilliant as it was logically unassailable. Alas, from this common ground they have today drawn conclusions which lead them to shoot and kill one another. The " Marxian" press accuses the "Marxian" Scheidemann of having sent assas- sins to murder the "Marxian" Kurt Eisner! The "Marxian" Haase calls the "Marxian" Noske an executioner. The "Marxian" Hoffman has the "Marxian" Levin and Landauer shot. And all in the name of Marx ! What a disgrace and what a debacle! This debacle Lenin seems to have foreseen. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 101 "What we are suffering from today in the realm of ideas," he wrote in 1908 in an article against the revisionists, "that is to say, our polemics against the theoretical correctives which are being applied to the doctrine of Marx, . . . the work- ing class will necessarily have to suffer on an in- finitely larger scale when the proletarian revolu- tion brings all these questions under discussion to a crisis, brings all differences of opinion to bear on points of the most immediate importance in determining the conduct of the masses, and forces them in the full midst of battle to distinguish be- tween friends and enemies and to discard poor allies in order the better to deal a decisive blow at the common adversary. ' n It is true that a remarkable change in the sit- uation took place which Lenin could not foresee. Former revisionists are found today among the independents, and former orthodox socialists among the Bolshevists! The lesson that is forcibly taught by all this ichaos is that fate seems thus to take vengeance on those who think they know the whole truth. "Scientific" socialism has the glory of giving social science a new method of investigation ; but its error was in making a philosopher's stone out of the method of Marx. This stone was less a gold-maker than a gold brick. Karl Marx, the great Utopian of scientific so- 1 N. Lenin, Marxisme et Revisionisme, A la memoire de Karl Marx (a collection of pamphlets), 2d edition, published by the Soviets of Petrograd, 1919, p. 11. 102 LENIN cialism, preached the advent of a new Messiah — the proletariat. Human experience is passing judgment on him today. It gives a flagrant lie to this "expectation" of an "economic savior" in the person of the proletariat, just as it confounds the hope in a moral Messiah, in the person of that same proletariat. All Marxians thought they saw "the refuge of all civilization, all intelligence, and all truth" in the working class. Not so, Marx himself, indeed. He had little confidence in hu- man nature. But among the Bolshevists today, and especially among the German Spartacides and the French and Italian extremists, the best minds are infected with a moral, though not a sociolog- ical, Messianism. Eealities are gradually taking vengeance on them. Experience is showing that the proletariat is very decidedly inferior to the bourgeoisie from the intellectual point of view. From the moral point of view it is at best equal but in no sense superior. The proletariat is more industrious, less selfish (it owns less to be selfish about), and more disposed to take risks (it has less to lose), than the bourgeoisie. It has, on the other hand, moral defects which come from its very low intellectual level. Under these condi- tions it can be said with great probability that the hope of a Messiah in the proletariat will bring Western Marxians the same cruel disillusionment that it has already brought the most sincere and intelligent Marxians in Eussia. No, the moral and intellectual presuppositions of the socialist THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 103 regime are still far from being confirmed. We have the sad right today to be more pessimistic than Schiller was in 1793. We know that Michael Bakunin furnished Turgienev, who knew him very well, with the prototype of his character, Roudin — a man devoid of will-power, a useless individual (though a good talker), incapable of doing anything serious in this world. This detail is very interesting when one thinks that before the rise of Lenin, Bakunin was the only Russian who ever played a very great role in the revolutionary history of Europe ; and the results of his activity and thinking can still be felt today, a full half century after his death. Bakunin was neither a philosopher nor a the- orist. He undoubtedly had the gifts of a writer ; but he wrote very little and then quite against his own inclinations. His writings, always vital and interesting in spite of their many faults, tend to be discursive, digressive. Most of them were left unfinished; others were published only after the author's death. He frequently changed his mind in the middle of a pamphlet, to the no little con- fusion of the reader. In the matter of style, Bakunin is the exact opposite of Karl Marx, his eternal antagonist, whose writings, from their log- ical form, are like mathematical theorems. Lenin has not the broad rich nature of Bakunin, 104 LENIN to whom lie is very inferior in native endowments. Lenin would be mortified to have anything at all in common with the great anarchist. Still the re- semblance between these men is striking : many of Lenin's favorite thoughts derive from Bakunin — whether directly or indirectly does not concern us here. The main idea underlying the political policies of Lenin (from the end of 1917 on) is the denial of the principle of universal suffrage. The Con- stituent Assembly is, in his eyes, "the dictator- ship of the bourgeoisie." 2 This happens to be Bakunin 's favorite postu- late: " Universal suffrage, " he says, "so long as it is exercised in a society where the people, the mass of the workers, are economically subject to a minority, can produce only fake elections, anti- democratic in essence, and absolutely opposed to the needs, instincts, and real will of the people." 3 This, in turn, is a repetition of the famous dic- tum of Proudhon in his Idees revolutionnaires : "Universal suffrage is another name for counter- revolution." I may add that Bakunin considered this one of the cardinal differences between his own views and those of Marx. "The Marxians," he said, "good Germans that they are, naturally worship the power of the State, and they are also necessarily prophets of political and social disci- 2 Lenin, Report to the First Congress of the Communist International, July 31, 1919. 3 Michael Bakunin, "L'EmpireKnouto-germanique" (1871), in his (Euvres, Vol. II, p. 311. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 105 pline, champions of government 'from the top down' — always in the name of universal suffrage and the sovereignty of the masses, who have the privilege and the honor of electing their masters — ■ and of obeying them." 4 Lenin, however, goes much further than Baku- nin. The latter rejected universal suffrage only so long as "inequality of economic and social con- ditions continues to prevail in the organization of society." Now the inequality, as everybody knows, has been suppressed in Russia through the generous efforts of the Bolshevists; but there has been no talk of re-establishing universal suf- frage ! Lenin finds the Soviet system much safer. And he is right ! The same is true in the matter of the "bill of rights." "In no capitalist country," says Lenin, "does 'general democracy' exist. Even in the most democratic bourgeois republic 'free speech and free assembly' are meaningless phrases," etc. 5 And here is what Bakunin says: "In the freest, most democratic, countries like England, Belgium, Switzerland, and the United States, the freedom, the political 'rights,' which the masses are supposed to enjoy, are nothing but a fiction." 6 Furthermore Bakunin is but expressing one of Lenin's favorite exaggerations when he says that 4 Bakunin, "Lettre au journal La Liberie, de Bruxelles" (1872), in his CEuvres, Vol. II, p. 345. 5 Lenin, I.e.; Humanite, July 29-30, 1919. 6 Bakunin, "Le manuscrit redige a Marseille" (1870), in (Euvres, Vol. IV., p. 190. 106 LENIN to enter the International one must " agree that the wealthy, exploiting, governing classes will never voluntarily, whether through generosity or a sense of justice, make any concession to the proletariat, however urgent, however insignifi- cant, that concession appear; because to do so would be contrary to nature in general and to bourgeois nature in particular . . . which means that the workers will be able to attain their eman- cipation and gain their rights as human beings only after a great struggle, waged by the organ- ized workers of the whole world against the cap- italists and exploiting land-owners of the whole world." 7 But most important is the fact that Bakunin and Lenin have the very same conception of the conditions which make a revolution possible. Bakunin was always firmly convinced that a rev- olution could be started anywhere and at any time. "Just suppose," he wrote in 1872 to his Italian friends, "a shout were raised in all the villages of Italy: 'War upon the castles! Peace for the cottage dwellers ! ' as was actually the cry during the revolt of the German peasants in 1520; or perhaps this slogan, which is even more expres- sive: 'The land for those who work it!' Do you think that many peasants in Italy would sit tight? Burn at the same time as many registries of deeds 7 The italics are Bakunin's; see his "Fragmenf (1872), in his CEuvres, Vol. IV., p. 423. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 107 as possible, and the social revolution would be a fact!" This dream of a social revolution led by the rural poor always haunted Bakunin's imagina- tion. He reverts to it in several of his works. That point also Bakunin regarded as a fundamen- tal difference between himself and Marx. Accord- ing to Bakunin, "all nations, whether civilized or uncivilized," could free themselves at one stroke and go directly over to communism without fol- lowing the outline laid down by Marx of a " stin- gily measured emancipation of the working classes not to be realized in full for a very, very long time." On the important question of preservation or destruction of the State, the ideas of the anar- chistic Bakunin are, of course, absolutely definite : "Say 'State,' and you say violence, oppression, exploitation, and injustice, all erected into a sys- tem and made fundamental conditions for the very existence of society." 8 "Say 'International Association of Workers,' and you deny the existence of the State. ' ,9 1 ' The means and the prerequisite, if not the prin- cipal objective, of the revolution, is the annihila- tion of the principle of authority in all of its pos- • sible manifestations ; and this means the complete abolition of the political, the juridical State." 10 8 Bakunin, "Letters to a Frenchman" (1870), in CEJuvres, Vol. IV., p. 54. 9 Ibid., p. 45. 10 Bakunin, "L 'Empire Knouto-germanique" (1871), m (Euvres, Vol. II., p. 344. 108 LENIN Lenin's ideas on this question are vague and contradictory. We nevertheless find in the same report, presented to the Congress of the Third International, a paragraph (§ XX) which reads: "The suppression of the State's power is the aim of all socialists, and first among them, of Marx himself. 11 Without the realization of this aim, real democracy — which means equality and freedom — cannot be realized. Now, this aim can he attained in practice only through the democ- racy of the Soviets, the proletarian democracy, that is ; for in calling the labor organizations into direct and constant participation in the adminis- tration of the State, we immediately prepare for the total suppression of the latter." However, in other paragraphs of this pamphlet, it is no longer a question of suppressing the State, but rather of re-enforcing it by bringing the mass- es into closer touch with its administration. There is perfect agreement, nevertheless, be- tween the ideas of Lenin and Bakunin with ref- erence to administrative apparatus. Bakunin thought that in 1870 (Paris Commune) the great crime of the "pedantic lawyers and scholars who made up the Government of National Defense was not to have completely broken up, while they were about it, the administrative apparatus of armed France. . . . " 11 Need we point out that this appeal to the authority of Marx is very risky? Bakunin considered his illustrious an- tagonist a "worshipper of the power of the State!" THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 109 Lenin prides himself on having smashed this apparatus in Enssia to smithereens. "The Soviet organization of the State/' he says, "is alone capable of overthrowing once and for all the old bourgeois bureaucracy which was, and had fatally to be, preserved nnder the capitalist regime, even in the most democratic republics ; and which was indeed the greatest obstacle in the way of real democracy for industrial laborer and peasant. The Commune of Paris took the first step of his- torical importance in this direction, and the Rus- sian Soviets have taken the second.' ' Some of the practical ideas which have made Lenin famous are mere plagiarisms of Bakunin 's schemes. The device of sending expeditions of industrial workers and Red Guards out to the rural districts is nothing but that. It would be wrong, however, to maintain that Lenin and Bakunin had the same notion of the general character of the Revolution. These two leaders are very different sorts of men and their outlooks cannot of course be identical. Bakunin thought the Revolution could do every- thing, even defeat a foreign enemy. In this he was a loyal descendant of the Jacobins of 1793. His faith in the necessity for revolution in France was probably never stronger than after Sedan. He was convinced that the social revolution of the French peasants led by the Corps-francs would be able to destroy the army of Moltke and thwart 110 LENIN the imperialistic designs of Bismarck. All his writings of this period show this same unshakable faith. 12 We know that Lenin was not such a fire-eater. His policies are inspired not by the memory of Valmy and Jemappes but by that of Kalnsz and Tarnopol. He has no faith whatsoever in the military capacities of the Kevolution. Bakunin, in 1871, wanted to convert the whole country into "one vast graveyard to bury the Prussians in." He preached "war to the death, a barbaric war, war with knife, tooth and nail, if necessary." 13 Lenin preferred to conclude the Peace of Brest- Litovsk. And today rumor has it that in the secret conferences at the Kremlin he is always the one to favor conciliation and amicable compromise with the Entente. Lenin knows that war was too much for the Czar and for Kerensky ; he realizes it may be too much for him as well. He asks for peace accordingly, thereby showing himself once more a better strategist than Trotsky and his other associates. On the other hand he is much more energetic than Bakunin in dealing with the defenseless. He preaches and prescribes the most bloody terror. Bakunin suffered infinitely more from reaction than did Lenin. He was twice condemned to death and spent many years of his life in the fortress of Olmiitz, where he was chained to the wall ; and in i 2 (Euvres, Vol. IV., p. 247 is Ibid., Vol. II., p. 293. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 111 the terrible fortresses of Peter-and-Paul and of Schlusselburg, where he lost all his teeth from scurvy. Never, however, did he preach terrorism. Cruelty was repugnant to his generous spirit. But, again unlike Lenin, Bakunin had neither personal ambition nor thirst for power. His works accordingly do not originate the idea of a dic- tatorship of the proletariat, though the social foundation on which he rested his socialist revolu- tion, in theory, is exactly the same as that which Lenin is using today. While Lenin would never acknowledge this, Bakunin has expressed the sit- uation in the baldest terms : "By 'flower of the proletariat' I mean that great mass, those millions of non-civilized, illit- erate, disinherited, poverty- stricken people whom Engels and Marx preferred to subject to the paternal regime of a very strong government" 1 * — for their own good, of course, since, as every- one knows, all governments govern in the inter- ests of the masses! "By ' flower of the prole- tariat' I mean that great popular rabble, that canaille, which, being practically free from all taint of bourgeois civilization, carries within it- self — in its passions, its instincts, its aspirations, in all the needs and sufferings of its general po- sition in society — the germs of the socialism of the future. This canaille, taken by itself alone, is strong enough this very minute to start the 14 "These are the literal words used by Engels in a very instructive letter written to our friend Caffiero." (Bakunin.) 112 LENIN Social Bevolution and carry it to triumphant victory. ' ,15 M. Georges Sorel, in my opinion, has been thought of too much as the theorist of the prole- tarian revolt through the general strike. That is perhaps his own fault, for he has too often iden- tified his work with that mediocre notion, which the post-war revolutions in Bussia, Germany, Aus- tria, and Hungary have most decidedly refuted. M. Sorel is nevertheless the spiritual father of syndicalism. He, alone among all socialists per- haps, is the philosopher, the psychologist, and even the poet, of "creative violence." Karl Marx was only a sociologist and as such was without doubt infinitely superior to Sorel; but it prob- ably would never have occurred to him to take the psychological theory of violence seriously. In this, more than anything else, we find the spiritual kinship between Sorel and Lenin. The theorist and present leader of Bolshevism borrowed from Karl Marx (misrepresenting him often, though not in my opinion, as a general rule) the theory of the class struggle ; the notion of the "proletariat-Messiah" ("scientific" socialism); the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat ; and that of the "catastrophic collapse" of capitalism. From Bakunin he took his faith in the possibility of the communist revolution no matter how, no 15 Bakunin, "Fragment" in (Euvres, Vol. IV., p. 414. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 113 matter when, no matter where; and this faith he managed — Heaven knows how — to reconcile with his Marxism. Finally he fonnd in Sorel, who is not one of his favorites meanwhile, a deep convic- tion of the necessity and of the holiness of vio- lence. I will not give in detail the theory of the pro- letarian strike which is to Sorel the theory of the Social Eevolution itself. I think everyone is sufficiently familiar with that famous theory. I will simply quote a few fragments from his hymn to " creative violence,' ' which is particularly time- ly today in the light of our experience with the Great "War and with the Bolshevist revolution. "Not only can the violence of the proletariat make sure of the revolution of the future, but it seems also to be the only means within reach of the nations of Europe, enervated as they are by humanitarian mollycoddleism, to regain their for- mer virility. Violence forces capitalism to con- cern itself solely with its material role in life ; and tends to give it back the aggressive assertiveness it formerly possessed. A growing and solidly or- ganized working-class can force the capitalist to remain passionate in the industrial struggle: if, in the face of a rich bourgeoisie greedy for con- quest, a united and revolutionary proletariat should arise, capitalistic society would attain its historical perfection. . . . The danger which threatens the future of the world can be averted if the proletariat clings obstinately to its revolu- 114 LENIN tionary ideas, so as to realize as nearly as possible the conception of Marx. . . . The violence of the proletariat exercised as a pure and simple man- ifestation of class feeling, and class struggle, appears in this light to be a very beautiful, a very heroic thing. . . . Those who teach the populace to strive for some superlatively high ideal of justice, forward looking toward the future, cannot be cursed out too roundly. Such people would fix permanently on the State the ideas resulting in all the bloody scenes of 1793; while the concept of the class struggle tends to purify the concept of violence. . . . The idea of the general strike, continually revitalized by the emotions which proletarian violence provokes, fosters an absolutely epic state of mind. . . ." 16 Sorel is a very personal thinker ; he is also, as he says himself, a self-educated man. This com- bination was necessary, indeed, to create the philosophy of violence and the myth of the general strike. Three men, in all his vast readings, seem to have had a particular influence on Sorel : Marx, Kenan and Bergson — one of the strangest mix- tures conceivable: "Capital," "The Prayer on the Akropolis," "Time and Freewill" — syndical- ism! To this list we might add the names of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Hartman. This peculiar amalgam of ideas, worked out in the intellectual laboratory inside Sorel ? s head, 16 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, pp. 128, 130, 161, and 388. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 115 forms a whole which is very original, intensely personal, and often interesting. In studying this system, today especially, one is inclined to ask why Sorel selected the general strike as the one supreme manifestation of violence. All his argu- ments could be just as well or even better applied to military mutiny and civil war. It seems that in this matter Sorel was much impressed by the failure of the first Russian revolution. But, now, after we have seen a number of successful revo- lutions, I wonder whether, if Sorel were writing his Reflections on Violence over again, he would not abandon the idea of the general strike, which has failed, and create a new myth of armed civil war? I do not mean this as facetious merely. The fact is that in reality, the general strike plays no necessary part at all in Sorel ? s system. It is true that the "normal development of strikes" entails "a string of acts of violence" which serves to keep up the morale of revolution- ary syndicalism. This "string" has a peculiar fascination for Sorel, especially when it is a question of bourgeois employers who are disposed to make their employees happy. Certain it is, at any rate, that the Russian Revolution has taken place without any pro- letarian strike, and has surpassed in its con- sequences the wildest of Sorel 's dreams. The "string of acts of violence" which follow a revo- lution are infinitely more imposing than those following on a general strike. And since experi- 116 LENIN ence has shown that civil war is quite possible in our time, I do not see what remains of the principal raison d'etre of all this strike myth- ology. What is absolutely incomprehensible is Sorel 's understanding of the future. Let us grant that the transition from capitalism to socialism is car- ried out, once and for all, under "catastrophic" conditions which are beyond human foresight. But after that? "What use, after the revolution, does Sorel think he can make of those brutal forces of hatred and violence which have been unchained and exalted by the fierce struggle be- tween the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? The analyst of the Reflections has no answer to give to this question. How could he have any? He says himself that his sociological tendencies are fundamentally pessimistic. We must not there- fore expect from him the usual cant about a Heaven on earth so soon as hated capitalism has been crushed. But since the class struggle, which quite entrances Sorel today, will have to dis- appear after the fall of capitalism; and as there can be no more strikes in a society without classes, what on earth will become of Our Lady Violence — all dressed up with no place to go ? "What other mythology can be improvised to take the place of the proletarian strike? But to suppose that vio- lence, one of the primitive instincts of man, to be- gin with, and which has been pent up, nourished, whipped to a frenzy, as the syndicalists would THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 117 wish, will suddenly disappear after the mysterious " catastrophe' ' of the transition from capitalism to socialism is utterly naive from the psychological point of view — so naive in fact, that a man of Sorel 's ingeniousness would probably suppose no such thing. Well, then, what other answer can he give to this question? Or does a redeeming agnosticism again relieve him of the need of answering? Since the general strike is nothing but a myth to Sorel, I will refrain from analyzing its theory as the critics of syndicalism generally do. I will simply note that, in the Eussian and German revo- lutions, the proletarian strike, like the general strike, played hardly any part of consequence, for the simple reason that both revolutions were brought about by the soldiers and not by the workers at all. This was a turn of affairs quite unforeseen by Sorel, as it was, moreover, by most socialists. On the other hand, Sorel guessed very closely what the governmental policies of the revolution would be. "Experience has always shown that our revolutionists will argue from 'reasons of State' as soon as they get into power. They will then adopt police methods and regard justice as a weapon to abuse their enemies with. 17 If by chance our parliamentary socialists should gain control of the government, they would show them- selves to be true successors of the Inquisition, of "Ibid., p. 156. 118 LENIN the Old Regime and of Robespierre. . . . Thanks to this reform, we might again see the State tri- umphant at the hands of hangman and heads- man." 18 I do not know whether Lenin and Trotsky can be counted among the "parliamentary socialists" for whom Sorel has so little affection; but I do know that these gloomy prophecies, the pessimism of which might have seemed exaggerated before the Bolshevist revolution, have on the contrary fallen far short of the truth. The Bolshevists have literally re-established the methods of the Inquisition, of the Old Regime, of Robespierre — save for the political tribunals perhaps. Lenin was able to dispense with these by shooting his enemies without any trial at all. That, in fact, is much simpler! Sorel thought, however, that war, the symbol of which, according to him, is "proletarian vio- lence," was above the mean and criminal methods "parliamentary socialists" would use once they were in power. "Everything which concerns war is done without hatred and without the spirit of revenge." I am far from questioning the accuracy of the •comparison between proletarian violence and military carnage; but I may say that Sorel has neither seen the wars of the past nor foreseen the character of the one we have all just been " Ibid., p. 160. