The Crisis in Russia

***I am indebted to the editor of the "Manchester Guardian"

for permission to make use in some of the chapters of this

book of material which has appeared in his paper.

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

THE SHORTAGE OF THINGS

Nothing can be more futile than to describe conditions in Russia as a

sort of divine punishment for revolution, or indeed to describe them at

all without emphasizing the fact that the crisis in Russia is part of

the crisis in Europe, and has been in the main brought about like the

revolution itself, by the same forces that have caused, for example, the

crisis in Germany or the crisis in Austria.

No country in Europe is capable of complete economic independence. In

spite of her huge variety of natural resources, the Russian organism

seemed in 1914 to have been built up on the generous assumption that

with Europe at least the country was to be permanently at peace, or

at the lost to engage in military squabbles which could be reckoned

in months, and would keep up the prestige of the autocracy without

seriously hampering imports and exports. Almost every country in Europe,

with the exception of England, was better fitted to stand alone, was

less completely specialized in a single branch of production. England,

fortunately for herself, was not isolated during the war, and will not

become isolated unless the development of the crisis abroad deprives

her of her markets. England produces practically no food, but

great quantities of coal, steel and manufactured goods. Isolate her

absolutely, and she will not only starve, but will stop producing

manufactured goods, steel and coal, because those who usually produce

these things will be getting nothing for their labor except money which

they will be unable to use to buy dinners, because there will be no

dinners to buy. That supposititious case is a precise parallel to what

has happened in Russia. Russia produced practically no manufactured

goods (70 per cent. of her machinery she received from abroad), but

great quantities of food. The blockade isolated her. By the blockade I

do not mean merely the childish stupidity committed by ourselves, but

the blockade, steadily increasing in strictness, which began in August,

1914, and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our stupidity. The war,

even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade, was so actually.

The use of tonnage was perforce restricted to the transport of the

necessaries of war, and these were narrowly defined as shells, guns and

so on, things which do not tend to improve a country economically, but

rather the reverse. The imports from Sweden through Finland were no sort

of make-weight for the loss of Poland and Germany.

The war meant that Russia's ordinary imports practically ceased. It

meant a strain on Russia, comparable to that which would have been put

on England if the German submarine campaign had succeeded in putting

an end to our imports of food from the Americas. From the moment of the

Declaration of War, Russia was in the position of one "holding out," of

a city standing a siege without a water supply, for her imports were so

necessary to her economy that they may justly be considered as essential

irrigation. There could be no question for her of improvement, of

strengthening. She was faced with the fact until the war should end

she had to do with what she had, and that the things she had formerly

counted on importing would be replaced by guns and shells, to be used,

as it turned out, in battering Russian property that happened to be in

enemy hands. She even learned that she had to develop gun-making and

shell-making at home, at the expense of those other industries which to

some small extent might have helped her to keep going. And, just as in

England such a state of affairs would lead to a cessation of the output

of iron and coal in which England is rich, so in Russia, in spite of her

corn lands, it led to a shortage of food.

The Russian peasant formerly produced food, for which he was paid in

money. With that money, formerly, he was able to clothe himself, to buy

the tools of his labor, and further, though no doubt he never observed

the fact, to pay for the engines and wagons that took his food to

market. A huge percentage of the clothes and the tools and the engines

and the wagons and the rails came from abroad, and even those factories

in Russia which were capable of producing such things were, in many

essentials, themselves dependent upon imports. Russian towns began to

be hungry in 1915. In October of that year the Empress reported to

the Emperor that the shrewd Rasputin had seen in a vision that it was

necessary to bring wagons with flour, butter and sugar from Siberia,

and proposed that for three days nothing else should be done. Then

there would be no strikes. "He blesses you for the arrangement of

these trains." In 1916 the peasants were burying their bread instead of

bringing it to market. In the autumn of 1916 I remember telling certain

most incredulous members of the English Government that there would be

a most serious food shortage in Russia in the near future. In 1917 came

the upheaval of the revolution, in 1918 peace, but for Russia, civil

war and the continuance of the blockade. By July, 1919, the rarity of

manufactured goods was such that it was possible two hundred miles south

of Moscow to obtain ten eggs for a box of matches, and the rarity of

goods requiring distant transport became such that in November, 1919, in

Western Russia, the peasants would sell me nothing for money, whereas

my neighbor in the train bought all he wanted in exchange for small

quantities of salt.