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 119 witnessing and of which Bolshevism is the hate- ful, as it is the logical, outcome. Lenin's governmental policy is absolutely per- meated with Sorel's faith in violence and in the salutary effects of violence. He agrees with Sorel, furthermore, on more than one specific point. The question of the State, for instance, is disposed of in the Reflections in the following manner: "The syndicalists do not propose to reform the State, as did the men of the 18th century; they intend to destroy it ; because they are determined to realize the idea of Marx that the socialist revo- lution must not end by replacing one governing minority with another." Lenin, who claims to be governing in the name of the majority of workers and peasants 19 (the elections to the Constituent Assembly and to the municipalities did not prove anything, you see), absolutely agree with this : he considered that his task had to be one of continued and systematic destruction, for a while at least. "There are moments in history," he says, "when it is most important for the success of revolution to pile up as much debris as possible, to blow up, that is, as many old institutions as possible." 20 He accomplished this task wonderfully. He did it so well, indeed, that later on when he decided to start "the prosaic job of clearing up the junk" he failed completely. Never was power more 19 N. Lenin, The Problems of the Soviets in Power, p. 4. 20 Lenin, Ibid., p. 40. 120 LENIN absolute than that of the Bolshevists; and yet Bussia has never been a " State.' ' "Such huge bodies are too awkward to get to their feet again when once they have fallen down. They cannot be held up when once they have lost their balance ; and their fall is always a very violent fall." 21 And here is another very Sorelian idea which dominates Lenin's mind: "It can be said that a great danger threatening syndicalism would be any attempt to imitate democracy. It is far bet- ter to be satisfied for a while with weak and chaotic organization than to fall under the domi- nation of syndicates patterned after the political institutions of the bourgeoisie." 22 Now we read in Lenin's great speech at the Pan-Eussian Con- gress of the Councils of National Economy, held in Moscow in May, 1918, that "there is a petty bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into 'parliamentaries' on the one hand and, on the other, into bureaucrats. We must struggle against all that." As intellectual types, Lenin and Sorel are not very much alike. Sorel 's thought, in spite of its inconsistencies and erratic inequalities, is cer- tainly more interesting, more original, but much less coherent. This latter defect is due perhaps to the disadvantage he labors under of having a very wide but somewhat undigested erudition. Of course he often tries, like Lenin, to abuse 21 Descartes, Discours de la methode. 22 Sorel, Ibid., p. 268. THEORIES OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 121 "bourgeois science;" but that task is uncongenial enough, to a writer who on every page refers two or three times to works ninety per cent of which are not socialistic. Lenin is infinitely more adept than Sorel at abuse of "capitalistic science" and "capitalistic philosophy." In his political works he hardly ever quotes a scientist not of "the Party" — and if he does, it is to say, with all due deference to Sorel, that Bergson is a "bourgeois" and a "Christer!" As for the practical accomplishment of Eus- sian Bolshevism, it finds its condemnation in this fragment from Sorel which I will quote in full although it is a trifle long : "I call attention to the danger which revolu- tions, produced in an era of economic decay, pre- sent for the future of a civilization. All Marx- ians do not seem to have paid due attention to Marx's ideas on this subject. He thought that the i great catastrophe' would be preceded by a terrible economic crisis ; but we must not confuse the crisis Marx had in mind with any form of disintegration. Crises seem to him the result of a too daring adventure in production which has created productive agencies out of proportion to the automatic regulating methods at the disposal of capital. Such an adventure takes for granted that the future be regarded as promising for the most powerful capitalistic enterprises, and that confidence in a coming period of economic ex- 122 LENIN pansion be absolutely preponderant at the time in question. For the niiddle classes, who may still find existence possible under the capitalist regime, to venture joining in revolt with the pro- letariat, prospects of production must seem to them as brilliant as the conquest of America must have seemed to the English peasants who left ancient Europe to hurl themselves into a life of danger in the new world." We wonder whether present-day Europe (not to mention Eussia) with its hundreds of billions of debts, offers, at just the moment chosen by Lenin, the glowing economic outlook which the author of the Reflections on Violence requires for successful revolution! CHAPTER VIII SOME FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM COME now to the Communist doctrine as it is ■■■ today. Humanite recently published 1 a long report which Lenin made to the Congress of the Third International at Moscow, in March, 1919. "It is," says Humanite, " a very important docu- ment in which the powerful theorist has set forth his ideas in the form of propositions on the con- troversial question of the dictatorship of the pro- letariat and bourgeois democracy. ' ' This document is indeed interesting. Power- ful or not, Lenin is unquestionably the only theor- ist of the Bolshevist doctrine. Bolshevism has its orators like Trotsky and Zinoviev; its men of letters, like Lunatcharsky, Kamenev, Vorovsky, Sfeklov; its business men, like Krassin; and final- ly its ikons like Maxim Gorky; it has, however, only one theorist and philosopher — Lenin. 2 As is evident, the authorship, as well as the formal official character of this document, 3 gives it ex- 1 July 29, 30, and 31, 1919. 2 Details of the personality of most of the Bolshevist lead- ers can be found in a very interesting book by Etienne Anto- nelli, La Russie bolcheviste, Paris, 1919. 3 At the Third International all nations, I think, even the Hindus and the Patagonians, were represented. Messrs. Sa- 123 124 LENIN ceptional importance. We can consider it the last, the most authoritative, word on Bolshevist doctrine. Lenin begins by saying that to talk of democ- racy in general, without specifying the class you are talking about, "is just making fun of the principles of socialism and especially of the doc- trine of the class struggle." Why universal suf- frage, which gives absolutely equal rights de jure and practically de facto to the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the peasantry, in the transfor- mation of isociety through legislation, should be "bourgeois democracy," Lenin does not explain. He considers it an axiom posited on the authority of Karl Marx (that might be disputed), and on the historical experience of the Commune. "The Commune of Paris," he said, "lauded by all those who pose as socialists (for they know that this praise wins great and sincere sympathy for them among the laboring masses), showed with (Striking force the quite accidental, the very relative, value of bourgeois parliamentary gov- ernment and bourgeois democracy — institutions which may have marked great progress over the confusion of the Middle Ages, but which today, when we have the proletarian revolution before us, should be radically modified. Nevertheless, doul and Pascal spoke for France. I do not know the names of the German delegates; Karl Radek, who is a German off and on (when he is not an Austrian, a Pole, a Russian or a Ukrainian), could not have been there, as he was interned in Berlin. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 125 at just this time when the Soviet movement is carrying on the work of the Commune, the traitors to socialism forget all the practical lessons the Commune of Paris taught us and go on repeating the old bourgeois rhapsody on * democracy in general.' The Commune, my friends, was a non- parliamentary institution !" (§5). What a sudden passion for the Commune of Paris! And yet here is what Lenin wrote about this same Commune fourteen years ago: "History records, in the Commune, a labor government which was not then able to distinguish between the elements of the democratic, and the elements of the socialist revolution, which con- fused the problems of the struggle for the Kepub- lic with those of the struggle for socialism ; which was not able to solve the problem of a vigorous military offensive against Versailles; and which made the mistake of not taking possession of the Bank of France. ... In short, whether one is talking of the Commune of Paris, or of any other Commune, the answer will always be that it was a government which ours must not imi- tate." 4 What is the Soviet Government, after all? Is it a government so inspired by the Commune as to avoid imitations of the Commune — this is what Lenin desired in 1905? Or is it, on the contrary, a Government "which, as everybody knows, is 4 N. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy (in Russian), Geneva, 1905. The italics in the quotation are Lenin's. 126 LENIN carrying on the work of the Commune," as Lenin said in 1919? In no other matter is the hypocrisy of Bolshe- vism so apparent as in this question of the form of government. For many years they themselves glorified the notion of a Constituent Assembly. We have already seen how Lenin advocated this idea in his Two Tactics of Social Democracy. We know that the resolutions of the first Bolshevist Congress (London, in May, 1905), inspired and dictated by Lenin, expressly proclaimed (§2) the necessity of "setting up, after the revolution, a provisional revolutionary government alone capa- ble of guaranteeing absolutely free elections, and of convoking on a basis of universal, equal, and direct suffrage with secret ballot, a Constituent Assembly expressing the real will of the people." Moreover, Trotsky published several pamphlets demanding the summoning of a Constituent As- sembly with equal urgency. Nor did all this take place before the war when problems presented themselves in a different light. In 1917, also, the Bolshevists were forever harping on the necessity of convoking the Constituent Assembly. The greatest crime they attributed to the provisional governments of Prince Lvov and of Kerensky was that of "sabotaging" the Constituent As- sembly and of delaying the general election on a variety of pretexts. 5 They did not, it is true, 5 Trotsky had the impudence to repeat this reproach after the dissolution of the Assembly by the Bolshevists (The Ad- vent of Bolshevism, Paris, 1919, p. 48). FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 127 abandon the Soviet idea, but at the same time they asked for the immediate convoking of the Assembly. 6 It was only toward the end of 1917, when the obviously anti-Bolshevist results of the election — held under Soviet control and subject to the most brutal pressure — 'began to be seen, that their press started a campaign, at first as prudent and as tentative as it was treacherous, not so much against the principle of the Constituent Assembly as against the Constituent Assembly itself. The Bolshevists were obviously trying to see how the land lay: they did not know whether the people would follow their candidates. Then they gradu- ally grew bolder. It became evident that the public was too tired of fighting to give armed assistance to anyone whatsoever. They were sure of the government regiments in Petrograd, which had been bribed by the promise of not being sent to the front. The bulk of the army actually en- gaged with the Germans was clamoring to get home and would probably accept anything done by anybody who promised peace at any price. Lenin staked everything on one throw; the Con- stituent Assembly was dissolved in the most brutal 6 This does not prevent Lenin from quietly writing today, in the same "Report on the German Independents": "The absurd attempt to combine the Soviet system (the dictator- ship of the proletariat) with the Constituent Assembly (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) clearly reveals the intellec- tual poverty of the yellow Socialists and Social Democrats — their narrow, bourgeois, reactionary outlook, and their timid retreat before the ever-increasing strength of the new de- mocracy of the proletariat." 128 LENIN manner. The sailor Jelesniakof was the Bona- parte of this Communist i ' 18th Brumaire. ' ' Then the Bolshevists immediately began to trot ont ar- guments, or rather dogmatic affirmations, against the whole principle of universal suffrage. Today the Bolshevists have good reason for thinking that they are hated by the people, that elections based on universal suffrage throughout Kussia as a whole would show an overwhelming majority against them; and their theoretical assertions are as frank as may be. In this famous report (§21) Lenin explains quite bluntly: "The Constituent Assembly — that is to say, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,!" Today the Soviets are the whole show. It is Soviet this and Soviet that. The word and the idea have become world famous — the word adopt- ed by all the languages on earth, and the idea by all admirers of Bolshevism. Who indeed in- vented "Sovietism?" "Was it Lenin? Not at all. 7 It was the notorious Parvus. Lenin, if you please, makes that assertion him- self in an article which appeared in the Munchner Post in November, 1918. Lenin at that time was very hostile to Sovietism, which he styles a "Men- chevist invention." It was in reply to Lenin's 7 I have said before in the first chapter of this book that Lenin, according to his biography written by Zinoviev, at- tended only two or three sessions of the Soviet of Petrograd in 1905, and then only as a simple spectator in the public gallery. It is easily understood that if he had been a par- tisan of Sovietism at that time his role would have been less in the background; he would have been president in place of Krousalef-Nossar, Trotsky, or Parvus! FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 129 strictures that Parvus set forth the following ideas : 1. That the workers and soldiers would be devoted to the Eevolution only when they them- selves gained control of the revolutionary move- ment; 2. That, for this reason, the interest of the proletariat would certainly become dominant in the Eevolution; 3. And that this eventuality would finally lift the Eevolution out of the mire of factional quarrel and sectarian dispute inside the revolutionary movement. 8 My interest here again is simply in keeping matters straight. Lenin is not the originator of ' ' Sovietism, ' ' the great revolutionary idea which is now sweeping the world. It was Parvus, Parvus the henchman of the Sultan and of Kaiser William II, Parvus the speculator, Parvus, the war profiteer, 9 Parvus, finally, an outstanding German propagandist who, as such, also invented the ingenious plea — for socialist consumption — that Germany had the right to victory because she had the most powerful proletariat and the best developed industry and should therefore be preserved to lay the groundwork of world revo- lution ! Of course the fact that Parvus invented Soviet- ism does not prove anything against the idea 8 E. Buisson, The Bolsheviks, Paris, 1919, p. 55. 9 Parvus admits having made several millions in trade during the war. 130 LENIN itself. Neither does it prove anything against Lenin. What difference does all that make, pro- vided Lenin did undergo a radical change of mind, did come sincerely to believe in Sovietism, as he had once sincerely believed in the Constit- uent Assembly? Unfortunately, however, he never sincerely believed in either of them. Here is another little pill for the idolators of both Lenin and the Soviet idea to swallow. I am taking it from a source which I consider above suspicion ; the same biography of Lenin by Zinoviev. The Communist Boswell, without suspecting the trou- ble he may be making in the end for his master and friend, sets forth Lenin's state of mind after the failure of his first attempt at a coup d'etat in July, 1917: "We went through a period," says Zinoviev, "when we feared everything was lost. Comrade Lenin even thought for a moment that the Soviets, corrupted by the Accordists, 10 might not prove to be of much use. He threw out the hint that we might have to seize power over the heads of the Soviets." 11 How splendid all this is! How grateful we should be to M. Zinoviev for giving us this infor- mation! Oh, the principles of these impostors! They stand by universal suffrage so long as they think it will give the Bolshevists a majority. They let universal suffrage go hang the moment they see that the Constituent Assembly is very decided- 10 "Accordists" (Soglachateli) were those who favored an understanding with the more moderate political elements. 11 Zinoviev, N. Lenin, Petrograd, 1918, pp. 58-59. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 131 ly against them. They then proclaim the holy principle of Sovietism! But if, at a given mo- ment, it looks as if the Soviets themselves were being " corrupted ' ' by anti-Bolshevism, the pass- word is immediately sent out that "we had per- haps better gain control without the Soviets.' ' For "Sovietism," then, some other phrase could have been substituted — the dictatorship of the Bolshevist Committee, perhaps, or the dictator- ship of Lenin — why not ? Eest assured that what- ever is proposed, the sympathizers of Bolshevism the world over, who live in a perpetual state of grace, would have immediately accepted it with the same awestruck and inspired admiration. The situation is quite as simple as that ! It is perfectly obvious that Lenin was deter- mined to gain power on any principle that would put him into power. He was bent on satisfying his dangerous mania for social experiment. All those famous " principles' ' which some people are so carefully studying today, all those theses, propositions, preambles, paragraphs (Lenin ex- cels in such rigmarole), were pretexts created ad hoc — that, and nothing but that ! Lenin, in fact, quickly realized that instead of acting "without the Soviets," it was more con- venient to emasculate and denature such expres- sions of popular will as survive in this parody of ideal democracy. Eussians who have lived under the Soviet regime cannot help laughing when they read the 132 LENIN "Constitution" (" fundamental law" are the words used) of the "Federated Socialist Repub- lic of the Soviets of Russia, ' ' adopted by the Fifth Congress of the Soviets, July 10, 1918. It is not so much that the document is very badly and pretentiously written, with no regard for logic, and with a total absence of juridical training on the part of its authors. Logic, after all, is only a bourgeois prejudice ; and one cannot reasonably expect much technical jurisprudence among men who scarcely know how to read and write. But the amusing thing is the contrast between all these pretentious articles, sections, paragraphs, and items, and the sad realities they hide. 12 It requires extraordinary impudence to assert that the members of the Soviets are elected by the people; for there has never been such a cynical parody on the election system since the world began — suffice it to recall that, except for Bolshevists, there is no freedom of speech or press in Soviet Russia. But things are even worse than that: threats, extortion, terror, falsification of ballots. It is a case merely of nomination of candidates — that is all the elections in the "Socialist Federated Republic of the Soviets of Russia" amount to. The members of the Soviets are elected, but by Bolshevist committees! 12 Lenin, Lunatcharsky, Kamenev and Vorovsky are, I be- lieve, the only Bolshevist leaders who have a certain amount of education. Trotsky is quite untrained as his writings show, though they reveal intelligence and unquestionable journalistic talent. As for Zinoviev, Uritsky, Volodarsky, Peters, Dsierjinsky, Sverdlov, Kalinine, Goukovsky, they are ignorant men in the strict sense of the word. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 13a For that matter, the Bolshevists do not con- ceal this fact, or at least they do so very badly* Here is the resolution they adopted at the Con- gress of the Third International: "On the basis of the propositions and after hearing the reports of the representatives of the different countries, the Congress of the Commu- nist International declares that the main duty of communist parties in countries where the Soviet system does not yet exist is : "1. To explain to the laboring masses the his- torical significance, the political and practical necessity, of creating a new proletarian democ- racy to take the place of bourgeois democracy and the parliamentary system; "2. To develop the Soviet system among the employees in all manufacturing concerns, in army and navy, and among the tillers of the soil and the poor peasants ; "3. To make sure of a solid and trustworthy communist majority inside every Soviet." 13 Some naive person will probably ask how a "solid and trustworthy" majority can be assured if the principle of free elections is admitted. But those of us who have seen these elections will not ask such questions. We know very well how it is assured. That is why we shall not pay much attention to this "Constitution of the Federated Socialist Eepublic of the Soviets of Kussia," limiting our comment to a few words about Article 13 Humanite, July 31, 1919. 134 LENIN IV, Chapter XIII, Paragraph 65, items a to g. This " paragraph' ' provides: "The following people can neither vote nor be elected : "a. Those who employ labor to derive profit therefrom. "b. Those who live on income not derived from their own labor: income from capital, industrial enterprise, landed property, etc. "c. Private business men, middlemen, or com- mercial travellers and salesmen. "d. Monks and priests belonging to ecclesiasti- cal and religious orders. "e. Officers and employees of the former police force, of the special corps of gendarmes, and of the 'Okhrana,' as well as members of the former ruling dynasty of Kussia. "f. Persons legally declared afflicted with men- tal diseases, the insane, and those under guard- ianship. "g. Persons condemned for felonies committed for gain, during the period fixed by law or court sentence." I will add, for the amusement of jurists, that the preceding paragraph (§64) enumerates, in just as detailed a manner but in a slightly different language, those who have the right to vote and be elected to the Soviets. The reader must there- fore not be astonished at not finding children mentioned under item g of paragraph 65. It is expressly stated in the preceding paragraph that FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 135 the right to vote belongs to "all those who have attained the age of 18 on the day of the elec- tions. " The local Soviets, however, after rati- fication by the central authorities, may "lower the legal age fixed by this article." 14 This Chap- ter XIII "On Suffrage" with its numerous "and so forths" is so well drawn up that if the Con- stitution and all its articles, including paragraphs 64 and 65, were not a joke in the first place, the authorities would be put to it to define which citizens of the "Federated Socialist Republic of the Soviets of Russia" have the right to vote and which have not. To cite only the most absurd passages in these two paragraphs: Though the industries of Russia have been nationalized, paragraph 65, section h, deprives those who derive an income from manufacturing enterprise from voting. Trade has all been na- tionalized (on paper, of course) ; and yet section c deals with private (?) business men, middlemen, and salesmen. Landed proprietors, among those who live on an income not derived from their own labor, are also disfranchised. What is this all about? The land, which has been "nationalized,'* is today in the hands of peasants. Does the in- come of a peasant who works with his family on a 14 The local Soviets probably have no great knowledge of the Constitution and of the rights it gives them, and of this one in particular. In all administrative departments, all the commissariats swarm with boys who are under the legal age fixed by this article. 