It was not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in a

satisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a country

of huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is no

exaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transport

able to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before the

war began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops

and the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with each

succeeding week of war, although in 1916 and 1917 Russia did receive

775 locomotives from abroad, Russian transport went from bad to worse,

making inevitable a creeping paralysis of Russian economic life, during

the latter already acute stages of which the revolutionaries succeeded

to the disease that had crippled their precursors.

In 1914 Russia had in all 20,057 locomotives, of which 15,047 burnt

coal, 4,072 burnt oil and 938 wood. But that figure of twenty thousand

was more impressive for a Government official, who had his own reasons

for desiring to be impressed, than for a practical railway engineer,

since of that number over five thousand engines were more than twenty

years old, over two thousand were more than thirty years old, fifteen

hundred were more than forty years old, and 147 patriarchs had passed

their fiftieth birthday. Of the whole twenty thousand only 7,108 were

under ten years of age. That was six years ago. In the meantime Russia

has been able to make in quantities decreasing during the last five

years by 40 and 50 per cent. annually, 2,990 new locomotives. In 1914 of

the locomotives then in Russia about 17,000 were in working condition.

In 1915 there were, in spite of 800 new ones, only 16,500. In 1916 the

number of healthy locomotives was slightly higher, owing partly to

the manufacture of 903 at home in the preceding year and partly to the

arrival of 400 from abroad. In 1917 in spite of the arrival of a further

small contingent the number sank to between 15,000 and 16,000. Early

in 1918 the Germans in the Ukraine and elsewhere captured 3,000.

Others were lost in the early stages of the civil war. The number of

locomotives fell from 14,519 in January to 8,457 in April, after which

the artificially instigated revolt of the Czecho-Slovaks made possible

the fostering of civil war on a large scale, and the number fell swiftly

to 4,679 in December. In 1919 the numbers varied less markedly, but

the decline continued, and in December last year 4,141 engines were

in working order. In January this year the number was 3,969, rising

slightly in February, when the number was 4,019. A calculation was made

before the war that in the best possible conditions the maximum Russian

output of engines could be not more than 1,800 annually. At this rate

in ten years the Russians could restore their collection of engines

to something like adequate numbers. Today, thirty years would be an

inadequate estimate, for some factories, like the Votkinsky, have been

purposely ruined by the Whites, in others the lathes and other machinery

for building and repairing locomotives are worn out, many of the skilled

engineers were killed in the war with Germany, many others in defending

the revolution, and it will be long before it will be possible to

restore to the workmen or to the factories the favorable material

conditions of 1912-13. Thus the main fact in the present crisis is that

Russia possesses one-fifth of the number of locomotives which in

1914 was just sufficient to maintain her railway system in a state of

efficiency which to English observers at that time was a joke. For six

years she has been unable to import the necessary machinery for making

engines or repairing them. Further, coal and oil have been, until

recently, cut off by the civil war. The coal mines are left, after

the civil war, in such a condition that no considerable output may be

expected from them in the near future. Thus, even those engines which

exist have had their efficiency lessened by being adapted in a rough and

ready manner for burning wood fuel instead of that for which they were

designed.