136 LENIN hundred acres of " nationalized' 9 land, come from his work or from landed property? Has the peasant the right to vote or not? But, for that matter, if one were trying to catalogue all the foolish things in this " Consti- tution, " one could choose almost any paragraph. I selected the sections relating to the ballot be- cause it struck me that if this paragraph were literally applied almost all the Bolshevists them- selves would suffer; for with the exception of "members of the former ruling dynasty of Kus- sia," there are representatives among them of all the classes mentioned in sections a, To, c, &, e, f, and g, of paragraph 65. No end of adventurers are settling their little affairs under the Bolshe- vist standard. Some of the officials of the Soviet Eepublic have made fortunes which would make poor Bela Kuhn turn green with envy. This gen- tleman on "retiring" took the paltry sum of live million kronen with him. Nor are "persons con- demned for felonies committed for gain," a rare exception in the Soviet Government. And only one guilty person out of a thousand is condemned — thanks for that much! 15 Who else? The offi- 15 Lunatcharsky, the People's Commissar of Education, re- cently said to a young French girl who was trying to get back her jewelry which had been left on deposit in a bank and who had gone through all the preliminary steps successfully only to meet refusal from the last official: "What can you ex- pect, Mademoiselle? You had hard luck, that's all. You have run across an honest man, probably the only one we have. Take his name! He is a pearl of rare quality." (Rob- ert Vaucher, L'Enfer bolchevik a Petrograd, Paris, 1919, p. 217.) FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 137 cers and members of the former police, of the spe- cial corps of gendarmes, and of the Okhrana? They are just swarming in Bolshevist circles. The Commissars themselves have often deplored the presence of this vermin in their midst "eating away," as they charge, "the flower of the com- munist regime." Lunatics? As many as you like, especially sadists. Who, for example, would call Peters a normal person? The monks! That depends on the order. Some of the Bolshevists (the best ones perhaps) seem to have altogether the mentality and psychology of our old ascet- ics. 16 The dictatorship of the proletariat, which this Constitution tries to express in legal form, is a Marxian idea, expounded — as is undeniable — in many of the early works of Karl Marx. It is true that attempts have been made by real Marx- ians, such as Akimov, to interpret Marx in a dif- ferent sense. 17 Akimov tried to show that Marx understood the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as a democratic government. His arguments are not without some weight. The Commune, which Marx and Engels considered a form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was in reality, even as they describe it, a government 16 M. Pascal, a French officer who had been sent to Rus- sia and who suddenly turned Bolshevist, is an example of this. I had the pleasure of knowing him when he was a clerical Catholic. That was just two years ago. 17 Akimov, Contribution to the Study of the Work of the Second Congress of the Social-Democratic Party of Russia, (in Russian), Geneva, 1904, pp. 36-53. 138 LENIN based on universal suffrage applied to the region around Paris. He recalls how Marx (in The Class Struggle in France and in the 18th Bru- maire) accused the bourgeoisie of abandoning universal suffrage and of creating, thereby, "a class parliament of usurpation." He also points out that the dictatorship of the proletariat was never part of any early platform of the Marxian .socialist parties of western Europe. The pro- grammes of Erfurt and Vienna, those of the Belgian, Swedish, and Italian socialist Parties, and the statutes of the International, do not con- tain the phrase. It appears first in the declara- tion of the Social-Democratic Party in Eussia. Akimov finally quotes Marx's description and characterization of the dictatorship of the bour- geoisie (which, we must add, was far surpassed in horror by the present regime in Eussia), and very judiciously observes : ' ' So there you have dictatorship ! Is that what the proletariat is asked to struggle and die for? Need we merely substitute the word 'proletariat' for the word ' bourgeoisie ' to get the ideal state of the future we all look forward to?" As I have already suggested, however, this ques- tion is of very little importance to us. Whether Karl Marx was or was not in favor of the dic- tatorship of the proletariat neither increases nor diminishes the value of it as a political concept, the fallacy of which has been clearly demon- strated by the Eussian experiment. FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 139 Events in Eussia have shown first of all that the dictatorship of the proletariat is in reality a dictatorship over the proletariat. Never, in history, has a parliament been more weak, more impotent, more abject, and more lacking in all dignity, than the Workers' and Soldiers' Coun- cils in the face of their Bolshevist masters. Just remember that the Central Russian Council greet- ed the signing of the infamous Peace of Brest- Litovsk with a burst of applause, though that treaty aroused protest even on the part of the People's Commissars. The slight deference the Bolshevist leaders pay their parliament is evident enough, a degradation due on the one hand to the low average of education in the Russian work- ing class, and consequently in its delegates, and on the other to the election system described above. Edward Bernstein said twenty years ago 18 that the present moral and intellectual development of the working class was such that the dictator- ship of the proletariat could be nothing but a dictatorship of soap-boxers and editorial writers. This observation, which was made before the practical experience of our day, undoubtedly shows great wisdom. Those of us who have actu- ally lived through such a dictatorship can go even further. We may say that Bernstein's observa- tion holds true of large cities such as Moscow 18 E. Bernstein, Theoretical Socialism and Practical Social Democracy, pp. 297-298. 140 LENIN and Petrograd. In the provinces and villages the dictatorship of the proletariat is more often a dictatorship of bandits of the worst sort. The most lawless elements of the population — brig- ands, robbers, vagrants, ne'er-do-wells — emerge from their dens to terrify peasant, workingman and honest citizen and create horrors which still await their Dostoievsky. A dictatorship of soap- boxers in the large cities, a dictatorship of brig- ands in the villages and provinces, a combination of the two in the medium sized towns (as well as in certain central institutions such as the fa- mous Extraordinary Commission) — that is what the dictatorship of the proletariat means. It is very likely the experiment would not be materially different in the most civilized western countries. We conclude, therefore, that every socialist party which aims to substitute clear and accurate thinking for pure demagogy must take the con- cept of the dictatorship of the proletariat in hand and put an end to it as a most unfortunate idea. In Eussia the Socialist Labor Party did this ex- pressly and with great emphasis by saying that it did not recognize any dictatorship whatsoever, whether that of the proletariat or of any other class, group, or persons. The socialist parties of the west would do well to follow this example. In democratic countries, where the working proletariat represents a majority of the popu- lation, the idea is absurd, since universal suffrage FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS OF BOLSHEVISM 141 gives the workers a deciding voice on all political questions. If these countries are not ruled by socialist governments, that proves simply that all the workers are not socialists; in which case a dictatorship of the proletariat, even if it were a bona fide one (not, that is, a dictatorship of cliques) would always mean a tyranny of one part of the working class over the rest and over the majority of the population as a whole. In a country like Eussia where the proletariat is a small minority, the system is the worst kind of autocracy, and one which ends by arousing the hatred of the great majority of the population, and of the peasants in particular, against all pro- letarian and socialist ideas. This state of affairs is not only unjustified, but extremely dangerous for society at large. The harm which the Bol- shevists have done to socialism cannot be reck- oned. The lesson to be derived from this should be a general repudiation of this evil doctrine on the part of all socialists. Will this be the case? The opposite appears more likely; for it seems that hard and costly experience alone is able to teach humanity any- thing. CHAPTER IX LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ALONG with the "dictatorship of the pro- letariat,' ' Lenin's report to the Congress of the Third International deals with two other questions of no less importance — freedom of as- sembly, and freedom of speech. Here is what Lenin says: "Moreover, the workers know very well that even in the most democratic bourgeois republic 'freedom of assembly' is only an empty phrase; because the rich always have the best public and private buildings at their disposal; they have ample leisure; and they enjoy the protection of the bourgeois authorities. The proletariat in the cities and in the country as well as the unprop- ertied peasants, an overwhelming majority of the population in short, have none of these three advantages. As long as things stand this way, equality, 'pure democracy,' is nothing but a snare and a delusion. To obtain true equality and in- augurate true democracy for the workers, their oppressors must first be deprived of their mag- nificent public and private buildings ; the workers must be given leisure; and freedom of assembly must be assured, not by the sons of the aristocracy 142 LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 143 or the capitalist class placed, as officers, in com- mand of stupid soldiers, but by armed workers tliems elves.' ' It is evident that Lenin knows how to make full use of the injustices of the capitalist world. Who can deny that such injustices are as numer- ous as they are cruel? And yet this whole tirade is as false as it is hypocritical. Freedom of assembly in the bourgeois demo- cratic republics is not an empty phrase; and Lenin, who so often had the floor in meetings in Paris, Zurich and Geneva, knows this better than anybody else. The "sons of the aristocracy' ' and "capitalist officers" who guarded these meetings in normal times before the war were, actually, policemen of the civil service who were not much interested in what they heard and were not much inclined to mix in. Old timers might perhaps be able to mention a few cases where freedom of speech was interfered with by the police; but everyone must admit that such cases were ex- tremely rare — political anachronisms, so to speak. I personally do not remember any such acts of violence. In the Saint Paul Riding School, in the Salle Wagram, and in Hyde Park, I have heard the most inflammatory tirades against the existing order, against capitalism, against gov- ernment in general and governments in particu- lar (against the Czar, Nicholas I, and M. Aristide Briand, for example) ; I have heard anarchistic and regicide speeches; I have heard Sebastian 144 LENIN Faure and the Spanish anarchists ; and never did the police who were listening inside or watching at the door — with faces expressing the reverse of sympathy — intervene in any way. In London the police often risk their lives to uphold freedom of speech, interfering to protect from the violence of an enraged crowd revolu- tionary orators who insult the government and the police. In fact the only cases I ever person- ally witnessed, where meetings were interrupted by brute force of arms, were in Eussia, under the Czar and at the beginning 1 of the Bolshevist rule. I will also venture the opinion that the armed workers led by Bolshevist boys behaved far more brutally than the gendarmes of the Czar under the leadership of the ' * sons of the aristoc- racy." But, says Lenin, the rich have the "best pub- lic and private buildings" at their disposal. The most magnificent of these unquestionably are the Parliament buildings. Very well ! In the Palais- Bourbon, in the House of Commons, and in the Eeichstag, all orators, rich and poor, have one and the same right to absolute freedom of speech. The only exception is, again, the Tauride Palace at Petrograd, which has been visited by "stupid (Soldiers' ' on three occasions. The First and the Second Duma were dissolved by the Czar's police, 1 1 say "at the beginning" ; because later on under the "Terror," no non-Bolshevist meetings were allowed; and any anti-Bolshevist speaker who dared show himself at a govern- ment meeting, would have been jailed immediately, or else shot as a saboteur, White Guard, or counter-revolutionist. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 145 who had unsuccessfully barred the gates of the Palace before the sessions began. The third case was the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly by Lenin's sailors. This last spectacle was one of unheard-of vulgarity and brutality. The ma- rines hurled obscenities and threats at the depu- ties, covering them with their guns under the benevolent eyes of Lenin himself — that great defender of liberty against the abuses of the bourgeoisie ! But besides Parliament buildings? It cannot be denied that the rich have finer edifices than the poor. But no one can say in good faith that the poor cannot hold meetings for lack of build- ings in the so-called bourgeois republics. The rich and the poor generally hold their meetings in the same places, which either cost nothing, as is the case with Hyde Park in London, or which are within the reach of all pocketbooks, as is the case with the Salle des Societes Savantes or the Salle Wagram in Paris, where L' Action Fran- caise and the Socialist Party hold meetings in turn. As for leisure, everybody knows that social- ist meetings are usually better attended than those of the rich; for the people who go to the former are more enthusiastic, more energetic, and interested in a larger variety of questions, than those who go to bourgeois meetings. The second problem which Lenin " solves' ' in the same report is that of the freedom of the press : 146 LENIN "The 'freedom of the press' is also one of the essential principles of 'pure democracy.' But the workers and the socialists of all countries know a thousand times over that this freedom is a delusion so long as the best printing machines and the largest supplies of paper are controlled by the capitalists and so long as capitalism keeps its hold over the press itself, a hold which seems to be more decided, more brutal and more cynical the further democracy and the republican system are developed — the best illustration is the United States. "To obtain real equality and true democracy for the workers — industrial and agricultural — the capitalists must first be deprived of power to employ writers in their service, to buy publish- ing houses and corrupt newspapers. For this reason the yoke of capitalism must be thrown off, the oppressors must be dispossessed and their power lessened. To the capitalist, 'freedom' means the freedom of the rich to profiteer and the freedom of the workers to starve. "Freedom of the press means to the capital- ists the freedom of the rich to buy the press and to create and misguide so-called public opinion. The defenders of 'pure democracy' again show themselves defenders of one of the basest and lowest systems ever devised for the domination by the rich over the organs of education of the poor. They are impostors who exploit exalted and de- ceptive phrases to prevent the people from ac- LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 147 complishing its historic task, the liberation of the press from the clutches of capitalism. "Real freedom and equality can be assured only by a Communist regime, which will not allow anyone to acquire wealth at the expense of others, which will make it, in a literal material sense, impossible for the press to be enslaved, either directly or indirectly, by the power of wealth, and under which each worker (or equal groups of workers) will have equal rights in the use of publishing houses and supplies of paper which then will belong to the conimunity. ' ' Now all this is so much dialectic legerdemain from a trickster of no serious scruples. No one is going to deny the existence of terrible abuses of the power of wealth in the realm of journal- ism. But to deduce from them that the freedom of the press in society today is only a delusion is to betray very little zeal for the truth. With all the abuses of capitalism with which we have to contend (of this I will have something more to say in the last chapter of this book), the anti- capitalist press in democratic republics such as France and Switzerland, and even in constitu- tional monarchies such as England or Italy, has ample means for subsisting and for carrying on the most violent campaigns against existing gov- ernments and against capitalism. This is possible for two reasons. In every country there are socialistic capitalists and even Bolshevistic capitalists who for some reason or 148 LENIN other are willing to give money to organs devoted to attack on the class to which these philan- thropists belong. 2 Moreover, public subscriptions, such as the one recently started by Humanite and which, I think, brought in five hundred thousand francs, make the creation and development of great socialist organs possible. All free countries have them. The German Vorivarts, and Freiheit, the Italian Avanti! and the French Humanite have circulations of hundreds of thousands. These organs were absolutely unrestricted before the war. And even today, with all the abuses and stupidities of post-war reaction, the press which is most hostile to the existing authorities, {Avanti! in Italy, or the Populaire in Paris, for example, which are near-Bolshevist or pro-Bol- shevist organs) have practically complete free- dom to say anything they choose. 3 In my judg- ment all those who would read Humanite or the Populaire, if these organs had "the very best printing presses and largest supplies of paper at their disposal," as Lenin requires, already read them now. But it is a piece of impudence in the Chief of the Soviet Government to be accusing the bour- geois republics of failure to respect the freedom of the press ! In Bussia, one has to go back, not 2 Krassin, one of the three present dictators of Soviet Russia, is an example of a Bolshevist millionaire. 3 No sincere democrat will deny that censorship is the most stupid and ineffective institution in the world; and we hope that full freedom of speech will be restored at once to all newspapers. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 149 to the reign of Nicholas II, but to that of Nicholas I, to find anything comparable to the cynical brutality with which the Bolshevist Government has suppressed every trace of an independent press. This impudence, however, is quite outdone by what the Bolshevist leader says, in the same docu- ment, with reference to the Terror: "The murder of Karl Liebknecht and Eosa Luxemburg is an important event in world his- tory not only because the best leaders of the true International had such a tragic end, but because the most highly developed State in Europe (we could say without exaggeration, in the whole world) has strikingly revealed its class character. If people under arrest, placed that is, by the authority of the State under the protection of the State, could be massacred with impunity by offi- cers and capitalists serving under a government of ' patriotic socialists,' it follows that the demo- cratic Eepublic, where such a thing is possible, is really a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. "Those who express their indignation at the murder of Liebknecht and Eosa Luxemburg but do not see this truth are either idiots or hypo- crites. ' Freedom/ in one of the freest republics in the world, the Eepublic of Germany, means freedom with impunity to kill the leaders of the proletariat after their arrest! It cannot be any different as long as capitalism lasts; for the de- velopment of democracy has intensified rather 150 LENIN than relieved the class struggle, which, because of the results and tendencies of war, has now reached a paroxysm.' ' The murder of the unfortunate Karl Liebknecht and Eosa Luxemburg was without doubt an inex- cusable act. The government of Scheidemann, however, not only disavowed this crime, but im- mediately took steps to avenge it. This is not, of course, particularly creditable to the government of "socialistic patriots.' ' Even under Nicholas II, attempts were made to apprehend and punish the murderers of Herzenstein and Iollos. It is therefore as false as it is impudent to say that "freedom in one of the freest republics of the world, the Eepublic of Germany, means freedom with impunity to kill the leaders of the proletariat, after their arrest ! " On the other hand, in the Soviet Eepublic, "it is absolutely true that the assassination of political enemies is not only tolerated but even ordered by the government ; and it takes place every day. I am speaking not only of acts such as the unpun- ished murder of Chingarev and Kokochkine, crimes far more abominable than the German murders ; because those two unfortunate deputies were not militants like Liebknecht and Eosa Lux- emburg, but peaceful, and, as it happened, de- fenseless men, invalids, killed in the most cowardly way in a hospital! The government of Lenin knew the names of their assassins very well, for they were published broadcast in the newspapers. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 151 Lenin did not dare, or did not care, to prosecute them; though he did in fact disavow the crime. This was during the early Bolshevist days when the government was still rather particular ! Now, people are being arrested every day, "placed, that is, by the authority of the State under the pro- tection of the State," only to be basely and cyn- ically murdered, hundreds of them, at the order of the Soviet Government, without trial, often without being formally charged with any crime, and sometimes without leaving any record of their fate. And in the face of such things, the hypocrit- ical head of the Soviet Government dares to accuse the democratic "socialist patriot" regime in Ger- many of the murder of Liebknecht and Kosa Lux- emburg! This is the height of cynicism! I have already shown by a quotation taken from an early work of Lenin's the falsity of his asser- tion that his Terror was the answer of the perse- cuted Bolshevists (poor devils!) to the conspir- acies of the imperialists and counter-revolution- ists the world over. The Terror was a premed- itated act. What, then, is its value ? I am not naive enough to suppose that the abom- inations committed by the Bolshevists can do them much harm in the opinion of the indifferent pub- lic, or even before the "tribunal of history." Acts of cruelty are never condemned once they succeed in their object. In our days of hatred and vio- lence, in our world of blood and iron, those are condemned rather who are not "hard" enough. 152 LENIN The spillers of the most blood are called the real, the strong, the masters of men. To shrink from bloodshed is to be weak, incapable, impotent. The usual reproach brought against Prince Lvov and Kerensky is that they did not shoot Lenin the day he first opened his mouth. Lenin himself seems not to understand this stupidity on their part — to bear them a grudge for it. No, history will not condemn the Bolshevists for massacring tens of thousands of bourgeois citizens any more than it will condemn those who will finally redeem Eussia for massacring tens of thousands of Bolshevists. General Manner- heim, one of the war's heroes — he won the Eussian Cross of Saint George and the German Iron Cross in a single war — was not discredited for shooting fifty thousand workmen, was he ? Nor will Uritsky and Lenin be. These ' ' condemnations of history ' ' are part of the conventional flim-flam of humanity, as all politicians know perfectly well. How many little Eobespierres and Napoleons (bourgeois and socialists of a feather) have I not met in the course of the last two years who boasted openly of their "atrocities" in the name of Eussia re- deemed, dressing them up a bit, probably, to fit the caveman pose better! The fact is we are always confronted with this great argument: the French Eevolution (which has had such a great influence on the imagina- tions of most demagogues down to our day) shows massacres, crimes, and atrocities quite as horrible LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 153 as the ones we are witnessing today! This is Lenin's favorite argument: "You call us cruel? But in 1793, the bourgeoisie was just as cruel as we are!" Sinister precedents for the Bolshevist Terror are indeed not lacking. The massacres of Paris were as bad as those of Petrograd are now; the judicial drownings of Nantes are no better than those of Kronstadt and Sebastopol; Samson and his guillotine quite rivals the Chinese firing- squads employed by the Extraordinary Commis- sion. And yet the Bolshevist massacres arouse much more disgust than those of that great period. They are repulsive, first of all, because of the imitative character of their cruelty. It is as if the Bolshevists were consciously trying to ape all the worst features of the great men of the French Terror: massacre for massacre, hostage for hos- tage, drowning for drowning. They have had their September, their Kevolutionary Tribunal, their common burial trench, their Louis XVI, their Marie Antoinette, their Dauphin, their ex-Nobles, as well as their Marat, their Carrier, and their Fouquier-Tinville. The guillotine alone was lack- ing ; and Trotsky, the great dramatizer among the Bolshevist leaders, even thought of that early in the Eevolution. If the Bolshevists were forced to rest content with the prosaic Chinese firing squad or the Lettish bayonet, they owe that humil- iation to the backwardness, merely, of the Russian 154 LENIN steel industry. Another notable lack in the land- scape of the Enssian Terror is the popular enthu- siasm around the scaffold. Common people do gaze at the jails of the Extraordinary Commis- sion, but with expressions of somber stupor on their faces. There was some reason to think, was there not, that a century of enlightenment could not have passed without teaching mankind a few lessons? The terrorist fanaticism of Robespierre, like the Catholic fanaticism of Torquemada, had at least the merit of being sincere. Was it conceivable that a new Inquisition could ever rekindle the auto-da-fe anywhere in Europe? Surely the dis- ciples of Karl Marx must have made some prog- ress over the disciples of Jean- Jacques Rousseau ! Did they not see, moreover, what the Terror led to in 1793? Nothing of the kind, alas ! And, unfortunately, these people call themselves socialists. Up to the present time, socialism had never undergone the acid test of governmental authority, unless the ex- periment of the Paris Commune, which was short and indecisive, be called such. Hitherto, social- ism has had its apostles and its martyrs ; but never its inquisitors or its executioners! But the Bol- shevists happen to call themselves socialists ; and many people will find it to their interests to be- lieve them. In spite of anything socialists may say, socialism will always be charged with the abominable Saint Bartholomews of the Kremlin. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 155 "You are no better than the others," the "im- partial" witness will retort to our defence. The Bolshevists, however, were right in claim- ing to be imitating the French Eevolution as closely as possible. Nothing did more harm to Kussia and to the anti-Bolshevist cause than this easy external analogy, this superficial resem- blance, between the two upheavals. This parallel influenced many intellectuals in Europe, begin- ning with M. Bomain Bolland, who had almost agreed, so it seems, to be the "Kant" of the Com- munist Eevolution; and ending with President Wilson, who refused to become its "Brunswick." 4 In the end, also, it gained, indirectly, no little sym- pathy for the Bolshevists among people who knew them only through the newspapers. I may say, without fear of paradox, that the hostility which some organs of the European press showed Bol- shevism on the grounds of atrocities was very valuable to Lenin — so solidly is the moral and political reputation of those organs established. An influential member of the British Labor Party told Mr. Titov and myself quite seriously that "the British workers were sympathetic with the Bolshevists because our capitalistic press is not." The external likeness of the French and the Kussian Bevolutions is indeed quite striking in some respects. The succession of events is much the same: enthusiasm, violence, civil war, terror, 4 Mr. Wilson at one time formerly pronounced very severe judgment on the French Revolution, not alone in its acts, but also in its ideas. 156 LENIN chaos. A weak Czar wheedled by -a foreign and unpopular Czarina; a liberal aristocrat leading during the first period of revolution ; 5 then for the Gironde, overthrown and persecuted, and the ' ' Mountain " victorious and triumphant, a Eussian Vendee (we really went France one better — we had two) helped by foreign powers bent on "drown- ing the Revolution in its own blood"; and "those awful emigres and counter-revolutionists" setting up another Coblentz in Paris and asking for the intervention of the reactionary armies ; and those heroic revolutionists who, like the men of the Convention, astounded the world with their mad energy, raising armies, winning victories, taking insurgent towns by storm and razing them ( Jaro- shiv surely is as good at Toulon!) . . . But how different the performance looks when you observe the acting from a front seat and hap- pen to know the actors off-stage! That "miser- able Russian Coblentz ? ' first of all ! What strange ingredients in that "gang of reactionaries" who are stabbing the Bolshevist Revolution in the back! Those Comtes D'Artois, those Russian Condes ! And who are they, if you please? They are Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Tchaikovsky, Lopatin, Madame Brechkovsky — Babuska( !), Axelrod, Zas- oulitch, Vera Gigner, Ivanof , old war-horses, all of them, old champions of Socialism and Democracy, everybody that Russia is proud of in the annals of 5 This seems to be a special predilection of revolutions : they begin with the titled noble ; a Marquis de Lafayette or a Prince Lvov, a Maximilian of Baden or a Count Carolyi. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 157 her heroic history ! 6 They are Korolenko, the great writer; Miakotone; Pechekhonov; Potresov — publicists of spotless reputation, known and es- teemed in all countries ! They are nine-tenths of the people who count for something in the culture expressing itself in Eussian today! And what is the slogan of these servants of greedy reaction? Is it the "vive le roi" of the emigres of Coblentz? No, they proclaim the sovereignty of the Constit- uent Assembly, based on that universal suffrage at which the Bolshevists so scoff! On the other hand, it would be hard to find any- thing in the history of the French Revolution analogous to the friendship in which the Bolshe- vists consorted with the foreign enemy. 7 I have already explained why I never regarded Lenin as a paid agent of German imperialism. It is never- theless true that the part the Germans played in the history of the coup d'etat of October, first in the revolutionary, and later in the governmental activities of the Bolshevists, is very great. It is known that Austria-Hungary offered a separate peace to the Government of Bus sia just a few days before the Bolshevist uprising. Did the government of William II discover the Austrian plan from some secret source? Did the Kaiser order his agents in Eussia to hasten the coup d'etat? Or is it all a matter of pure coincidence? 6 The Bolshevists have not a single name with which to counter this glorious Pleiades of their enemies. 7 Interesting views on this question may be found in a book by Mr. Charles Dumas: La Verite sur les Bolsheviks, Paris, 1919. 158 LENIN History may be able some day to untangle the jumbled lines of intrigue connecting Parvus, Ganetzky and Co. in Wilhelmstrasse, with the Smolny Institute. People in Petrograd at the time were able to observe with their own eyes the open activities of the German agents who were almost publicly buying machine-guns from the Eussian soldiers whom they had bribed. Who, in- deed, except German agents, could have needed Eussian machine-guns and cannon? From the point of view of the International it was legitimate, as the Bolshevists claim, to accept aid from the German imperialists — not, of course to help Germany, but as a war measure to their own advantage. 8 We can grant all this because Lenin will have it so. However, let us not look for precedents in the history of the French Eev- olution. I cannot see Eobespierre using money supplied by Pitt, any more than I can see Danton signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. To them national self-respect was not, as it is to Lenin, "the point of view of a duel-fighting country squire"; and treaties were not, as Trotsky con- sidered them in the sinister comedy of Brest- Litovsk, opportunities for satisfying so-called revolutionary, but in reality very bourgeois, van- ity, by rubbing elbows with counts and princes in diplomatic tournaments ! Fate was surely kind to the Bolshevists in this 8 At the same time the Bolshevists were accusing the inter' ventionists of seeking aid from the democratic Allies. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 159 disastrous story of the separate peace. If tliey find any sympathy at all left for them today in France, England and Italy, they owe it indeed to their lucky star. Who could have foreseen, at the end of 1917, that the Allies would win a decisive victory without the help of Russia? The Bolshe- vists did not at any rate; and Trotsky said pub- licly, in a speech on February 15, 1918, that he did not consider such an Allied triumph at all prob- able. Was the Peace of Brest-Litovsk 9 really a clever and deeply subtle manoeuver? Is it true that the Bolshevists "took the Germans in," as they are boasting today? Not at all. The Kuhl- manns and the Czernins knew very well what they were doing. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk was, to use Lenin's famous expression, much more of a peredychka, a breathing space, for the Germans than it was for the Bolshevists. It enormously increased their chances of success on the Western Front where they were concentrating all the forces freed by the Russian collapse. 10 9 "The Bolshevists pride themselves today on having out- guessed the German imperialists who made them capitulate at Brest-Litovsk; they regard the German revolution as their work. In reality, though they doubtless gave large sums of money to the Sparticides, they did a great deal more in Rus- sia to prevent the overthrow of William II than they did in Germany to bring it about. Their evil influence on the Rus- sian army, and the fear which the example of our country inspired in the Germans, retarded the defeat of Prussian mil- itarism a full year." ( Landau- Aldanov, La Paix des Peu- ples, p. 96.) 10 There were 137 divisions of the enemy on the Russian front in 1916; and they were under command of the three most competent generals the Germans had: Hindenburg, Ludendorf, and Mackensen. There were 146 in August, 1917, on the eve of the fall of Kerensky. How many remained 160 LENIN What would have happened if the Germans had won a decisive victory before the arrival of Amer- ican reinforcements (whether the United States should arrive in time was purely a technical ques- tion, the answer to which was not foreseen by far greater experts than the Bolshevists — by Luden- dorf and Hindenburg notably) ? With the western democracies crushed, triumphant German impe- rialism would not have left Russian Bolshevism in power for twenty-four hours. Having used the Bolshevists for their purposes, the Germans would have dismissed them with as little ceremony as was actually the case in the Ukraine and in Fin- land. They would have found a Skoropadsky or a Mannerheim for Moscow also. This did not happen, however, and for a thou- sand reasons : strategic blunders, in the first place, of Ludendorf , who failed to drive the Allied army at Salonika into the sea in time ; and to hoard his reserves sufficiently during the great offensive of April, 1918 ; a great effort on the part of the Allied armies and industries ; famine in Germany created by the blockade; the collapse of Bulgaria and Turkey; and numberless other things. Among these latter was the Bolshevist propaganda in Ger- many, which, however, was but a single factor of very limited importance, and which would have had no importance at all without the concurrent after the Peace of Brest-Li tovsk? This fact alone was enough, I think, to justify the Russians who remained faith- ful to the Alliance in considering the invitation to Prinkipo given by the Entente to "all parties in Russia," a downright insult. LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 161 action of the other factors. The Bolshevists did not see the situation as a whole. Brest-Litovsk rendered German imperialism a great service which, however, was not great enough — no ser- vice would have been great enough — to assure a German victory. And such a victory would have meant the ruin of democracy and of socialism, to say nothing of Bolshevism. The peace of Brest-Litovsk was black treason quite as much from the proletarian as from the patriotic point of view. Today after the Allied victory the matter presents a very different aspect from what it had in June, 1918, when the Germans were at Chateau- Thierry; and especially from what it would have had, if it had resulted in the setting up of a military German government in Paris as well as in Moscow. I wonder what M. Jean Longuet would have said then! However, Germany may, as the end proved, have made a very bad bargain at Brest-Litovsk. Since the collapse of Russia did not save her from decisive military defeat and complete capitulation, it might have served her purposes better if a dem- ocratic Russia, the Russia of the Provisional Gov- ernment, had been represented in the conference at Paris on the same footing as France and Eng- land. A Russia with a powerful voice in the dis- cussion would probably have insisted, for many reasons pertinent to her vital interests, on the modification of some of the terms of the peace im- posed upon Germany by the victors. But one 162 LENIN cannot foresee every thing. The political consid- erations of the German imperialists were based on the chance of victory or at least of a draw. Does not this prove that the Bolshevists are wrong in boasting about the Peace of Brest-Litovsk as a master stroke evincing the great wisdom of Lenin % In striking parallels with the French Revolution, they do not, in fact, emphasize this boast ; they are willing to overlook this " master-stroke.' ' And they are absolutely right. There is no example of such treachery in the men of the Convention, with whom the Bolshevists are so fond of comparing themselves. There is another fundamental difference be- tween the French Eevolution and the Russian Revolution: in France, war came out of revolu- tion ; in Russia, revolution out of war. The luxuriant blossoming of liberal ideas in the eighteenth century, as well as economic develop- ment in France, found its expression in the Great Revolution. The potential energy of the French people, which had been storing up for centuries, then became kinetic. The twenty-five years of war which followed were sustained on this for- midable surplus of forces. Not only Valmy and Marengo but Austerlitz and Jena also are due, at least in part, to the enthusiasm behind these revo- lutionary ideas. The soldier who died for the glory of Napoleon thought he was dying for freedom ! How different is the Russian Revolution! Not only did it have the abortive preamble of 1905- LENIN AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 163 1907, which wearied and discouraged the present generation; but the Russian people entered upon victorious Eevolution in 1917, already fatigued by three years of war waged under conditions in- finitely more difficult than those confronting the other Allied peoples. 11 The material and moral effects they had made had quite exhausted them. Life was disorganized even at the beginning of the Revolution. All the evils which seemed to assume terrifying proportions as the Revolution wore on and which are often attributed to the Rev- olution entirely — desertion, graft and extrav- agance, economic chaos, the breakdown of the rail- ways, the closing of the factories — already existed under the Czar. The revolution simply advertised them, and with understandable exaggeration. The war itself was a terrific revolution which drained off the energies of the Russian people and sowed the seeds of a bleak and blear discour- agement. When the Revolution broke we had lost 11 Russia was under blockade for more than five years, a blockade more complete than the German blockade; for though Russia, for two or three years, received some aid from her allies over the slender threads of the Siberian Rail- road and the line of the north, Germany received far more replenishment, not only from her own allies, but from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, Italy and Roumania (for a time), and from the rich lands she conquered in France, Belgium and Poland. Moreover, if Germany was crushed by a four years' blockade, in spite of her wonderful organization, what can be said of Russia, which was always very badly administered and in- finitely worse administered after October, 1917? That she has borne up at all proves the great natural richness of the country and a vitality in its people as extraordinary as their passivity. How long would England have survived had she been blockaded like Russia? 164 LENIN faith in everything. This collapse of Enssian morale was not due, as is sometimes alleged, to military reverses solely. Had that been the case, the revolution would have come in 1915, after the great retreat, involving the fall of Kovno, Brest- Litovsk and Ivangorod. The fact is, Russia did not suffer a real " knock-out " during the first three years of the war. The reverses on the other fronts were quite similar to hers. Besides she had great successes: Eastern Galicia had been conquered; the Russian flag was floating over Erzerum and Trebizond. The strategic situation in February, 1917, was not so very, very bad. But faith had gone. Intellectually, from the very be- ginning of the war, Russia had been in the state of mind which Victor Hugo attributed to France in 1870: "The outlook is dark — fraught with pos- sibilities of the best and worst: France herself deserves an Austerlitz, but the Empire a Wa- terloo !" In point of fact the Revolution took place almost mechanically. The country had just enough en- ergy left to do away with the old regime. The great enthusiasm needed to carry on simultane- ously two enterprises, war and revolution, was not there and could not be manufactured. Ger- many herself could not have done what Russia tried to do. The Revolution degenerated rapidly ; the problem of mutiny in the army, which insisted on demobilization, came to overshadow everything else. CHAPTER X SEMI-BOLSHEVISM: THE PLATFORM OP THE FRENCH SOCIALIST PARTY rp HE fundamental idea of Bolshevism as well -*■ as Lenin's practical program was recently summarized by him in the following description: "A dictatorship of the proletariat, coupled with a new democracy for the workers — civil war for a greater participation of the masses in politics." 1 We must compliment the Bolshevist leader on one point: he expresses himself with a frankness and a clearness quite in contrast with the haziness prevailing today in the ideas of most European socialists. One ought to read the interesting "Question- naire on Bolshevism" conducted by L'Avenir 2 of Paris. This magazine asks the best qualified militant socialists to answer a few queries, of which the first two are as follows : "Is the revolutionary transformation of the capitalist system into the socialist system possible at the present moment? If so, by what signs can this possibility be recognized, and in what does it consist? "Can revolutionary power do without demo- cratic sanction, and how?" 1 N. Lenin, Letter to the Workingmen of America, p. 11. 2 No. 37, p. 223, May, 1919. 165 166 LENIN The answers are not very instructive taken one by one; but in the mass, they are exceedingly in- teresting. "The Socialist Party," says Madame Louise Saumoneau, for instance — she was the first to answer the questionnaire, clipping a section from the "program of the Committee for the Kesump- tion of International Kelations," "strongly repu- diates any attempt to represent the Kevolution as premature and the proletariat as insufficiently pre- pared for the exercise of power. . . . Eevolution alone can bring about a rapid and complete solu- tion of the world's problems of social reconstruc- tion." That is what the Socialist Party, in whose name Madame Louise Saumoneau is speaking, thinks. But M. Andre Lebey, who belongs to the same party and whose answer comes immediately after hers, does not seem to share this opinion. His letter, indeed, says: "It is mad, criminal and ab- surd to say that 'the present duty of the prole- tariat is to take over power immediately.' You know as well as I do that the working class is still very badly educated. It is backward intellectually and in material resources. Only when capitalist society has attained its maximum development and has spread its benefits everywhere will an insur- rectionary movement, which cannot be 'ordered in advance,' perhaps become necessary." 3 3 1 am, let me repeat, quoting only the first two answers. The others are no less contradictory. SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 167 On the other hand, one may read the following in a recent pamphlet by M. Albert Thomas: "We nsed to dream," he said, "that the propertied classes who had increased their riches and power and who, even during the war, had partly compen- sated for war losses by new inventions and meth- ods, wonld preserve something of the new spirit that had come to animate them during the years 1914-18, and would be ready to acknowledge that they were managing production not in their own interests solely, but in the interests of all. We hoped they would come to see that the manage- ment of capital is a social trusteeship held for the common good, and to look upon their em- ployees as equal partners in a public enterprise, entitled therefore to become parties in discussion and negotiation. Is this hope a delusion? Has a durable union, a union superior to all our selfish struggles, become impossible? I, for one, refuse to think so." 4 Madame Saumoneau wants a revolution in France immediately. M. Lebey considers it a little premature; and M. Thomas does not want it at all. In the heart of the "united" Party there are three contrary or differing opinions on this rather important question. Which one expresses the official ideas of the Party? Should there be a revolution today, as Madame Saumoneau desires, or is it, on the other hand "mad, criminal and absurd," as M. Lebey insists? 4 Albert Thomas, Bolshevism or Socialism, Berger-Le- vrault, 1919, pp. 13-14. 168 LENIN To conciliate these two positions wonld seem to be a task beyond human power ; but the Extraor- dinary National Congress held in April, 1919, proved the opposite. It maintained the unity of the Party and "answered" the fatal question: "The Socialist Party declares more vehemently than ever, with a conviction increased by recent terrible lessons, that the goal for which it is aim- ing is * social revolution.' "Social revolution means nothing more nor less than the substitution of a collectivist regime of production, distribution, and exchange for the present economic regime, founded on capitalistic private property and corresponding to a period in history which is now out of date. "The future alone will show how this change, which is in itself the Eevolution, will take place — whether through a legal transfer of titles, or a pressure of universal suffrage, or an exercise of force on the part of the organized proletariat." 5 That is what M. Leon Blum in his Comment on the Platform of the Socialist Party calls "facing problems directly, without hypocrisy, or uncer- tainty!" I trust I may be allowed to disagree with him. Those accustomed to call things by their right names will find mere word-juggling in the passage which I have just quoted. From the strictly formal point of view, the Platform is probably correct. There can be no doubt that the legal substitution of the new economic regime 5 Policy and Platform of the Socialist Party, p. 6. SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 169 for that of the present day may be called a social revolution. In the same sense one may speak of a "revolution" in chemistry, or a "revolution" in botany. Unfortunately, that is not the ques- tion. The question is how this transformation is to take place, whether by the "pressure of uni- versal suffrage," or by "the exercise of force on the part of the organized proletariat." And the Platform has no answer to make to this question except to say modestly: "the future alone will show;" while M. Blum in his Comment begs his colleagues "not to confuse method with aim." "What is the meaning of all this ? Here we have a world on fire; Europe perhaps at the point of death; a terrible experiment started by men in Moscow, who ask for nothing better than a chance to repeat it in Paris and London ; the people con- fused; tension in the masses extreme — and the French Socialist Party thinks that this is the pro- pitious time to say, with a tone of a prophet and a revealer, what has been said a thousand times before, that the final aim of socialism is the sub- stitution, etc., and that this substitution is called the Social Eevolution ! Has not the man in the street the right to say to the members of the Congress : "Gentlemen, no one asked you about that. "We knew that forty years ago. WTiat we want to know is whether you, like the men of Moscow, in- tend to organize a 'movement of force' in the near 170 LENIN future and whether you are going to ask us to help you. That is what we want to know, because if there is going to be a barricade we must know on which side of it we are going to fight.' ' The " answer' ' is: "The proletariat cannot re- nounce any instrument of warfare in fighting for the attainment of political power." "Any instrument of warfare!" The machine- gun is an excellent instrument of warfare; and experience in Eussia (as Nicholas II and Lenin discovered) has demonstrated that with machine- guns a minority can impose its will on the majority for a considerable length of time. This sentence of the "Policy and Platform" must have pleased M. Alexandre Blanc who calls himself a Bolshe- vist. Perhaps that was the reason for its use. But must the French proletariat, can the French proletariat, do without universal suffrage, or even oppose universal suffrage, in order to gain polit- ical power ; or must it on the contrary wait until it becomes a majority? The "answer" to this is: "The Social Revolu- tion has no chance of being successful unless it occurs at the proper time, at a time, that is, when conditions are ripe for it in material concerns as well as in the mentality of the public. The Party has always discouraged the workers from attempt- ing movements that are premature and demon- strations that are impulsive." This time Andre Lebey and Albert Thomas must be satisfied, which is perhaps again what the SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 171 Party leaders were aiming at. But the man in the street is still left in the dark : if he is not called on today, will he be called on tomorrow, and if not, when? "The Socialist Party is no more master of the moment for the revolution than it is of the form the revolution will take." But after all, on what do these things depend? "The form of proletarian Kevolution will de- pend, in the last analysis, on circumstances (!), especially on the nature of the resistance it meets in its efforts to gain deliverance. The Socialist Party would not shrink from seizing any oppor- tunity the mistakes of the bourgeoisie might give it." At any rate, the principle of universal suffrage is a "matter of circumstances" clearly. But not in the least clear is what the resistance of the bourgeoisie has to do with this case. Admitting that the principle is also a matter of circumstances to the bourgeoisie (as is doubtless the fact) and that the circumstances are such that the bourgeois think they are in a position to do without univer- sal suffrage, the question is not even raised as to whether the Socialist Party has a right to