Let us now examine the combined effect of ruined transport and the six

years' blockade on Russian life in town and country. First of all was

cut off the import of manufactured goods from abroad. That has had

a cumulative effect completed, as it were, and rounded off by the

breakdown of transport. By making it impossible to bring food, fuel

and raw material to the factories, the wreck of transport makes it

impossible for Russian industry to produce even that modicum which

it contributed to the general supply of manufactured goods which the

Russian peasant was accustomed to receive in exchange for his production

of food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather more than he did

before the war. But he has no matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, no

tools. The Communists are trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia,

and in the villages the most frequent excuse for keeping children from

school is a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as I

have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove, without boots

or anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go and learn to read and

write. Clothes and such things as matches are, however, of less vital

importance than tools, the lack of which is steadily reducing Russia's

actual power of food production. Before the war Russia needed from

abroad huge quantities of agricultural implements, not only machines,

but simple things like axes, sickles, scythes. In 1915 her own

production of these things had fallen to 15.1 per cent. of her already

inadequate peacetime output. In 1917 it had fallen to 2.1 per cent. The

Soviet Government is making efforts to raise it, and is planning

new factories exclusively for the making of these things. But, with

transport in such a condition, a new factory means merely a new demand

for material and fuel which there are neither engines nor wagons to

bring. Meanwhile, all over Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowing

with burnt staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface of

the ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked harrow of

some weight, are brushing the ground with light constructions of wooden

spikes bound together with wattles.

The actual agricultural productive powers of Russia are consequently

sinking. But things are no better if we turn from the rye and corn lands

to the forests. Saws are worn out. Axes are worn out. Even apart from

that, the shortage of transport affects the production of wood fuel,

lack of which reacts on transport and on the factories and so on in a

circle from which nothing but a large import of engines and wagons will

provide an outlet. Timber can be floated down the rivers. Yes, but it

must be brought to the rivers. Surely horses can do that. Yes, but,

horses must be fed, and oats do not grow in the forests. For example,

this spring (1920) the best organized timber production was in Perm

Government. There sixteen thousand horses have been mobilized for

the work, but further development is impossible for lack of forage. A

telegram bitterly reports, "Two trains of oats from Ekaterinburg are

expected day by day. If the oats arrive in time a considerable success

will be possible." And if the oats do not arrive in time? Besides, not

horses alone require to be fed. The men who cut the wood cannot do it

on empty stomachs. And again rises a cry for trains, that do not arrive,

for food that exists somewhere, but not in the forest where men work.

The general effect of the wreck of transport on food is stated as

follows: Less than 12 per cent. of the oats required, less than 5 per

cent. of the bread and salt required for really efficient working, were

brought to the forests. Nonetheless three times as much wood has been

prepared as the available transport has removed.

The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the combined effect

on the country of their productive weakness and of the loss of their old

position as centres through which the country received its imports from

abroad. Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials and

much else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life.

Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there were

no means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrial

centres where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and in

winter, cold. People living in rooms in a flat, complete strangers to

each other, by general agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen.

In the kitchen soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth there

beside the natural warmth of several human beings in a small room. There

it is possible to sleep. During the whole of last winter, in the case I

have in mind, there were no means of heating the other rooms, where the

temperature was almost always far below freezing point. It is difficult

to make the conditions real except by individual examples. The lack of

medicines, due directly to the blockade, seems to have small effect on

the imagination when simply stated as such. Perhaps people will

realize what it means when instead of talking of the wounded undergoing

operations without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, a

Bolshevik, working in a Government office, who suffered last summer

from a slight derangement of the stomach due to improper and inadequate

feeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen different

apothecaries were unable to make up the prescription for lack of one or

several of the simple ingredients required. Soap has become an article

so rare (in Russia as in Germany during the blockade and the war there

is a terrible absence of fats) that for the present it is to be treated

as a means of safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washing

after and during their work, and in preference to miners, chemical,

medical and sanitary workers, for whose efficiency and health it is

essential. The proper washing of underclothes is impossible. To induce

the population of Moscow to go to the baths during the typhus epidemic,

it was sufficient bribe to promise to each person beside the free bath

a free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into disrepair for want of

plaster, paint and tools. Nor is it possible to substitute one thing for

another, for Russia's industries all suffer alike from their dependence

on the West, as well as from the inadequacy of the transport to bring to

factories the material they need. People remind each other that during

the war the Germans, when similarly hard put to it for clothes,

made paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In Russia the nets used in

paper-making are worn out. At last, in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me),

there seemed to be a hope of getting new ones from abroad. But the

condition of the paper industry is typical of all, in a country which,

it should not be forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulp

for other countries besides itself. The factories are able to produce

only sixty per cent. of demands that have previously, by the strictest

scrutiny, been reduced to a minimum before they are made. The reasons,

apart from the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence of

food, forage and finally labor. Even when wood is brought by river the

trouble is not yet overcome. The horses are dead and eaten or starved

and weak. Factories have to cease working so that the workmen,

themselves underfed, can drag the wood from the barges to the mills.