meet violence with violence. In this event, it is evident that the bourgeois will be the ones to bring about the revolution and that the socialists will have no say on the point. But so long as the suffrage is not in danger, will they, can they, should they, use force? That is the question. The man in the 172 LENIN street is still waiting for the answer of the Congress. "The Socialist Party is not master of the mo- ment/' says the Platform. "How can we foresee what form the Bevolution will take!" asks M. Leon Brum. But whether the Party is master of the moment or not, whether it foresees the form of the Eevolntion or not, the question asked by L'Avenir must nevertheless be answered: is the present moment apt for instituting the collectivist regime of production, exchange and distribution, or is it not? If the answer is "no," the Party should say so frankly without thinking of the an- noyance it may cause Madame Louise Saumoneau or M. Alexandre Blanc. If the answer is "yes," it must say "yes" despite the sorrow M. Albert Thomas and M. Andre Lebey would probably feel. And it is equally necessary to answer the second question of L'Avenir as to whether the presump- tive Kevolution can do without ' ' democratic sanc- tion." Specific answers to these direct questions would be worth infinitely more than generalities on the final objectives of the Socialist Party or of socialism, which is — who would have believed it? — the substitution of one kind of ownership for another ! However, if the platform of the French Party says nothing about the chances of success the dif- ferent forms of social revolution have, M. Leon Blum lets fall a few very significant words on this subject which really deserves much better treat- SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 173 ment. He says: "If, on the other han3 one — though not the most probable — of the hypotheses which we have had to consider should be realized, if the acquisition of power by the proletariat should be the result of a constitutional process whereby the socialists, under circumstances to be determined, should gain a majority in the parlia- ment of their country, and if they then should find themselves in a position to bring about what really amounts to revolution — a radical transformation, that is, in the status of property — well, in spite of the constitutional origin, in spite of the legal char- acter, of this transformation, it would be a rev- olution just the same !" The text of the Comment punctuates the conclusion of this rather involved sentence with the word "applause." I suppose this applause of the Congress was aroused par- ticularly by M. Blum's sensational and novel idea that the real objective of socialism is the trans- formation of property status and that the trans- formation contemplated amounts to Revolution! I cannot imagine it as a tribute to his judgment as to the probabilities of the hypotheses "we have had to consider!" It is incredible, nevertheless, that a question of this latter nature should, under present conditions in the world, be silently passed over in the Platform of a national Socialist Party and dealt with in a casual phrase of nine tvords in a Comment. The socialists have not as yet gained a majority in Parliament and in the coun- try. The French people, accordingly, and the 174 LENIN proletariat especially, have a right to expect the Socialist Party to tell them unequivocally the pol- icy they are to be asked to support. The Platform is more concise in answering the no less exercising question of the "dictatorship of the proletariat.' ' It says: "Whatever the form the Revolution assumes, the passing of the proletariat into power will probably be followed by a period of dictatorship. ' 3 The postulate is clear, and we can only congrat- ulate the French Socialist Party on having prof- ited so well by the wonderful lesson of the Eussian Revolution. The French Bolshevists who re- frained from adopting Bolshevist ideas until those ideas were thoroughly discredited, remind me, in their strategy, of those clever Egyptians, who kept as still as mice so long as the forces of Great Britain were absorbed in the Great War and post- poned revolting till after the defeat of Germany! "History clearly shows the meaning of this formula which is being so bitterly abused by the reactionaries today. History demonstrates be- yond question that a new regime, political or social, can never be established solely on the legal structure of the regime it is replacing. The rev- olutions of the 19th century succeeded or failed according as they did or did not observe this prin- iciple. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat ' is nothing but this transition between the old order which has been abolished and the new one which is coming into its own." SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 175 And Mr. Blum's Comment continues: ' ' When a new regime, — whether it be a new political, or a new social, system makes no dif- ference — has upset an existing order, it is con- demned to failure in advance if to justify its existence, it depends, at the beginning, on the political, economic or social institutions which it has overthrown. (Applause." . . . "Here we are dealing with a rule of profes- sional technique, one might say. Eevolutions have failed or succeeded according as they were or were not sparing of constitutional legality dur- ing the period lying between the old order and the new — the intermediate period of dictatorship, in other words ; which, when social revolution is involved, must be an impersonal dictatorship of the proletariat, just as at other times during other revolutions, it has been the dictatorship of Royal- ists, Bonapartists or Republicans. ' ' This argument of the Platform and its para- phrase in the Comment (or is the Platform the paraphrase of the Comment?) does not, to my mind, prove anything at all. "All the revolutions of the 19th century," says M. Blum, "succeeded or failed according as they did or did not have an intermediate period of dictatorship. ' ' I am very anxious to know how M. Blum classifies the rev- olutions of the 19th century and which he thinks were successful. But the author of the Comment does not choose to multiply illustrations ; he does not care to pose as "a history professor.'' He 176 LENIN contents himself with one example, "the last of the revolutions which occurred in France — the substitution of the republican for the imperial regime in 1870-71. ' ' What, for instance, was the point of conflict between Gambetta on the one hand, and the rest of the Government of National Defense on the other! In the face of the approaching elections, an early date for which had been stipulated in the Armistice, Gambetta tried to set up a real dic- tatorship on a democratic basis. He insisted, for one thing, that former officials of the Empire be ineligible for election. That was not constitu- tional. "It makes no difference," answered Gam- betta. "I am exercising a dictatorship, and if I do not exercise it, the Eepublic and democracy will be lost." And indeed, two or three years later, because Gambetta had not been able to seize and hold the intermediate dictatorship of the Ee- public, "a reactionary Assembly was able to form a conspiracy for the restoration of the Monarchy. ' ' In the first place I do not know what this in- structive fragment means by its phrase "a dem- ocratic dictatorship." Did it represent anything but the omnipotence of universal suffrage? If, for instance, in accordance with the Constitution of the Third Eepublic, the princes of formerly reigning families were exiled from France, does it follow that the French people have been living under dictatorship for fifty years? But without stickling on such points, as I try to follow M. SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 177 Blum's reasoning to the bottom and understand fully the historical example he cites, I find myself more and more perplexed. So then Gambetta "was not able to seize and hold the intermediate dictatorship.' ' And, since all the revolutions of the 19th century failed if they did not observe M. Blum's rule about an "intermediate period of dic- tatorship," I conclude that the Third Eepublic must have been overthrown and the Empire re- stored. However, things were not quite .so tragic as that. All that happened was "a reactionary Assembly forming a conspiracy to restore the Monarchy." That is literally all, and M. Blum's terrible rule is not so terrible as it seems. Accord- ing to his own statement, the Eevolution which established the Third Eepublic and which is un- deniably one of the most successful revolutions we have had in Europe — since the regime it estab- lished has lasted already a good half century — took place without the "intermediate period of dictatorship." If the other examples M. Blum might give in favor of his thesis are as convincing as this one, he is decidedly right in not choosing to pose as a "history professor." I will not go so far as to erect a general rule out of the opposite of the thesis of the Platform, namely that every revolution has been lost when it gives rise to a dictatorship. Eevolutions are phenomena far too complex to be made dependent upon any one condition which must itself be de- pendent on a thousand different factors of the 178 LENIN most varied kind. Furthermore, as I have already suggested, it is very difficult to divide revolutions into two classes such as "successful" and "un- successful." I stop at the assertion that the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is not only one of the most dangerous, hut also one of the most incoherent, political ideas ever conceived. "The new order," M. Blum continues, "planned by the proletariat, will be established by a class, but in the interest and for the good of all men. Like the new juridical system it precedes and prepares, the impersonal dictatorship 6 if the pro- letariat is exercised in the name and in the interest of the whole of humanity" (or, at least, of the whole nation). This goes without saying ! Since Adam delved and Eve span, no dictatorship, personal or im- personal, has ever been exercised in this world save in the interest of the whole of humanity ! The frank and honest dictators (it is, after all, a mat- ter of frankness and honesty) have never denied this. "Take as your text the so-called 'general welfare,' " said Napoleon, "and you can go as far as you like." 6 Georges Sorel wrote in 1907 : "In socialist literature there is frequent reference to a future dictatorship of the proletariat, about which they are not very fond of giving explanations. Sometimes this formula is improved by adding the epithet impersonal to qualify dictatorship but that does not clarify the situation very much." (Reflections on Vio- lence, p. 250.) It looks as if the authors of the Platform had exhumed this adjective on purpose to please M. Sorel, and so that he could have more than his usual fun with "the intellectuals who have taken up the profession of thinking for the proletariat!" SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 179 "However, this period of transition must be as brief as circumstances permit. Its duration will vary according to economic conditions, the degree of preparation and organization of the proletariat, and the nature and intensity of the resistance met." 7 Since we are here considering a dictatorship merely as opposed to a democracy based on uni- versal suffrage, we may ask how this dictatorship is to end of its own accord. If it suppresses itself as soon as "circumstances permit," what will it set up in its own stead? Anarchy? Universal suf- frage ? In this latter case can we hope for a com- plete reversal of public opinion — enlightened by the wonderful experiment successfully concluded by the proletariat — from despotism to democracy? I prefer not to be a history professor either; otherwise it would be very easy to show that no dictatorship, personal or impersonal — and the im- personal much less than the personal 8 — has ever prepared its subjects to be free citizens in a dem- ocratic state. All dictatorships have had just the 7 Platform, p. 8. 8 Cardinal Mazarin maintained rightly enough that people will put up with the absolutism of a king, even if it involves an extreme of tyranny ; but cannot stand that of ten thousand feudal lords, scattered all over the map, for any length of time. For this same reason the dictatorship of the hundred thousand Bolshevist commissars who are terrorizing Russia today is the most unbearable tyranny the country has ever known. It is much worse than the Old Regime; for the abso- lutism of the gendarmes was at least modified by a code of law. The situation would even be more abominable than it is if 99 per cent, of these commissars were not so readily to be bought off with money. In Russia today bribery is the sole surviving guaranty of individual freedom! 180 LENIN opposite effect on public opinion. That is why no dictatorship has ever suppressed itself of its own accord. M. Blum might reply that the dictator- ship of the proletariat will, in this respect as in all others, be different from the dictatorships hith- erto known to history; and he will cite the cur- rent example of Moscow. Like many other Euro- pean socialists, M. Blum should have taken a trip to Eussia, 9 granted the Bolshevists would have let him in (which is very doubtful, for this cham- pion of theirs is in their eyes one of the "bour- geois hypocrites"). He would there have seen first hand what the Russian people think of the Bolshevists — and, accordingly, the unlikelihood of ''circumstances ever allowing" Lenin to substi- tute universal suffrage for the "period of tran- sition." Of such a substitution — the "period of transition" has already lasted four years — Lenin is not even thinking. These observations, how- ever, are purely academic; we all know how dic- tatorships end in reality. And the regime of Lenin — although it satisfies M. Blum's formula absolutely (it would be hard indeed to find any- thing better in the way of dictatorship and a more "sparing use" of "constitutional legality") will not be an exception. 9 1 see in M. Boussaton's answer to the investigation of L'Avenir (No. 38, p. 285) the sincere cry of a drowning man: "Russia might have thrown some light on the prob- lem; but it is practically impossible for us to find out what is going on there. . . . We need documents! As for the moral and humanitarian side of the matter, what are we to believe?" SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 181 "The power of dictatorship during the period of transition must be exercised by the proletariat politically and economically organized. "True, in this respect, to its traditional tactics, the Socialist Party realizes that the political and economic organs of the workingmen must nor- mally determine the major lines of its policy." We find ourselves in darkness here again. What does "proletariat politically and econom- ically organized" really mean? Is it the C. G. T. (Confederation Generate du Travail) ; or is it merely the "Constitution of the Soviets," which has just been published jointly by the bookshops of the Socialist Party and by Humanitef In the latter case a few words should be added on the "poorest peasants," on the councils of deputies from the batrahs and the sredniaks, or even better, the Comitety Biednoty (Committees of the Indi- gent) to bring us up to the dernier cri in Moscow styles. It is very likely that an experiment with the Social Eevolution among the better educated Western peoples would not be very different from what we see in Russia. The world has just lived through five years of warfare which has peculiarly intensified all human instincts of hatred and de- struction. The very tone of controversy in the French newspapers (as in those of other coun- tries) is sufficient to cause some distrust as to the pacific character of a possible revolution in 182 LENIN France. 10 All parties resort to the same vituper- ation, the same accusations of corruption and treason. Signs of moral and intellectual deterior- ation are evident in every country; and do not imagine that the Socialist Party is escaping this general taint. Two socialist deputies, MM. Basly and Cadot, recently introduced a bill in Parlia- ment demanding the death penalty (with execu- tion " within twenty-four hours") for monopolists, profiteers, and speculators; and two extremist papers approved the measure. ' ' That is sane re- publican tradition, ' ' says Humanite. ' ' During the Great Eevolution were not the profiteers of that day quickly collared and hoisted up the nearest lamp-post?" 11 "Only ignorant people," says the Action Fran- gaise, on the other hand, "will be astonished to see the Royalists welcoming this timely resurrec- tion of the ' roasting bees' 12 and the ' hanging sprees' with which our kings kept the ' rabble' in order for some nine hundred years or more." 13 Now, without sympathizing with profiteers, speculators, and monopolists, one might hope that a modern civilized government had other means of settling economic questions than the "neckwear of the Eevolution" and the chambres ardentes of our old kings. 10 1 mention Franc© as one of the most civilized countries in the world. 11 Humanite, July 11, 1919. 12 The chambres ardentes, tribunals which condemned pris- oners to death by fire. 13 L' Action Frangaise, July 11, 1919. SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 183 Almost touching indeed is this flocking together of such differently feathered fowl as Royalist and Bolshevist, 14 yet here we find M. Daudet asking almost every day for the guillotine for M. Cail- laux; while M. Brotteau of the Populaire advo- cates a similar shampoo for Marshal Joffre's venerable head. 15 This is all journalistic fun- making, I am well aware. It would be idle to take such banter seriously in normal times. But let a revolution break out in France 16 and such jokes will turn, as they turned in Russia, to gal- lows, guillotines and — who can be sure — perhaps also to chambres ardentes! The Bolshevists have had theirs. . . ." But not only the moral condition of humanity today must be considered. The Platform of the French Socialist Party (which, in fact, does not take the moral condition into consideration at all) sets forth a list of circumstances "favorable to the success of the social revolution." I will mention only two of these: "first, the close unity of the International Socialist Party; second, material prosperity, especially in all that concerns stocks of raw materials, food stuffs, machinery, and means of transportation. ' ' The first of these con- 14 Five years ago, in spite of "sane republican tradition," a socialist declaring himself in favor of the death penalty would have been expelled from the Party. is Populaire, July 12, 1919. ""In time of revolution the class struggle has absolutely and inevitably always and everywhere taken form as civil war, and civil war is impossible without the most terrible destruction and the most bloody terror. ... (N. Lenin} Letter to the Workers of America, p. 7.) 184 LENIN ditions, without being indispensable, is neverthe- less not without importance. The second seems to me to be absolutely necessary. Well, does the Socialist Party believe that these two prerequis- ites obtain today? Will not everyone agree with me that we are today infinitely farther away from their realization than we were before the war in 1913, when the question of the Social Revolution had not as yet been raised by current events? Well then, would it not be better, instead of adopt- ing on this matter a sort of agnosticism hardly in keeping with the frank dogmatism of the Marxian faith, would it not be more honest also, to tell the French workers plainly that the "proletarian hour" will not strike tonight, nor even tomorrow morning ? It is true that to get free from this agnosticism in one way or another would mean a split in the famous "unity" (unity!) of the French Socialist Party. But would that "unity," I ask, be able to withstand the first crisis of the Eevolution (grant- ing that it survived up to the moment of the Rev- olution) ? The socialists of France owe a debt of gratitude to the French ministers, whose policies, good or bad, have kept them all united — Compere- Morel hobnobbing with Longuet, Thomas with Blanc, Lebey with Raffin-Dugens. Augustus Bebel, commenting on the policy of Jaures at the Amsterdam Socialist Congress, said : "After every vote in the French Parliament, we see the Jaurist group dividing into two or three SEMI-BOLSHEVISM 185 factions. For anything similar one has to go to Germany to the most despised of the capitalistic parties, the National-Liberals. But today a por- tion of the proletarian party in France shows the same tendency. The effect is naturally to com- promise and demoralize the whole movement. ' m Since the crisis of war is now over and the crisis of revolution has not yet come in France, the French Socialist Party has hitherto but rarely shown the lamentable spectacle which Bebel con- demned. I do not know, however, whether the intellectual and moral prestige of the French "United" Party has been increased by the fact that on one side of its parliamentary group sits M. Blanc, who openly calls himself a Bolshevist, and on the other M. Thomas, who maintains no less openly that "to fight Bolshevism is not to betray socialism but on the contrary to serve it." 18 In my opinion it would be more logical for each of them to keep to his own side of the house and leave the others alone, all the more since this wonderful "unity" is so ineffective in results. Though I hope very sincerely that the day may not come when the French socialists will see what the German, and we Russian, socialists have al- ready seen — a barricade rising in their own midst ! 17 Bebel, Speech of August 19, 1904, at a full session of the Congress of Amsterdam. What would Bebel, who was then so severe with the French socialists, have said today at the spectacle presented by the German socialists? 18 Albert Thomas, Bolshevism or Socialism, p. 7. CHAPTER XI THE SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE: JEAN JAURES BECAUSE of his great talents, the inherent strength of his character, the integrity of his political and private life, the extent and depth of his knowledge (in which he equalled, if he did not surpass Karl Marx), and because of the clearness of his political thinking, Jean Jaures was one of the noblest men mankind has known. I will begin this chapter by stating one of the fundamental ideas of this book: that the motto of all the democratic leaders of our day must be "Back to Jaures." But "back" does not wholly express my mean- ing. In spite of the great influence and excep- tional prestige of the French "tribune," demo- cratic and socialist thought and policy have never been sufficiently imbued with his ideals. The past belongs to Marx; the present, "alas," seems to belong to Lenin; I have some hope that the future may belong to Jaures. "Some hope," I say. Unfortunately nothing today gives promise of any triumph, in the near future, of the "Jaures idea." Slandered by his 186 SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 187 adversaries, frequently misrepresented by his friends, and honored by the men of Moscow, Jaures will perhaps have long to wait for the rec- ognition of his glory by all humanity. The fate of this man is doubly tragic : a fanatic assassinated him, and the Bolshevists erected a statue to his memory ! The paper which he edited with such great distinction for ten years gave an enthusiastic account of the ceremonies at the un- veiling of this monument in Moscow. It did not see in this tribute an insult to the memory of the great defender of human rights ; though the statue was set up two blocks away from the Lubianka, where the "Extraordinary Commission" tortures its prisoners, and barely a mile from Petrovsky Park, where " counter-revolutionist s" are shot without trial. Trotsky, it seems, made a beautiful speech at the unveiling ; he did not care for the methods of the French Tribune but he paid homage to the ability of the man. Let the proletariat of the world forgive Jaures for not having been a Bol- shevist — that was Trotsky's general tone. When Leo Tolstoi died, Nicholas II, who admired Tol- stoi's " ability" much as Trotsky admires the "ability" of Jaures, asked the Lord to be mer- ciful to that illustrious sinner. 1 Trotsky, praising Jaures with faint damns, makes a good twin for the Romanoff despot. When a famous "legal mistake" occurred in 1 "May the Lord be a merciful judge to him !"— so Nicholas II, when Stolypin told him that Tolstoi was dead. 188 LENIN France, the victim of which was neither a prole- tarian nor a socialist, Jaures devoted three years of his life to the cause of the millionaire officer against whom the injustice had been done. This fact alone ought to make his disciples go slow in setting him up today as a co-religionist and almost a friend of men who kill bourgeois because they are bourgeois and officers because they are of- ficers. 