It may well be imagined what the effect of hunger, cold, and the

disheartenment consequent on such conditions of work and the seeming

hopelessness of the position have on the productivity of labor, the

fall in which reacts on all the industries, on transport, on the general

situation and so again on itself.

Mr. J. M. Keynes, writing with Central Europe in his mind (he is, I

think, as ignorant of Russia as I am of Germany), says: "What then is

our picture of Europe? A country population able to support life on the

fruits of its own agricultural production, but without the accustomed

surplus for the towns, and also (as a result of the lack of imported

materials, and so of variety and amount in the salable manufactures of

the towns) without the usual incentives to market food in exchange for

other wares; an industrial population unable to keep its strength for

lack of food, unable to earn a livelihood for lack of materials, and so

unable to make good by imports from abroad the failure of productivity

at home."

Russia is an emphasized engraving, in which every line of that picture

is bitten in with repeated washes of acid. Several new lines, however,

are added to the drawing, for in Russia the processes at work elsewhere

have gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to see

dimly, in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened.

The struggle to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, of

Russia, and, not impossibly, of Europe. For each country that develops

to the end in this direction is a country lost to the economic comity of

Europe. And, as one country follows another over the brink, so will

the remaining countries be faced by conditions of increasingly narrow

self-dependence, in fact by the very conditions which in Russia, so far,

have received their clearest, most forcible illustration.

THE SHORTAGE OF MEN

In the preceding chapter I wrote of Russia's many wants, and of the

processes visibly at work, tending to make her condition worse and not

better. But I wrote of things, not of people. I wrote of the shortage of

this and of that, but not of the most serious of all shortages, which,

while itself largely due to those already discussed, daily intensifies

them, and points the way to that further stage of decay which is

threatened in the near future in Russia, and, in the more distant future

in Europe. I did not write of the shortage deterioration of labor.

Shortage of labor is not peculiar to Russia. It is among the postwar

phenomena common to all countries. The war and its accompanying eases

have cost Europe, including Russia, an enormous number of able-bodied

men. Many millions of others have lost the habit of regular work. German

industrialists complain that they cannot get labor, and that when they

get it, it is not productive. I heard complaints on the same subject in

England. But just as the economic crisis, due in the first instance to

the war and the isolation it imposed, has gone further in Russia than

elsewhere, so the shortage of labor, at present a handicap, an annoyance

in more fortunate countries, is in Russia perhaps the greatest of the

national dangers. Shortage of labor cannot be measured simply by the

decreasing numbers of the workmen. If it takes two workmen as long to do

a particular job in 1920 as it took one man to do it in 1914, then, even

if the number of workman has remained the same, the actual supply of

labor has been halved. And in Russia the situation is worse than that.