2 Among those who for the last twenty years have been carrying on a real anti-militarist campaign, (anti-militarist in the sense in which the word was defined in the preface to this book), Jaures un- questionably did the most to denounce and foresee the terrible calamity of war. This is what he said in the Chamber of Deputies on April 7, 1895 : " Everywhere great colonial competition is going on, in which the source of wars between European peoples is revealed in its very naked- ness. Unrestrained rivalry between two groups of manufacturers or merchants may be enough to threaten the peace of all Europe. Well then, how do you expect that war between nations will not always be an immediate possibility? Will we not always be on the verge of war so long as human life is at bottom nothing but war and conflict in 2 After the attempt upon the life of Lenin, 512 hostages, officers and bourgeois (the figures are the official statistics of the Bolshevists), were shot by order of the Soviet Govern- ment to avenge this act. How pleased Jaures would be to have such admirers! SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 189 a society given over to disordered competitions, class antagonisms and political struggles, them- selves often nothing but social struggles in dis- guise 1 ' ' He reverted to the same thought three years later in the columns of La Petite Bepublique (Nov. 17, 1898) : "If war breaks out, it will be a vast and terrible war. For the first time in history it will embrace all nations, all continents. Capitalistic expansion has made the whole earth a battlefield to be stained with the blood of men. The most terrible accusation that can be brought against capitalism is that it holds over humanity the permanent and ever more menacing threat of war. In proportion as the horizon of human possibility and promise widens, the dark cloud of war also spreads. It now darkens all the fields where men till the soil, all the cities where men trade and labor, and all the seas sailed by the ships of men. Humanity will escape from this obsession of slaughter and disaster only when it has substituted the prin- ciple of peace for the principle of war, a socialist order for capitalist disorder/ * And three years before his death (Dec 20, 1911), he again called up the same spectre before the eyes of an unbelieving Parliament : "We sometimes speak lightly of the possibility of such a terrible catastrophe; but we forget, gentlemen, that the war of tomorrow in the extent of its horror and the depths of the ruin it will 190 LENIN cause will be something unheard of in the ex- perience of men. . . . "We are asked to think of a short war, to be settled by a few claps of thunder and a few flashes of lightning. Do not be deceived. It will be a long-drawn-out conflict, varied with tremendous shocks between the opposing forces, as tremen- dous as those which took place in Manchuria be- tween the Eussians and the Japanese. Human masses will ferment in sickness, distress and pain, and waste away under the ravages of an artillery fire unparalleled in violence. Fever will take hold upon the sick, trade will be paralyzed, factories shut down, and the oceans ' horizons once streaked with the smoke of steamships will return to the sinister unbroken solitude of former days. "Yes, it will be a terrible spectacle and one to arouse all human passions. Consider this matter well, gentlemen. Listen to the warning from a man who, passionately attached to the ideals of his party, is convinced that to get justice and peace among men, it is necessary to change the form of property; but who also believes that it will be the noble distinction of the movement to proceed along lines of peaceful evolution, without unchain- ing those destructive hatreds which have hitherto been part of the history of all great social move- ments. "But notice another thing: it is in time of for- eign war — the invasion of a Brunswick, followed, you remember, by the famous ' joumees de Sep- SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 191 tembre' ; such a catastrophe as that of France in 1870 or that of Russia in the conflict with Japan — that all the belligerent passions of a nation, con- centrating on the social question, are whipped by the very fact of war into extremes of violence; and that is why the conservatives ought, of all classes, to be the most interested in preserving peace, the rupture of which inevitably means the release of all the energies of social disorder.' ' But was it only the chauvinists, nationalists a la Deroulede — who sometimes talked lightly of the possibility of European war? Did not Jules Guesde, a very rabid Marxian who was often an- tagonistic to Jaures, formerly lay great hopes on a ' ' fertile war 1 ' ' Jaures settled his accounts with this strange internationalism as follows : " There is the same impotence, the same con- fusion in the foreign policy of Guesde. It goes without saying that he is definitely an internation- alist. From the very beginning he has fought the chauvinism of Deroulede and other 6 patriots,' and has marked the pitfalls into which this enthusiasm of belligerent charlatanism may lead the public mind. His internationalism, however, is not an internationalism of peace, which would allow the proletariat of Europe to acquire liberty in gen- eral and, through the latter, power, and so to con- centrate all mental, moral and material resources, wasted today either by war or by an armed peace, on the problems incident to the necessary change in the status of property. No, it is not from the 192 LENIN regular growth of the proletariat nor from the progress of the democracies that he expects the deliverance of the wage-earners to come, but from deep commotions which will make the revolution- ary force gush forth as in a torrent from a rent earth — the greater the cataclysms therefore the more productive the results. But there is no greater cataclysm than the bloody conflicts of great peoples who already have in them the in- ward quiver of approaching social wars. For in such struggles, where the national organizations of world capitalism strike at and ruin each other, all the bonds which normally embarrass the rev- olutionary proletariat will fall away, and from the governmental and capitalistic husks of the nations torn asunder by the shock of war, the International of labor will burst into bloom. ' ' "What a cataclysm, indeed, what a piece of luck for revolution, if by chance Kussia and England should hurl themselves against each other and destroy each other! Eussia, the hot-bed of abso- lutism, England, the hot-bed of capitalism! Both stifling the proletarian spirit in the world! Both obstacles in the pathway of Eevolution ! "According to Guesde, Eussia is not only a Cossack menace to the republican or constitutional liberties of the "West. By forcing Germany, her immediate neighbor, to be continually on tiptoe, Eussia to some degree justifies German military imperialism — the guardian of Germanic inde- pendence; and the German proletariat itself hes- SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 193 itates to make an attack on the Empire for fear that, in all the risks of a terrible civil war, Czarism will intervene to make of Germany another Poland. England also is a drag on the international pro- letariat; because, having to some degree allowed her workers to share in the benefits of her eco- nomic conquest of the world, she keeps them sta- tionary in a mood of conservatism or timid reform. The downfall of czarism would liberate the so- cialist democracy of Germany; the downfall of English capitalism would throw the proletariat of England into the universal revolutionary move- ment. That is why Guesde hailed the strained re- lations which developed in 1885 between Kussia and England over Afghanistan, and glorified war as a harbinger of blessings. " 'Far from being a black cloud in the revolu- tionary sky, that gigantic duel which the govern- ments of Europe in gloomy foreboding see ap- proaching, is all to the good for western socialism, no matter which of those two "civilizing" states comes out of the fight disabled. It would be even better if both of them were wounded unto death. " 'A Kussia crushed in Central Asia means the end of czarism, which managed to survive the assassination of a czar but could not possibly with- stand the collapse of the military power on which it leans and with which it is interchangeable. The aristocratic and bourgeois classes, too cowardly to act of their own accord, and hitherto inclined 194. LENIN to let nihilist bombs explode in vain, will suddenly find themselves swept into power in a government now constitutionalized, now parliamentarized, now Westernized. And the first and inevitable effect of this political revolution in St. Petersburg will be the liberation of the laboring classes in Germany. Freed from the Moscow nightmare, sure of no longer finding the Cossacks of an Alex- ander behind the dragoons of a Wilhelm, the so- cialist democracy of Germany will be in a position to dance the revolutionary festival, the proletarian "89 " on the ruins of the empire of blood and steel. Meanwhile, and even before the defeat itself — as the czarist papers themselves are obliged to confess — the bankruptcy of Eussia will shake the foundation of the whole capitalist world. 6 ' ' Hurrah for war then ! Lo, the last ' ' dangers' ' of peace have disappeared ! Destiny is now to be fulfilled! In a few days, in a few weeks at the latest, the militarism of Moscow and the com- mercialism of England will be at each other's throats; . . . and may the outcome be the final downfall not of one but of both contenders.' " 3 With all the respect due the character and in- tegrity of M. Jules Guesde, it must be said that in all this rhapsody he played a bad trick on him- self as well as on socialism. It is not only the fact that thirty years later M. Guesde became minister (I would be the last, certainly, to blame him for 3 Charles Rappoport, Jean Jaures, second edition, 1916, pp. 369-371. I have taken the quotations of Jaures from this book. SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 195 that) in the coalition cabinet of the Union Sacree and of "national defense," formed to carry on the war in which France f ought side by side with the "militarism of Moscow" and "the commer- cialism of England" against the military imperial- ism of Germany, the "guardian of German inde- pendence" (phrases of M. Guesde which are word for word the theme of the manifesto of the 93 German scholars and of the reactionary press of the other side of the Khine all through the war). This is a purely personal matter. But everything else in the passage I have just quoted is of equal soundness, beginning with the false prophecy that "in a few days, in a few weeks at the latest, the militarism of Moscow and the commercialism of England will be at each other's throats," and end- ing with the moral position in which socialism is left as compared with "monarchism, opportunism and radicalism" — the latter crying "disaster" at the advance of the terrible spectre of conflict; while the former, in joyful expectation of the "revolutionary dance," "hurrahs for war," and declares with satisfaction that "the 'last dangers' of peace have disappeared!" The worst enemy of socialism could not have given it a blacker eye. Fortunately passages of this nature are rare in socialist literature. But it must be admitted that in the writings of Marx and Engels, and especially in their private cor- respondence, a few paragraphs are animated with the same spirit — M. Jules Guesde, moreover, is 196 LENIN one of the purest Marxians. The "masters" also from time to time wistfully contemplated the world cataclysm, either in the interest of national causes or in that of the " revolutionary dance." Lenin expressly recognized that there was some truth in all this for certain classes of wars; and declared himself to be of Marx's opinion. "The* wars of former days," he wrote in one of his articles in 1915 4 "were the continuation of bour- geois movements to free nations from foreign yokes or from Turkish and Eussian absolutism.. No question then interested socialism except aa to whether the success of one of the two bour- geoisies in the struggle was preferable to that of the other; and the Marxists were able to rouse people in advance to wars of this nature by re- kindling national hatreds, just as Marx did in 1848, and later on against Eussia ; and as Engels in 1859 spurred the Germans against their op- pressors, Napoleon III and Eussian czarism." On the other hand Lenin retorted to Gardenin, who was pointing to what he very justly called the "reactionary chauvinism" of Marx in 1848: "We Marxians are, and always have been, in favor of revolutionary war against counter-revolutionary states." Lenin and Zinoviev 5 based all their 4 N. Lenin, "The Failure of the Second International," in The Communist, No. 1-29 (1915). 5 G. Zinoviev, "On Maraudism," in The Social-Democrat* No. 39 (1915). SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 197 Swiss propaganda on the recognition of a differ- ence in principle between the "imperialistic" war of 1914-18 and the "wars of national indepen- dence" of former days, notably, for instance, that of 1870, which, "by bringing about the unification of Germany fulfilled a very important and his- torically progressive mission" (Zinoviev). 6 The absurdity of this method of reasoning is strikingly obvious, I think. If there are such things as "progressive wars," the war of 1914-18 which liberated Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, and Jugo-Slavia, was without a shadow of doubt much more so than the war of 1870 which did not lib- erate anything but reduced Alsace to slavery. The militarism of William II was more dangerous than that of Napoleon III ; and Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson, are certainly much less reac- tionary than Bismarck. This line of thinking is entirely foreign to Jaures. He does not believe in wars of any kind, and he takes little stock in the gaiety of the "rev- olutionary dance ' ' which is to come out of a world conflict. Moreover, he never tried (as Engels did) to arouse patriotic hatreds even against op- pressors. He never hurrahed for war with M. 6 It would be very interesting to know what those French socialists who are flirting with Bolshevism think of this "dif- ference in principle" between the wars of 1914 and 1870; and whether they regard the war of 1870 as really an "his- torically progressive" movement. 198 LENIN Jules Gnesde. In this respect also the system of Jaures is on a higher plane than Marxism. 7 "A European war can bring the Kevohrtion on. The controlling classes would do well to remember that. But such a war might also, and over a long period of time, provoke crises of counter-revolu- tion, rabid reaction, and exasperated nationalism. It might result in crushing dictatorships, mon- strous militarisms, and a long chain of retrograde violences, meanly motivated hatreds, vindictive reprisals, and degrading slaveries. We, for our part, refuse to take a hand in this barbaric game of chance. We refuse to risk, on one throw of such blood-stained dice, the certainty that our workingmen will some day be free, the certainty 7 I may say in passing that Jaures was duly appreciative of the remarkable gifts and powerful intelligence of Karl Marx. I do not think, however, that the moral and intel- lectual personality of this great fighter ever really appealed to him. M. Paul Boncour writes in his reminiscences of Jaures: "I found him reading the correspondence of Marx and Engels. Jaures often 'brushed up' in these sources of socialist doctrine. With that perfect good faith which seemed always to give him the freshness of spirit of a child, he said to me, fingering the heavy pages : 'How wrapped up in their blessed "doctrine" these fellows were, inflexible in their an- tipathies, indifferent to everything outside^ their own fights of the moment ! I often wonder whether it is not a weakness, whether it does not diminish the fighting ability of a militant to try, as I am always trying, to understand the ideas of other people, and open up to so many other emotions not strictly pertinent to the political and social struggle itself/ " Indeed, therein lies the great difference between the natures of Marx and Jaures; the author of Das Kapital had a very vast knowledge ; but his emotions were aroused only by social and political combat, and then only so far as his personal ideas and the bearing of events upon them were concerned. In this respect Lenin is much nearer to Marx than Jaures was. Lenin can see and think of nothing except Bolshevism. SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 199 of honorable independence, under a European democracy, which the future holds in reserve for all peoples, and all groups of people, despite and beyond all divisions, and dismemberments." 8 These words of a great orator are words also of a prophet. And yet Jaures always trusted that humanity would be spared the World War. "Such a thing would be too stupid!" he would say, 6 'therefore it will not be." "Such a thing would be too stupid; therefore it is sure to be!" would have been the reasoning of a Schopenhauer. "Jaures," says Anatole France, 9 "knew very well that the war would help his party ; but he did not want to purchase victory for the ideals closest to his heart at such a price." A reservation is in point here. The war did help socialism, in that it developed among the masses a hatred for the governments which brought it about; but it also worked against so- cialism and in a much more important way, by destroying the moral and economic foundations on which socialism must rest. It was in anticipa- tion and appreciation of this that Jaures made so many efforts to fight off and forestall war. He was only too right. He did not succeed. And death was the reward of his efforts. "He suffered this fate," Anatole France nobly says, "that his 8 Jaures, The July (1915) Conference on Militarism (pub- lished by Vorwarts and quoted in M. Charles Rappoport's book on Jaures). 9 Anatole France, "Jaures" in Humanite, March 26, 1919. 200 LENIN soul, which was as beautiful as peace, should die with the death of peace. ' ' People commonly speak of three phases in the political career of Jaures as a socialist: he was regarded as a " revolutionary" during the years 1893 to 1898, from the time he joined the Socialist Party up to the coming into power of the Waldeck- Eousseau-Millerand ministry; as an " opportu- nist," a "reformist," from 1898 to 1904, up to the Congress of Amsterdam; and thereafter as a " rev- olutionary" again, during the period of "unified" socialism, in which the war outbreak — and death — found him. This analysis into periods and changes of policy is sound so long as the merely external affiliations of the great French orator are concerned. But the doctrine, the system of thought, of Jaures, presents much greater unity. In this respect his tendencies, even as a mere youth when he sat in Parliament in the Centre and supported the policy of Jules Ferry, do not differ greatly from his more mature thinking. He certainly had a right to claim as he did claim: 10 "I have always been a republican and a socialist: the social Eepublic, the Eepublic of organized and sovereign Labor, has always been my idea. For it I have always fought from the very beginning even with all my inexperience and ignorance as a boy. 10 Jean Jaures, Discours parlementaires, 1904. SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 201 "Just as I am falsely said to have abandoned the doctrine and platform of the Left Centre for the doctrine and platform of socialism, so it is falsely alleged that in the years from 1893 to 1898 I advocated a method of violent revolution and frequented extremist republican circles, only to adopt later on an attenuated 'reformism,' and revolution at a lagging evolutionary pace. To be sure, in the enthusiasms of the first great socialist successes in 1893, I sometimes nursed the illusion of a complete, immediate, and almost too easy, victory for our ideals. And in the heat of struggle against the systematically reactionary ministries which defied us, threatened us, tried to cast us out of the body politic of the Republic, outlaw us, ex-communicate us from national life, I did appeal to the great forces of the proletariat ; as I would again tomorrow, if the authorities tried to prevent the free, legal evolution of collectivism, the order- ly redemption of the working class. But in all my speeches in that time of storm — the bitter emotions of it I can still feel — the essentials of our socialist policies of today can easily be recog- nized: the same fundamental anxiety to unite so- cialism with real love of country, to complete democracy in politics by democracy in life; the same reliance on the power of the law, if only that law be not abused by the recklessness of reaction- ary parties or deformed by class treachery.' 9 All of Jaures is there, all the great lesson of 202 LENIN Ms theory and practice : social democracy as the logical and necessary result of political -democ- racy; progressive reform where opportunity is given for the free clash of ideas before a public opinion which decides; threat of violent revolu- tion where that opportunity is threatened; rev- olution itself where it is denied. To this program, political thought of today, though enriched by the great experience of 1914- 19, cannot add a single word. It is the program of today. It is the program also of tomorrow. In 1904, Jaures was beaten at Eheims and Am- sterdam by the combined efforts of Jules Guesde, Vaillant, Bebel and Kautsky. On what question? On the question as to whether socialists should work in cabinets with bourgeois ministers. Very well ! In 1915, Jules Guesde became a minister as the colleague of Briand, Kibot and Denys Cochin, and Vaillant encouraged him in doing so; as for the German non-compromisers, Bebel, if he were alive, would surely be Chancellor of State today, if not President of the German Eepublic ; and M. Kautsky, though maintaining a critical reserve, is at present a fairly cordial supporter of the ministry, and is even in a receptive mood for a portfolio itself. Events have shown that the non-participation of the socialists in power is not a question of prin- ciple nor a symbol of party faith; but a question of pure tactic, depending exclusively on political circumstances. Jaures, perhaps, made a tactical SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 203 error in defending the entrance of M. Millerand, a socialist at that time, into the Waldeck-Rous- seau-Galliffet cabinet. But on the principle at issne, he was undoubtedly right. The attitude of Jaures on the Dreyfus case — the second question of policy which then separated him from Jules Guesde and Vaillant, does not give rise to any question at all in our time. The well-known phrase, "James saved the honor of French socialism by his position on the Affaire" is generally recognized as true today. Moreover, since Jules Guesde has since served as minister in a war cabinet, all the attacks he made against Jaures for supporting the cause of a professional military officer u have peculiarly lost their point. 11 "Here is, we are told, a special victim who has the right to a special campaign on our part in his behalf and a deliv- erance at our hands which would constitute an exceptional case in socialist polity. This victim is a member of the ruling class, a staff captain. Rich in his youth, through the robbery of laborers exploited by his parents, and free to become a useful man, free to put the knowledge he owes to his millions to the benefit of humanity, he nevertheless chose what he calls a military career. He said: T will use my splendid education, my unusual intellectual training, to slaughter my fellowmen.' Interesting, this victim, isn't he! (Loud Applause.) Oh, I understand very well that you workingmen, you peasants, who are taken away from the factory and the plow, put into a uniform and given a gun, under the pretense that you are needed to defend your coun- try, have the right, the duty even, to cry out to us, the organized proletariat, when you fall foul of this terrible military justice! You are not in the barracks of your own free will. You have never voluntarily accepted either the military rules, or the military organization of the so-called military justice, which you put up with. But he knew what he was doing when he chose the career of arms; he deliber- ately entered on this path, upholding the courtsTmartial so long as he thought that they would bear only on the poor man ; and that he would some day be the commanding officer 204 LENIN In addition to these two questions of tactic, however, there were two points of theory in dis- pute between the camps of Jaures and Guesde which have not lost any of their interest since that time. I say two points, though they are really reducible to one : the class struggle and the revolution. A misunderstanding exists to the disadvantage of reformist socialism, to which "reformists" themselves have often contributed: it has to do with their notion of the class struggle. People have preferred to think that the difference between the revolutionists and the reformists lay in the fact that the former recognized, while the latter did not recognize, the "class struggle." The mis- understanding -arises, as is often the case, in the ambiguity and nature of the word "recognize." To my mind the question has no meaning whatso- ever. The class struggle is a fact which no man in his who would set the wheels of that blind, secret and merciless justice into motion against the poor man! Such is the victim in whose behalf they are trying to mobilize all the forces of the socialists and of the proletariat!" (Jules Guesde, speech at the Lille Hippodrome.) I have quoted this long passage in extenso because it is a fine example of all the elements of sectarian socialism which Lenin himself would not disclaim — easy and eloquent dema- gogy* an appeal to the instincts of hatred, coupled with an extremely simple scheme of thought. Fate has cruelly pun- ished M. Jules Guesde, a sincere and conscientious man, by making him "under the pretence that he was needed to defend his country," work in 1914-15 in collaboration with these mis- erable "commanding officers." He was able to see that life is much too complicated for sectarian formulas to simplify. How superior is the great and noble farsightedness of Jaures to this narrow and blind ritualism. SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 205 senses can help perceiving. One may build exag- gerated hopes on this fact, as the Marxists do. It may be deplored, as, for instance, Christians deplore it. But the fact itself cannot be denied. Harmonious cooperation of the classes today is as a general rule not a reality but a utopia. The Eussian Eevolution has shown that the bourgeois are nearly always as " maximalist" in their desid- erata as the proletariat: one side wants to get everything, the other wants to yield nothing. A glaring example of bourgeois stupidity, and bour- geois "maximalism" I witnessed in the Ukraine, after the Germans had driven out the Bolshevists and put General Skoropadsky in control. As for the stupidity, bankers, manufacturers, and land- owners all seemed to believe 12 in the stability of the hated regime — a Cossack general supported by a foreign army! And as for the " maximal- ism,' ' the temporary majority seized its chance to take vengeance on the workers and peasants for all the insults it had suffered during the short period of Bolshevism. Today, of course, the tables have been turned exactly. Dragonnades of land- owners alternate with peasant jacqueries. But can one blame the illiterate peasants and work- 12 With the majority it was an unshaken, almost religious faith — I can say that as an eye-witness. Business paper and securities leapt at once to dizzy altitudes, and yet there were hardly any sellers ; everyone wanted to buy or else was waiting for a still higher rise before selling. A few months later the debacle occurred — semi-Bolshevism under Petlioura, Bolshevism under Rakovsky, and finally ultra-Bolshevism under Grigorief. Many wealthy people lost their entire for- tunes in the crash, to say nothing of those who lost their lives ! 