For example, in the group of State metal-working factories, those, in

fact which may be considered as the weapon with which Russia is trying

to cut her way out of her transport difficulties, apart from the fact

that there were in 1916 81,600 workmen, whereas in 1920 there are only

42,500, labor has deteriorated in the most appalling manner. In 1916 in

these factories 92 per cent. of the nominal working hours were actually

kept; in 1920 work goes on during only 60 per cent. of the nominal

hours. It is estimated that the labor of a single workman produces now

only one quarter of what it produced in 1916. To take another example,

also from workmen engaged in transport, that is to say, in the most

important of all work at the present time: in the Moscow junction of the

Moscow Kazan Railway, between November 1st and February 29th (1920),

292 workmen and clerks missed 12,048 working days, being absent, on

in average, forty days per man in the four months. In Moscow

passenger-station on this line, 22 workmen missed in November 106 days,

in December 273, in January 338, and in February 380; in an appalling

crescendo further illustrated by the wagon department, where 28 workmen

missed in November 104 days and in February 500. In November workmen

absented themselves for single days. In February the same workmen were

absent for the greater part of the month. The invariable excuse was

illness. Many cases of illness there undoubtedly were, since this period

was the worst of the typhus epidemic, but besides illness, and besides

mere obvious idleness which no doubt accounts for a certain proportion

of illegitimate holidays, there is another explanation which goes nearer

the root of the matter. Much of the time filched from the State was in

all probability spent in expeditions in search of food. In Petrograd,

the Council of Public Economy complain that there is a tendency to turn

the eight-hour day into a four-hour day. Attempts are being made to

arrest this tendency by making an additional food allowance conditional

on the actual fulfilment of working days. In the Donetz coal basin, the

monthly output per man was in 1914 750 poods, in 1916 615 poods, in 1919

240 poods (figures taken from Ekaterinoslav Government), and in 1920

the output per man is estimated at being something near 220 poods. In the

shale mines on the Volga, where food conditions are comparatively good,

productivity is comparatively high. Thus in a small mine near Simbirsk

there are 230 workmen, of' whom 50 to 60 are skilled. The output for the

unskilled is 28.9 poods in a shift, for the skilled 68.3. But even there

25 per cent. of the workmen are regular absentees, and actually the mine

works only 17 or 18 days in a month, that is, 70 per cent. of the normal

number of working days. The remaining 30 per cent. of normal working

time is spent by the workmen in getting food. Another small mine in the

same district is worked entirely by unskilled labor, the workers being

peasants from the neighboring villages. In this mine the productivity

per man is less, but all the men work full time. They do not have to

waste time in securing food, because, being local peasants, they are

supplied by their own villages and families. In Moscow and Petrograd

food is far more difficult to secure, more time is wasted on that

hopeless task; even with that waste of time, the workman is not properly

fed, and it cannot be wondered at that his productivity is low.

Something, no doubt, is due to the natural character of the Russians,

which led Trotsky to define man as an animal distinguished by laziness.

Russians are certainly lazy, and probably owe to their climate their

remarkable incapacity for prolonged effort. The Russian climate is such

that over large areas of Russia the Russian peasant is accustomed, and

has been accustomed for hundreds of years, to perform prodigies of

labor during two short periods of sowing and harvest, and to spend the

immensely long and monotonous winter in a hibernation like that of the

snake or the dormouse. There is a much greater difference between a

Russian workman's normal output and that of which he is capable for a

short time if he sets himself to it, than there is between the normal

and exceptional output of an Englishman, whose temperate climate has

not taught him to regard a great part of the year as a period of mere

waiting for and resting from the extraordinary effort of a few weeks.

[*]

* Given any particular motive, any particular enthusiasm, or

visible, desirable object, even the hungry Russian workmen

of to-day are capable of sudden and temporary increase of

output. The "Saturdayings" (see p. 119) provide endless

illustrations of this. They had something in the character

of a picnic, they were novel, they were out of the routine,

and the productivity of labor during a "Saturdaying" was

invariably higher than on a weekday. For example, there is

a shortage of paper for cigarettes. People roll cigarettes

in old newspapers. It occurred to the Central Committee of

the Papermakers' Union to organize a "Sundaying" with the

object of sending cigarette paper to the soldiers in the Red

Army. Six factories took part. Here is a table showing the

output of these factories during the "Sundaying" and the

average weekday output. The figures are in poods.

Made on Average week

Factory the Sunday Day Output

Krasnogorodskaya.........615...............450

Griaznovskaya.............65................45

Medianskaya..............105................90

Dobruzhskaya.............186...............250

Belgiiskaya..............127................85

Ropshinskaya..............85................55]

But this uneven working temperament was characteristic of the Russian

before the war as well as now. It has been said that the revolution

removed the stimulus to labor, and left the Russian laziness to have its

way. In the first period of the revolution that may have been true.