206 LENIN ingmen for not being more intelligent and less "maximalist" than the educated people of money? I grant you that the Russian bourgeoisie, from a political point of view, is the least intelligent in the whole of Europe ! This lesson may not have been absolutely in vain. Harmonious cooperation between mutually tolerant classes is and will long remain a Utopia ; but it has not been proved that the class struggle must necessarily overstep the limits of pacific elec- toral and parliamentary contest. The revolution cost the bourgeois too much for them lightheart- edly to oppose universal suffrage (though some of their spokesmen are undoubtedly anxious to bring them to this). There is, therefore, reason to hope that universal suffrage will be recognized by both camps as the pivot of the future struggle. This was, I believe, the general idea of Jaures. Isolated sentences of the great French tribune may doubtless be quoted to the contrary. Jaures was a man of extraordinary activity. He wrote a great deal and lectured even more. He acknowl- edged himself that he often had to write and talk with no chance for a careful weighing of words. It would therefore be unfair to judge his doctrine by occasional remarks escaping him in the heat of debate. Sentences of an extremism which, if I dare say so, is a little too ready, are also found in his historical studies. I am not very fond of some pages in his "History of the French Revolution." That book is, of course, a prodigious work of labor SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 207 and learning, of admirable eloquence always, not without finesse and irony here and there. It is also a fairly impartial work, in spite of its frank title as a "socialist" history. But I do not like Jaures as a "Montagnard" any more than I like Anatole France as a "comrade." I do not like the ven- eration Jaures shows for Danton, with whom he had nothing in common except eloquence (but how different the Attic eloquence of Jaures from the demagogy of Danton!). I do not like to see this "Dreyfusard" sitting in stern judgment on the Girondins who, " at a time when the revolutionary mind needed complete serenity, unity and enthu- siasm, brought on those unintelligible 'Septem- ber days/ during which the responsibility of parties and individuals is almost impossible to determine." Moreover obiter dicta of this kind have never fooled those who honestly and in good faith were seeking for the true doctrine of Jaures. M. Charles Eappoport, who is neither a reformist nor a mod- erate, in a very authoritative and conscientious book devoted to the famous orator, speaks of "his concept of things as organically reformist," in the period after, as well as in the period before, the Congress of Amsterdam; 13 and he calls Jaures a "Prometheus of evolution." 13 Charles Rappoport, I.e., pp. 59 and 372. The admiration which he has for Jaures does not prevent M. Rappoport today from considering the Social Revolution as the one beneficent panacea (see his article in the Journal du Peuple, for July 30. 1919). 208 LENIN Let Jaures speak for himself, however : 6 ' The revolution of the future must proceed by enlightened and legal methods. The organization of the proletariat as a class party does not in any way imply recourse to violence. There is nothing in it incompatible with the idea of evolution and a constitutional policy of universal suffrage. The proletariat knows that by using violence it is mak- ing things harder by sowing the seeds of panic. "Nothing good can be expected from convul- sions which shake society to its very foundations. After a few lamentable totterings things would return to their present, or something approaching their present, equilibrium. The proletariat will come into power not through some lucky turn of events in a political turmoil, but through the legal and methodical consolidation of its own forces. "More than that, even if a sudden coup is suc- cessful, its success will not be an enduring one. It will have no morrow of promise. There are small property holders even in the villages; and if a minority should for a minute abolish that property, nuclei of resistance would form every- where. Only through delicately and accurately planned transactions in which the interests of small holders are fully safeguarded, will the latter submit to a change from a capitalistic to a social- istic status; and transactions and guarantees of such intricacy can be made only after the calmest deliberation and through the legally expressed will of the majority of the people in a country. SOCIALISM OF THE NEAR FUTURE 209 "Quite apart from convulsive crises which can- not be foreseen before they occur, nor controlled after they have occurred, there is only one sov- ereign tactic for socialism today: the legal con- quest of a majority. The revolutionary appeal to force can be only a great deception for the workingman of our time." It is a pity the Bolshevists did not carve these words of Jaures on the statue they erected to him at Moscow. CHAPTEE XII THEORIES THAT ARE DEAD AND IDEAS THAT ENDURE POLITICAL theorists must today apply them- selves to disengaging from a tangle of data the great lessons of these last five years, the most extraordinary years in human history. On the benefits it will derive from these lessons the future of mankind depends. The truth very rarely issues from the clash of conflicting opinions; and almost never from the clash of political opinions. But the clash of events is the very best of teachers for the few who sin- cerely and hopefully search for the truth in them. The only trouble with this method of learning is that it costs so much. The time in which we live will certainly be con- sidered a period of crises by future historians. Vico would without any hesitation have placed it in his category of "critical periods'' and as a model specimen of such. No general idea of life, no political theory, no social institution, but has been more or less shaken by the terrible ordeal of 1914-19. Some have been destroyed, or at least eliminated from European life, I will not say for- ever (forever is a word that should be banished 210 THEORIES AND IDEAS 211 from sociology), but for a very long time at any rate. Absolutism, in the first place, seems to be in this latter group, the despotic and medieval abso- lutism of the Nicholas II type, as well as the "en- lightened" and modern absolutism of the William II variety. Absolutism, as a political idea, is dead. It seems quite unable to find rational de- fenders. The Bonalds, the Stahls, the de Maistres, the Pobiedonostsevs, have had their day. Their spiritual descendants dare go no farther back- ward than English constitutionalism. The divine right is no longer fashionable in Europe. To make it at all palatable, it must be seasoned with a certain amount of democracy. The near future will show whether even this mixture has much appeal for the generations now rising. Other evil political ideas have been more for- tunate. For some of them the issue is still far from decided. It is hard to establish with cer- tainty just the amount of stability there is in that idol which bears the vague name of imperialism. No other word was more discredited in the minds of the masses during the five years of the war; no other idea gave more convincing proofs of its vitality. The imperialism of Germany on the one side and that of the Entente on the other were violently stigmatized, only to end in the treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles. Fate thought best to give an hour of decisive victory to each of the parties in the conflict ; and both showed their 212 LENIN hands. But great as is the power of words (and of hypocrisy) in this best of all possible worlds, the time will come when the idol of imperialism will be either universally worshipped or else broken into bits. Of the two alternatives the second is the more likely to come true. There is nothing, however, to prove that this will be so. Is war, the chief corollary of imperialism, a dead idea 1 Theoretically, yes. Victory is a dangerous will-of-the-wisp. That we see clearly enough to- day. All the belligerent nations were conquered and ruined, Germany a little more, France a little less. And yet who would risk asserting that this war has been the last ? And third, capitalism. There have been social- ists, even many socialists, who failed quite to per- ceive the power and flexibility of the present economic regime. So much used to be said about its "intrinsic incoherence" that people ended by believing it incapable of resisting any serious test. Moreover, the ordeal when it came was more ter- rible and more severe than could ever have been foreseen. What did it all show? It showed, without doubt, the moral and intel- lectual bankruptcy of our proud civilization; but that very civilization, quite as much as its bank- ruptcy, is to be attributed to the capitalist regime. Alas, it would be more just to call it the bank- ruptcy of humanity; for in the eyes of idealists and of optimists who thought men good and beau- tiful, humanity has undeniably failed, revealed THEORIES AND IDEAS 213 itself as something ugly, something miserably ugly! But we can ignore the moral and intellectual side of the question. What about the power, the stability, of the present economic system? There is no doubt as to the answer here. We must rec- ognize that capitalism has shown itself more stable, and infinitely more flexible, than its sup- porters — let alone its adversaries — believed. The capitalist system was able, without breaking down, to survive the great catastrophe which befell it, and which, partially at least and with no vital necessity, it also provoked. And it was able to do this, because it was sufficiently versatile to adapt itself to new circumstances, to transform itself artfully, audaciously, and with bewildering rapidity, of all which the German Kreigs-social- ismus gave the most striking example. 1 It had to do so. But for the heroic device of socializing its capitalism, no country would have been able to withstand the war. Had blockaded Germany kept to the old system of the "free play of eco- nomic forces," she would have been destroyed in a few weeks. But it was also a very grave crisis for capitalism. The enemies of capitalism were won over to follow its example, which for that matter, they were unprepared or unable to follow. Eathenau has a disciple by the name of Lenin, 2 1 On the seventh day after the outbreak of war Germany already had her central committee of industry. 2 In 1917 Lenin gave a lecture in Switzerland which showed how much he was impressed by the practical success of Ger- man military socialism. 214 LENIN though the disciple proves to be much less adroit than the master. The fatal hour of pure capitalism like that of pure divine right was called on August 1, 1914. The hour of amalgamations has begun. On the whole, socialized capitalism is less illogical than the mixture of divine right with parliamen- tarianism. In the fourth place, what became of the prin- ciples of democracy? Much has been said recently about a crisis in democratic theory. The experi- ence of the terrible years just past has revealed the extreme instability and flightiness of conviction in the masses. Russia has given the most elo- quent proof of this. Military chauvinism in 1914 ; a few days of patriotic and libertarian ecstasy in March, 1917 ; pacifism of a Bolshevist hue towards the end of that same year; complete prostration today — such are the stages through which Russian mentality passed in a very short space of time. Elections based on universal suffrage and taking place at yearly intervals would have given the most disparate results in Russia. In other coun- tries these contradictions have been less manifest. A very marked psychological change is neverthe- less to be seen everywhere. Just compare the German (or American) newspapers of 1914, with those of 1917, and those of 1919. The socialist organs, like the socialist rank-and-file, have under- gone a similar evolution. Vorwarts (or Human-. THEORIES AND IDEAS 215 ite) talks an entirely different language today from what it used at the beginning of the war. The masses in every country were dragged into the war with an extraordinary ease which the most cynical prophets could not have foretold. Their resistance to the mental contagion, real or affected, of the intellectuals, proved to be virtually nil. The influence of governments and of the press surpassed the most sanguine chauvinistic hopes. The famous "political education" of the old par- liamentary peoples amounted to nothing but res- ignation. This is only too true. And yet, can we speak of a real crisis in the cause of democracy? I do not think so. In the first place, the political forms to which democracy was generally opposed failed in a much more striking manner. Then again, everything consid- ered, universal suffrage, for all its sudden fluc- tuations and palpable mistakes showed solid good sense on the whole. The war did not start by pop- ular vote: it was declared by the German execu- tive power. Peoples and parliaments merely ac- cepted a fait accompli. Could they have done any- thing else? In the case of Germany, particularly, they showed an incomprehensible cheerfulness and lightness of heart in so accepting the war. But once war was let loose upon the world the only practical way to stop it was to bring it to a suc- cessful finish. The war was a terrible calamity which, of course, could have nothing amusing about it. But in order not to lose the war, in order 216 LENIN for the peoples to escape slavery, enthusiasm and confidence were necessary above all. The parlia- mentary assemblies of all countries did everything in their power to arouse enthusiasm in the masses and inspire self-confidence in the leaders. On the whole, in spite of the great indictment that may be brought against the German parliamentarians, theirs was a defensible attitude. When the " other danger" came, when the ter- rible temptation of Bolshevism arose before the peoples, universal suffrage gave a proof, which in my opinion is almost conclusive, of real good sense* in the masses. It was not by chance that the People's Commissars in Eussia or Hungary, and' their emulators in Germany, had to proclaim ' ' all power to the Soviets ! ' ' Universal suffrage every- where brought the Bolshevists nothing but disap- pointment. Even in Eussia, the elections for the Constituent Assembly, which took place after the coup d'etat of October and under the strong pres- sure of the Bolshevist authorities, gave a great majority to the adversaries of Bolshevism. In Germany the ballot gave Bolshevism a knock-out blow. Whatever imperfections may be ascribed to universal suffrage and the principles of democ- racy, they have not wholly shattered the hopes reposed in them. A disciple of Liebniz would say that a sort of pre-established harmony exists between the state of mind of a people, expressing itself through the suffrage, and the amount of social reform that THEORIES AND IDEAS 217 can be realized in a definite space of time. The German Constituent Assembly has passed such reforms, probably, as the political and economic condition of Germany makes it at present possible to realize : a very democratic republican constitu- tion; fiscal reform which places the heavier bur- den of taxation on the propertied classes; con- fiscation of war profits; socialization of certain kinds of industry; very advanced labor legisla- tion, etc. The most difficult test which universal suffrage will have to undergo in the near future will take place in Russia. If the Russian people, who, with all their great qualities, still form one of the most backward nations in Europe, can avail themselves of universal suffrage, after all they have been through, without sinking into reaction and mon- archy; if with their votes they preserve freedom, a federal constitution, and a republican form of government, democratic principles will win a vic- tory which may without hesitation be called de- cisive. In the fifth place, the principles of socialism are also traversing a crisis today. Yet the very considerations which incline people at present to think of socialism as a failure seem to suggest an opposite conclusion. In spite of the numerous faults committed everywhere by the socialists (along with everybody else), two undeniable facts dominate the political philosophy of our time : a. The war clearly revealed the vices of the 218 LENIN old world which the socialists have always de- nounced ; b. The revolution showed the necessity of the social reforms which were a part of the program of the socialist parties. 3 Under these circumstances, whatever the errors and illusions of its disciples, the socialist idea has stood the great test perhaps better than any other. In the sixth place, it is more than permissible to speak, theoretically at least, of the complete failure of the revolutionary idea. The example of Eussia has killed a great and glorious legend. I think it unnecessary, after all that has been said in this book, to dwell on the character of the Bol- shevist Eevolution. I need only ask this question : did a revolution lead of necessity to this lament- able end? The answer is : yes. Given the terrible burden of the war and the moral disability the leaders of the first period of 1917 were under to conclude a separate peace, the Russian Eevolution simply had to enter on its Bolshevist phase. Many costly mistakes were made which hastened the debacle and the early passing of power into the hands of Lenin. But a separate peace with Germany was the only thing that might perhaps have prevented this ending of the Russian drama. The tempta- tion of peace, which made Lenin's career, was too 3 Was it not President Wilson's League of Nations which adopted, and caused national governments to adopt, the wholesome idea of the eight-hour day which only yesterday was denounced as anarchy, an idle dream, an absurdity, etc.? THEORIES AND IDEAS 219 great for the people, worn out by three years of war to resist. If the revolution in Germany has so far taken a different course from that followed in Russia (the resemblances between the moral indices of both revolutions is nevertheless very pronounced), that is due less to differences in national traits and degree of civilization in the two countries than to the difference in nexus between the two rev- olutions and the war. In Russia the Lvovs, Sakin- kovs and Kerenskys wanted to continue the war and had to do so ; while the Lenins and Trotskys promised the masses immediate peace, and thus scored a victory over their adversaries. In Ger- many, the revolution of November, 1918, had im- mediate peace for its aim from the very beginning ; and the men who came into power then began by offering the people peace abroad and peace at home; while their opponents, the Spartacides, did not hide their desire to plunge the country into the abyss of a civil war, the benefits of which had already been shown by the Russian Revolution. As for foreign policy, the Spartacides maintained an ambiguous attitude, even going so far as to preach a "holy war" in alliance with the Russian proletariat against the "capitalists of the En- tente.' ' The superiority of the Bolshevist tactic to that of the Spartacides is evident from this also, that it was only later, when the Bolshevist power was already organized, that Lenin gradually played, and one by one, his trumps of civil war. 220 LENIN His campaign of April-October, 1917, was primar- ily inspired by the idea of immediate peace with Germany. The Spartacides, on the contrary, be- ing unable to win the German people over with the promise of external peace (since others had already signed the Armistice), were unwise enough to terrify them by suddenly conjuring up the discredited ghost of a civil, and perhaps of a "holy," war. The most stupid even went so far as to promise that a wonderful army of Trotsky's would materialize on the Ehine to fight the imperialists of the Entente. The exhausted people were appalled at such allurements; and hastened to support those who promised peace abroad and peace at home. But if the Eussian Eevolution had to end in Bolshevism, was it therefore a mistake, a crime even, to bring it about? There are several answers to this distressing question. It can be, and it is, said that nobody caused the Eevolution; that it came on by itself. There is some truth in this. It is also said that the Eevolution was caused by those who were its first victims — the Czar and his ministers. This is also true enough. It is said that, for all the catastrophes resulting from it, the Eevolution was better than the stagnation of the old regime — on the principle that "the longest way round is the shortest way home." This is the opinion ex- pressed in a diary by the unfortunate Chingarev, the Cadet deputy who, for no reason whatsoever, THEORIES AND IDEAS 221 was thrown into prison by the big Bolshevists and murdered in a hospital by some little ones. There is an element of truth in this again. It can be said that from the national point of view the Eevolution was a disaster and a crime, for it has led to the breaking up of Eussia, to general ruin, and unheard-of sufferings. That would be the answer of our Burkes, our conservatives, our mod- erate liberals. We will probably not support such a contention. However, it is not the verdict history will bring in against the Eussian Eevolution which matters most at present. The important thing is the les- son for the future which the experiences of our day may teach. This lesson I state as follows : The moral and political balance-sheet of rev- olutions which overthrow despotic regimes can be and nearly always is positive, in spite of the very heavy liabilities involved; since despotic regimes themselves are but slow revolutions and bear most of the responsibility for the debacles in which they end. But in countries where universal suf- frage with freedom of speech is guaranteed, when these two powerful instruments of liberty are in operation, every revolution is a catastrophe, and every resort to revolution a crime. In the present stage of moral and intellectual development in the human race, revolution is at- tended by such terrible outbreaks of crime, such numbers of victims, so much ruin, such bitter hatred, such cynical demagogy, that men come to 222 LENIN hate the very idea which revolution hopes to realize. Though the purpose of revolution is very often a worthy one, the end is always massacre, savagery, and general political prostration. This is the criterion we can use in judging the revolu- tions of the past and of the future. The Eussian Eevolution of March, 1917, was a blessing because it overthrew one of the wickedest despotisms in history. The German revolution was also a blessing because it substituted a free republican system for the virtual absolutism 4 of William II, who threw the world into mourning and reduced Europe to blood and fire. But the Bolshevist and Spartacide revolutions were dis- asters, crimes, because they were directed against regimes founded on the sovereignty of the people and furnishing all possible guarantees for the free conflict of ideas and movements. "But very well then ! If the revolutionary idea has failed, as you believe, what can you put in its place to lead humanity to a better destiny! Are you not reduced to the old-fashioned and naive, not to say hypocritical, idea of a coopera- tion of classes ? Wealth in control will never con- sent to renounce its ancient privileges for the benefit of society as a whole. It is Utopian to imagine that capitalism can be abolished without 4 Germany had a certain freedom of the press and universal suffrage for the Reichstag which, however, was very far from being omnipotent. The great power of the Kaiser, to say nothing of the electoral system of Prussia, made popular sovereignty a myth. THEORIES AND IDEAS 223 civil war. Do you think that our millionaires will bow, without striking a blow, to the mere sound- ness of your arguments ? ' ' (Lenin. ) No, I do not think anything of the sort. But neither do I think that capitalism can be abol- ished by civil war which, in the long run, simply strengthens ideas of social conservatism. This book is in general founded on a very clear dis- tinction between facts as they are in reality and what one might like them to be. As far as the famous cooperation of classes is concerned, that is without doubt extremely desirable ; on the prin- ciple that an agreement is always a thousand times better than a fight ! But again, for the present, I can see such cooperation obtaining only in a few exceptional cases too rare entirely to serve as grounds for a political and social doctrine. The moral and intellectual level of humanity today does not permit us to have great hope in the near future either. As for a time more remote, I do not know and nobody knows — except the soap- boxers — what Destiny has in store for us. No, I have no more faith than Lenin has in the goodness and justice of millionaires; but neither have I faith in the virtue and magnanimity of the proletariat which he praises so highly. I do not believe that in general any serious political doc- trine can be based on an appeal to virtue and mag- nanimity. It is to common sense and especially to the sentiment of self-interest that reform must talk; and even then, as experience again shows, 224 LENIN it does not always have the good fortune to be listened to. Humanity is guided by atavistic in- stincts, by waves of contagious emotion, which the doctrine of economic materialism has always ignored and which the war revealed in all their horror. Eeason usually comes too late, like a policeman after the crime ; but it comes neverthe- less. It has not been shown that humanity is abso- lutely incapable of deriving some profit, a small profit it may be, from the hard lessons experience teaches. Yes, those who in the present state of civiliza- tion would substitute friendly cooperation for class struggle are certainly Utopians. It is not enough, however, to recognize that the class strug- gle exists and must exist. We still have to decide in what form we want this struggle to take place. I believe that for some time, and beginning with our very day, progressive men in democratic countries will divide according to the type of com- bat they prefer. The crux of the matter is this : do you want a class struggle in the form of a violent revolution with all that terrible word involves? If so, you must belong to the Third International, the Inter- national of Lenin. If not, you belong in the anti- Bolshevist camp. For the word "revolution" in a free and demo- cratic country means all that the doctrine of the Third International implies: adjustment of con- flicting interests by violence, absolute denial of THEORIES AND IDEAS 225 the principle of universal suffrage, dictatorship of the proletariat, a Soviet constitution, civil war, abolition of civil and political rights, and, if need be, terrorism. This is so evident that one wonders in astonish- ment how socialist parties, which call themselves, and are in their essence, anti-Bolshevist, can speak of the dictatorship of the proletariat in their platforms or wave the banner of social rev- olution in their propaganda — granted of course that this revolution is relegated by them to some indefinite future ! 