It is becoming day by day less true. The fundamental reasons of low

productivity will not be found in any sudden or unusual efflorescence

of idleness, but in economic conditions which cannot but reduce the

productivity of idle and industrious alike. Insufficient feeding is

one such reason. The proportion of working time consumed in foraging

is another. But the whole of my first chapter may be taken as a compact

mass of reasons why the Russians at the present time should not work

with anything like a normal productivity. It is said that bad workmen

complain of their tools, but even good ones become disheartened if

compelled to work with makeshifts, mended tools, on a stock of materials

that runs out from one day to the next, in factories where the machinery

may come at any moment to a standstill from lack of fuel. There would

thus be a shortage of labor in Russia, even if the numbers of workmen

were the same today as they were before the war. Unfortunately that is

not so. Turning from the question of low productivity per man to that

of absolute shortage of men: the example given at the beginning of

this chapter, showing that in the most important group of factories the

number of workmen has fallen 50 per cent. is by no means exceptional.

Walking through the passages of what used to be the Club of the Nobles,

and is now the house of the Trades Unions during the recent Trades Union

Congress in Moscow, I observed among a number of pictorial diagrams

on the walls, one in particular illustrating the rise and fall of the

working population of Moscow during a number of years. Each year was

represented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which rose and

fell with the population. From that diagram I took the figures for 1913,

1918 and 1919. These figures should be constantly borne in mind by any

one who wishes to realize how catastrophic the shortage of labor in

Russia actually is, and to judge how sweeping may be the changes in the

social configuration of the country if that shortage continues to

increase. Here are the figures:

Workmen in Moscow in 1913............159,344

Workmen in Moscow in 1918...........157,282

Workmen in Moscow in 1919............105,210

That is to say, that one-third of the workmen of Moscow ceased to

live there, or ceased to be workmen, in the course of a single year.

A similar phenomenon is observable in each one of the big industrial

districts.

What has become of those workmen?

A partial explanation is obvious. The main impulse of the revolution

came from the town workers. Of these, the metal workers were the most

decided, and those who most freely joined the Red Guard in the early and

the Red Army in the later days of the revolution. Many, in those early

days, when there was more enthusiasm than discipline, when there were

hardly any experienced officers, and those without much authority, were

slaughtered during the German advance of 1918. The first mobilizations,

when conscription was introduced, were among the workers in the great

industrial districts. The troops from Petrograd and Moscow, exclusively

workmen's regiments, have suffered more than any other during the civil

war, being the most dependable and being thrown, like the guards of old

time, into the worst place at any serious crisis. Many thousands of them

have died for the sake of the revolution which, were they living,

they would be hard put to it to save. (The special shortage of skilled

workers is also partially to be explained by the indiscriminate

mobilizations of 1914-15, when great numbers of the most valuable

engineers and other skilled workers were thrown into the front line, and

it was not until their loss was already felt that the Tsar's Government

in this matter came belatedly to its senses.)

But these explanations are only partial. The more general answer to

the question, What has become of the workmen? lies in the very economic

crisis which their absence accentuates. Russia is unlike England, where

starvation of the towns would be practically starvation of the whole

island. In Russia, if a man is hungry, he has only to walk far enough

and he will come to a place where there is plenty to eat. Almost every

Russian worker retains in some form or other connection with a village,

where, if he returns, he will not be an entire stranger, but at worst a

poor relation, and quite possibly an honored guest. It is not surprising

that many thousands have "returned to the land" in this way.

Further, if a workman retains his connection, both with a distant

village and with a town, he can keep himself and his family fat and

prosperous by ceasing to be a workman, and, instead, traveling on the

buffers or the roof of a railway wagon, and bringing back with him sacks

of flour and potatoes for sale in the town at fantastic prices. Thereby

he is lost to productive labor, and his uncomfortable but adventurous

life becomes directly harmful, tending to increase the strain on

transport, since it is obviously more economical to transport a thousand

sacks than to transport a thousand sacks with an idle workman attached

to each sack. Further, his activities actually make it more difficult

for the town population to get food. By keeping open for the village the

possibility of selling at fantastic prices, he lessens the readiness

of the peasants to part with their flour at the lower prices of the

Government. Nor is it as if his activities benefited the working

population. The food he brings in goes for the most part to those who

have plenty of money or have things to exchange for it. And honest

men in Russia to-day have not much money, and those who have things to

exchange are not as a rule workmen. The theory of this man's harmfulness

is, I know, open to argument, but the practice at least is exactly as

I have stated it, and is obviously attractive to the individual who

prefers adventure on a full stomach to useful work on an empty. Setting

aside the theory with its latent quarrel between Free Trade and State

control, we can still recognize that each workman engaged in these

pursuits has become an unproductive middleman, one of that very

parasitic species which the revolutionaries had hoped to make

unnecessary. It is bad from the revolutionary point of view if a workman

is so employed, but it is no less bad from the point of view of people

who do not care twopence about the revolution one way or the other, but

do care about getting Russia on her feet again and out of her economic

crisis. It is bad enough if an unskilled workman is so employed. It is

far worse if a skilled workman finds he can do better for himself as

a "food speculator" than by the exercise of his legitimate craft. From

mines, from every kind of factory come complaints of the decreasing

proportion of skilled to unskilled workmen. The superior intelligence

of the skilled worker offers him definite advantages should he engage in

these pursuits, and his actual skill gives him other advantages in the

villages. He can leave his factory and go to the village, there on

the spot to ply his trade or variations of it, when as a handy man,

repairing tools, etc., he will make an easy living and by lessening

the dependence of the village on the town do as much as the "food

speculator" in worsening the conditions of the workman he has left

behind.

And with that we come to the general changes in the social geography

of Russia which are threatened if the processes now at work continue

unchecked. The relations between town and village are the fundamental

problem of the revolution. Town and countryside are in sharp

contradiction daily intensified by the inability of the towns to supply

the country's needs. The town may be considered as a single productive

organism, with feelers stretching into the country, and actual outposts

there in the form of agricultural enterprises taking their directives

from the centre and working as definite parts of the State organism.

All round this town organism, in all its interstices, it too, with its

feelers in the form of "food speculators," is the anarchic chaos of the

country, consisting of a myriad independent units, regulated by no plan,

without a brain centre of any kind. Either the organized town will

hold its own against and gradually dominate and systematize the country

chaos, or that chaos little by little will engulf the town organism.

Every workman who leaves the town automatically places himself on the

side of the country in that struggle. And when a town like Moscow loses

a third of its working population in a year, it is impossible not to

see that, so far, the struggle is going in favor of that huge chaotic,

unconscious but immensely powerful countryside. There is even a danger

that the town may become divided against itself. Just as scarcity of

food leads to food speculation, so the shortage of labor is making

possible a sort of speculation in labor. The urgent need of labor has

led to a resurrection of the methods of the direct recruiting of

workmen in the villages by the agents of particular factories, who by

exceptional terms succeed in getting workmen where the Government organs

fail. And, of course, this recruiting is not confined to the villages.

Those enterprises which are situated in the corn districts are naturally

able to offer better conditions, for the sake of which workmen are ready

to leave their jobs and skilled workmen to do unskilled work, and the

result can only be a drainage of good workmen away from the hungry

central industrial districts where they are most of all needed.