5 For the dilemma is extremely simple: either " revolution' ' means to realize the ideas and aspirations of the majority of the peo- ple — in that case, in a democratic country where universal suffrage is omnipotent, it is a political absurdity; or else the revolution aims to impose the will of a minority upon the majority, in which case it implies an abrogation of universal suffrage, a dictatorship "of the proletariat" (so they say!), the substitution of Soviets for parliaments, and so on — all the features, in short, of Lenin's doctrine. "But," a socialist of the school of Kautsky could still say, "you forget the resistance of the property-owners, the great inertia of capitalism. Do you imagine the principle of popular sover- 5 Twenty years ago Kautsky was easily able to answer Bernstein by saying: "We can quietly leave the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the future. It is futile for us to be dogmatic about it today." This convenient evasion is unfortunately now no longer practicable. 226 LENIN eignty is a sacred unassailable dogma to our bour- geois ? They burn incense to that idol so long as it is a beneficent deity ; but the moment a Constit- uent Assembly elected by universal suffrage tries to take privileges away from them, you will see how much use they have for the suffrage, and for constitutionality. In that situation a violent rev- olution will have necessarily to take place.' ' I have never said that there could be no Bolshe- vists except in Lenin's camp. The bourgeois very likely have their own Bolshevists ; and it is possible that in a crisis they may have recourse to Lenin's methods to keep what they have. Then it will probably be necessary to use force against them just as force must be used today against the dictators in the Kremlin. But in this case it would still be Bolshevists at the bottom of the revolution — the Bolshevists of the bourgeoisie. However, I do not think that this must be the fatal, inevitable end of our social conflicts. In the first place I doubt whether these conflicts will take the form of a magical and instantaneous transformation which will, to quote the famous simplist formula, "expropriate the expropria- tors" in a single day. We probably have before us a long and slowly unfolding series of far-reach- ing reforms each one of which will probably de- mand great sacrifices on the part of the privileged classes for the benefit of the majority. The haute bourgeoisie, you see, has had time to meditate on the terrible lessons of these past years. It is not THEORIES AND IDEAS 227 at all certain that our men of wealth will care to have recourse to force with all the great risks this involves, rather than submit to the will of the people. They will have fresh in their memory the fate of governments which have tried to rule with the mailed fist for the benefit of a minority against the majority — the fate of Nicholas II, of William II, and soon, probably, that of Lenin himself ! Under these circumstances we must not despair of the possibility of progress without violence and revolution. Conflict of ideas under conditions of equal freedom for everybody; class struggle, rabid if necessary, but without knives and with- out guns — a struggle carried on by the "twenty- five soldiers of Gutenberg," and by the ballot — such is my programme. "But," the skeptic will tell me, "you said you were going to observe a clear distinction between what is in reality and what would be desirable. Certainly you will agree that your very desirable programme appears to be worlds removed from what it actually is. The earth, alas, seems to be- long to knives, and especially to machine guns. Eevolutionary ideas are gaining ground every- where. There will always be revolutions just as there will always be wars." I doubt whether I could confound this skeptic. Skeptics like cynics are more often right than they deserve to be. Nevertheless my guess is that the world will not always belong to machine guns. 228 LENIN Such clever weapons have this drawback, or rather this advantage, that in the long run people get sick of them. Two years, five years, ten years, and then the most obstinate and the most stupid begin to have enough of slaughter. Perhaps there will always be wars and revolutions ; but meeting skepticism with skepticism we may say that such a statement could not be proved. At any rate much depends on what the educated people of the various countries stand for. The Eussian Eevolution has emphasized the important role that the so-called "intellectuals" could play in political change. I think that socialist intellectuals the world over (I am speaking only of those who are anti-Bolshevist) have abused the slogan of social revolution. It was easy to speak of such a thing when you did not have to show how, nor say when and where. But the hour came and went. The experiment has been tried. We now know what the social revolution is like. The word that stands for it must disappear from our political vocab- ulary. We renounce worship of this idol not in the name of conservatism, as has been done so often, but in the name of human freedom. As I come to the end of my study, I should like to give a brief but less negative sketch of the platform from which I have criticized Leninism. Socialism is today as much a problem of pro- duction as of redistribution of wealth. Tn every country the most important task at present is to find means of increasing production. In countries THEORIES AND IDEAS 229 like Enssia, where natural resources are abundant and hardly exploited at all, the problem can be solved more easily than elsewhere. In the old civilized nations like France, Germany or Eng- land, the situation is not so simple. People will have either to emigrate or to fall back on new inventions, like those which were frequently put into practice during the war. And for this latter reason the first duty of intelligent governments (admitting that there are a few) must be to give money to science without stint, and to pure, as well as to applied science (for one can never tell what practical benefits may result from researches which seemed at first to have no utilitarian bearing at all). Hitherto, un- fortunately, the exact opposite of this has been done. Governments have begun economizing by cutting the funds destined to the universities. A great physicist of world renown recently said that with the resources he had today he was barely able to pay his laboratory errand boy; as for new instruments and expensive experiments, they were no longer to be thought of. An enlightened government, no matter how poor the condition of its treasury, should give not millions, but hundreds of millions, to science. It should establish new schools and new professor- ships, and laboratories where not only experi- enced students, but all who show a taste for scien- tific research can work. Each country should strive to develop a " state of mind" conducive to 230 LENIN conditions which would attract intelligent young people toward science. (Hitherto, in Europe, the best talent has been absorbed by politics which feeds its devotees better and affords much greater and easier satisfactions to vanity.) It should pay scholars "royally" ("republicanly," they are very badly paid!) ; it should institute prizes and rewards for work in pure science, as well as for practical research. It should become a buyer of patents, and an editor of scientific journals to protect the savant from exploitation by the capi- talist. It is a very cheap business, of course, to dwell on material rewards for scientific work; every- body knows that scientists (like politicians!) seek in their labors only the satisfaction of duty well done. But the events of recent years have left us unconvinced as to the noble impulses of human nature. The war seems almost to have exhausted the reserves of idealism in the minds of our con- temporaries. We do not think, accordingly, that large rewards and high salaries would spoil any- thing. It is probably a far better bargain to pay seekers after truth than to shower money and power, as we have been doing, on these men to whom we owe this present state of world chaos. We gave billions lavishly for the work of the Hin- denburgs and the Ludendorfs. Can we not find millions for the Edisons and the Pasteurs? They could not be better spent ! The second problem, and one of greater impor- THEORIES AND IDEAS 231 tance, before the legislator in every country to- lay is that of education of the coming generation. For the one which passed through the crisis of L914-19, with all the heroism it displayed, did not some up to the mark. We can repeat today what Schiller wrote in 1793 : "The attempts of the French people to re- establish themselves in the sacred rights of man *nd gain political liberty have only revealed their impotence . . . and because of this impotence not [>nly the unfortunate French themselves but a considerable part of Europe and a whole civil- ization have been thrown back into barbarism and slavery. The moment was most favorable ; but it found a corrupt generation unworthy of it, a gen- eration which could not rise to the wonderful )pportunity before it. And this failure shows :hat the human race has not yet emerged from ;he age of childish violence, that the liberal rule )f reason came too soon, when we were still un- prepared to harness the brutal energies within us. Purely we are not ripe for civil liberty when we ire lacking in humanity to this extent. "Man is seen reflected in his actions; and what s the picture afforded us in the mirror of the present day? Here the most revolting savagery; ;here, its opposite extreme, inertia ! In the lower classes, a riot of vulgar anarchistic instincts, ivhich, set free from the bonds of the social order, ire bent on satiating every bestial desire with mgovernable fury. What prevented an earlier 232 LENIN explosion was not, as we now see, internal moral strength, but only restraining force from above. The French were not free individuals whom the State had oppressed; they were savage animals on whom kings had put wholesome chains. On the other hand, the educated classes reveal a still more repugnant spectacle of complete debility, weakness of spirit, and degradation of character, which is all the more revolting in that culture itself has a greater part in it. . . . "Is that, I ask, the Humanity for whose 'rights' philosophy is extenuating itself, which the noble citizens of the world are thinking of, and in which a new Solon is to realize his consti- tution of freedom? I doubt it very much. . . . The French Eepublic will disappear as speedily as it was born; the republican constitution will sooner or later end in a state of anarchy, and the only hope for the nation will be for a powerful man to rise, it matters not from where, and calm the storm, re-establish order, and hold the reins of government firmly in hand. And let him, if need arise, become absolute master, not of France only, but of a great part of Europe !" This is admirable as prophecy; but it was not the solution of the problem. Napoleon did not bring salvation to the French nation. He simply plunged it into a new crisis. Today it would be childish to look for the salvation of humanity through the rise of some "man on horseback." The generation which has lived through these THEORIES AND IDEAS 233 four terrible years cannot be courted with bou- quets of military laurels. A complete reform of the moral and intellectual education of humanity can alone bring it the hope of better things. As for the question of social reforms, every- thing must be done to make the rights and com- fort of the workers compatible with the condition of maximum production on which the very exist- ence of our civilization depends. It is from this twofold point of view that the problem of the socialization of industry must be approached and solved. Socialization must take place without curtailing production. Experiment alone can show the way; and in this all countries can only learn from each other and by the empirical method. The motto of these experiments should be the search for conditions of maximum comfort for the work- ers with a view not to the interest of capital, which in itself is of no consequence, but to the maximum development of production. This research must be conducted on an inter- national scale, as was the case with the introduc- tion of the eight-hour day. Think of the hoots 'that once were heard when this "pernicious" re- form was mentioned ! And how readily it was ac- cepted in 1919, when it was seen to be necessary. Perhaps the good sense of the controlling classes will triumph also in the question of international relations ; people will perhaps end by seeing that the preservation of European civilization abso- lutely demands that the terrible nightmare of 1914- 234 LENIN 1918 be forgotten, and a real League of Nations instituted in which there will not be a nnion of conquerors but an international parliament where questions which concern the whole world can be discussed and settled. These five years of a censorship such as Europe has not known for a great many years have given us an opportunity to appreciate the real value of freedom of thought. Especially those who have lived under the Bolshevist regime will pause to reflect before they attack the conquests of "bour- geois" liberalism, though experience has been equally decisive in revealing the great abuses of capital in this matter. The incalculable harm wrought by a certain element in the capitalist press during the war, the hatred and falsehood it has sown abroad, give it the same moral standing as. the Bolshevist or semi-Bolshevist organs. We have seen only too well and in almost every coun- try the edifying example of great newspapers which the foreign enemy was able to buy in the full midst of the war and force to serve his own cause. We want everybody in the world to have full freedom to express his thoughts; but con- ditions which allow speculators and profiteers to buy newspapers with a circulation of a million, influence public policy according to their whim, and systematically corrupt and pervert the ideas of the masses, are intolerable. Eadical reforms are necessary here. We can- not enumerate them all. Perhaps the State should THEORIES AND IDEAS 235 found and support a certain number of dailies to make free forums of them. This idea is less fan- tastic than it seems. Since the news in these State papers would be true and absolutely impar- tial, it could no longer serve base political in- trigues and selfish speculations on exchange. As for the editorials, they could be written in turn by esteemed representatives of every political hue. In this way the readers of the newspapers would be better informed than they are today; and instead of being influenced by papers faith- fully submissive to the will of those who own them, they will be led by honest people of the most opposite views and will be able to form opin- ions after taking into account every pro and con. The practical difficulties in the way of this reform can be surmounted if recourse is had to organi- zations of men of letters who will choose editors from among the foremost writers of the day. Moreover, if the literary and artistic sections of the great dailies are entrusted to them, public morals and popular taste cannot help benefiting thereby. The germ of this future state of affairs can be seen today in the organization of some of the so- cialist papers, such as Humanite, for instance, for which Thomas, and Alexandre Blanc, Kenaudel and Longuet, Sembat and Frossard, may write in turn. The presence of politicians of such differ- ent opinions in the bosom of the same party is harmful and foolish. But the case is entirely dif- 236 LENIN ferent with newspapers, whose special aim is to present opposing political opinions to the public. The State newspapers should be a second parlia- mentary forum where all orators may speak freely without influences of an " editorial policy" to cramp them, and with no obligation toward each other save that, perhaps, of a certain amount of courtesy, which is still to be found in the par- liaments but which has quite vanished from the press. They will not express opinions of a min- istry like the " inspired" papers of today; on the contrary, they can and should give hospitality to the most violent attacks upon the men in power (just as the Official Journal — the French " Con- gressional Kecord" — published at the expense of the Government, gives the exact stenographic re- port of what all the speakers in the Parliament say). There is no question here of the general socialization of the press. Along with these "free forums," published at the expense of the Govern- ment, all the various private papers will continue much as before. Writers who have their own or- gans will continue to profit by them; and those who have none will find their chance in the organs of the State. It may be necessary to socialize the so-called "popular press,"— la presse du boule- vard — which has sheets of enormous circulation and whose influence on the public mind is very clearly distinguishable from that of the others. It is inconsistent to proclaim a government mo- nopoly in public education and leave untouched THEORIES AND IDEAS 237 these organs which form public opinion, which are a thousand times more powerful than the schools and are today distributors of corruption rather than of information. If such State news- papers were entrusted to corporations of writers they would be just as independent as the Acade- mies and Universities, which are nevertheless supported by the State today in most countries. The "confiscation" of the "popular" papers must be carried out under conditions which will not en- courage trouble-makers to create others like them. In this way only those men will publish news- papers who do so, not to make them instruments of financial intrigue, but to express tendencies of political thought with which they are in sympathy. I cannot give a detailed plan for such a " reform" here. I do believe, however, that a solution of the question of real freedom for the press is to be found along this line. Bolshevism has shown us an ignoble and shameless state of affairs where all the press has been "socialized" to the advan- tage of one party, and where independent opin- ion is cynically smothered. The present state of chaos in the western countries is without doubt infinitely superior to the regime set up in the Re- public of the Soviets. In France and England all. political opinions can be freely expressed. But the abuse of the power of money gives privileges to those elements which are usually the least trustworthy. The system proposed here seems to give guarantees for the greatest liberty and 238 LENIN equality, without disadvantage to anyone except a small handful of bankers. The last question which I am to touch upon is probably one of the most important — the prob- lem of land. Here the Eussian Eevolution has given us one of its greatest negative lessons. There is no question as to the facts : the peas- ant wants the land to be his private property ; he does not want any socialization that detracts in any way from his full possession of the soil he tills. One of the tragedies of the old Eussian " in- tellectual" agitation lay in thinking, and making the people think, that they wanted something that they did not want. In 1917, by a fatal paradox, we had to persuade the Eussians that they wanted to go on with the war while, as a matter of fact, they wanted to withdraw at any cost. This was the only point on which the people as a whole agreed with the Bolshevists, who, on this one point, gained their October victory. On that oc- casion it was our duty to go against our common sense. But need we persist today in thinking wrongly that the peasants are ready to give up private ownership of land? If we do, we will col- lide with another hard reality. Since the peasants in Eussia form 80 per cent of the population, the conflict between socialist and democratic prin- ciples will be inevitable, if it be assumed that so- cialism is incompatible with the recognition of private ownership in land. The Marxians formerly laid great store on the THEORIES AND IDEAS 239 "law" of the concentration of landed property and the "proletarization" of the peasant masses. Criticism from the school of Bernstein has shown the fallacy of these hopes; and the war revealed the invalidity of Marxian prognostication in gen- eral. It is therefore necessary to understand two things clearly : that, in the first place, it is impos- sible to force the communist principle and a "kind of happiness" on peasants who form the great majority of the Enssian people and of many other peoples also; and secondly, that the continued "proletarization" of the peasants is a dream and not a pleasant dream at that. Under these cir- cumstances the socialists should look for a solu- tion of the problem in a reconciliation of their general doctrine with the principle of the private ownership in land — an ownership limited by cer- tain laws of a necessity obvious to the peasant's common sense. The great socialist and demo- cratic parties, especially those of Kussia, which find their main support in the peasantry — the most industrious of all classes — should mold their policies toward such a conciliation. It is by no means an impossible one. tF wi" tF ^t ^ "Revolution is a form of that immanence which forces itself upon us from all hands and which we call Necessity. "In the face of this mysterious complication of pleasures and sufferings the eternal question rises — the 'Why* of History. 240 LENIN " 'Why?' " 'Because!' "This answer of the ignoramus is the answer also of the sage. "In the presence of these climacteric catastro- phes which devastate — and rejuvenate — civiliza- tion, criticism of detail is hazardous. To blame or to praise men for the results they achieve is like praising or blaming figures for the sum they amount to. That which is destined to perish, perishes. The wind that must blow, blows. "Eternal truth does not suffer from these storm winds. Above revolutions lie Truth and Justice as the starry sky lies above the tempest.' ' This serene philosophy of Victor Hugo 6 is not for the world of the present ; I am not sure even that it is for mankind at all. In "blaming " the men we see in action today (and why should we praise them?) we are also obeying Necessity. In the face of a twofold catastrophe which has devastated civilization and which may perhaps "rejuvenate" it, we have not hesitated to pass judgment. The Messina earthquake had its good side, I suppose: when the old city was destroyed, those who survived had to build a new and better one, one more suited to their needs. But if some Rea- son or other were presiding over human destiny, we could have gotten along without this earth- 8 The passage is found in 'Ninety Three. THEORIES AND IDEAS 241 quake very well. Were two hundred thousand victims and countless losses of property necessary to improve a town or get a new one built? The European War and the Eussian Revolu- tion have "rejuvenated" civilization much as the earthquake " rejuvenated" Messina. I am not convinced that ten million men had to die, that the labors of generations had to be destroyed, to obtain this poor and downtrodden League of Nations of ours. Nor am I convinced that the world had to be plunged into the abyss of Leninism to force min- istries (and often public opinion) to understand the need for radical social reforms. But let us at any rate hope — however uncertain it all may be — that surmounting everything we have seen and endured in these last years, "Truth and Justice do in fact endure like the starry sky above the tempest!" H 12 9 *d» •ijife:. ***** • 4? A a. riorum.* _)? _ *>*vSs^V ^ ^ ^w^ *Y ^^ o .4°* **k * v °^ •- ^ H^**?^\*** 8 .^9^r. «^ ; % i^K> ^ ^ ** ^ % ^ v vf^ Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process **^ Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide *? Treatment Date: ^ J ^s^ .0* -•" > -^ . 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