Summing up the facts collected in this chapter and in the first on

the lack of things and the lack of men, I think the economic crisis in

Russia may be fairly stated as follows: Owing to the appalling condition

of Russian transport, and owing to the fact that since 1914 Russia has

been practically in a state of blockade, the towns have lost their power

of supplying, either as middlemen or as producers, the simplest needs

of the villages. Partly owing to this, partly again because of the

condition of transport, the towns are not receiving the necessaries of

life in sufficient quantities. The result of this is a serious fall in

the productivity of labor, and a steady flow of skilled and unskilled

workmen from the towns towards the villages, and from employments the

exercise of which tends to assist the towns in recovering their old

position as essential sources of supply to employments that tend to

have the opposite effect. If this continues unchecked, it will make

impossible the regeneration of Russian industry, and will result in

the increasing independence of the villages, which will tend to become

entirely self-supporting communities, tilling the ground in a less and

less efficient manner, with ruder tools, with less and less incentive to

produce more than is wanted for the needs of the village itself. Russia,

in these circumstances, may sink into something very like barbarism, for

with the decay of the economic importance of the towns would decay

also their authority, and free-booting on a small and large scale would

become profitable and not very dangerous. It would be possible, no

doubt, for foreigners to trade with the Russians as with the natives of

the cannibal islands, bartering looking-glasses and cheap tools, but,

should such a state of things come to be, it would mean long years of

colonization, with all the new possibilities and risks involved in the

subjugation of a free people, before Western Europe could count once

more on getting a considerable portion of its food from Russian corn

lands.

That is the position, those the natural tendencies at work. But opposed

to these tendencies are the united efforts of the Communists and of

those who, leaving the question of Communism discreetly aside, work with

them for the sake of preventing such collapse of Russian civilization.

They recognize the existence of every one of the tendencies I have

described, but they are convinced that every one of these tendencies

will be arrested. They believe that the country will not conquer the

town but the reverse. So far from expecting the unproductive stagnation

described in the last paragraph, they think of Russia as of the natural

food supply of Europe, which the Communists among them believe will, in

course of time, be made up for "Working Men's Republics" (though, for

the sake of their own Republic, they are not inclined to postpone trade

with Europe until that epoch arrives). At the very time when spades and

sickles are wearing out or worn out, these men are determined that

the food output of Russia shall sooner or later be increased by the

introduction of better methods of agriculture and farming on a larger

scale. We are witnessing in Russia the first stages of a titanic

struggle, with on one side all the forces of nature leading apparently

to an inevitable collapse of civilization, and on the other side nothing

but the incalculable force of human will.

THE COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP

How is that will expressed? What is the organization welded by adversity

which, in this crisis, supersedes even the Soviet Constitution, and

stands between this people and chaos?

It is a commonplace to say that Russia is ruled, driven if you like,

cold, starving as she is, to effort after effort by the dictatorship of

a party. It is a commonplace alike in the mouths of those who wish to

make the continued existence of that organization impossible and in the

mouths of the Communists themselves. At the second congress of the Third

International, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of the

development of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution."

Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that he

differed from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant by

the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understand

by the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' what is actually the

dictatorship of its determined and conscious minority. And that is the

fact." Later he asked, "What is this minority? It may be called a party.

If this minority is actually conscious, if it is able to draw the masses

after it, if it shows itself capable of replying to every question on

the agenda list of the political day, it actually constitutes a party."

And Trotsky again, on the same occasion, illustrated the relative

positions of the Soviet Constitution and the Communist Party when he

said, "And today, now that we have received an offer of peace from the

Polish Government, who decides the question? Whither are the workers to

turn? We have our Council of People's Commissaries, of course, but that,

too, must be under a certain control. Whose control? The control of the

working class as a formless chaotic mass? No. The Central Committee of

the party is called together to discuss and decide the question. And

when we have to wage war, to form new divisions, to find the best

elements for them-to whom do we turn? To the party, to the Central

Committee. And it gives directives to the local committees, 'Send

Communists to the front.' The case is precisely the same with the

Agrarian question, with that of supply, and with all other questions

whatsoever."

No one denies these facts, but their mere statement is quite inadequate

to explain what is being done in Russia and how it is being done. I

do not think it would be a waste of time to set down as briefly

as possible, without the comments of praise or blame that would be

inevitable from one primarily interested in the problem from the

Capitalist or Communist point of view what, from observation and

inquiry, I believe to be the main framework of the organization whereby

that dictatorship of the party works.

The Soviet Constitution is not so much moribund as in abeyance. The

Executive Committee, for example, which used to meet once a week or even

oftener, now meets on the rarest occasions. Criticism on this account

was met with the reply that the members of the Executive Committee, for

example, which used to meet once a week or even oftener, now meets on

the rarest occasions. Criticism on this account was met with the reply

that the members of the Executive Committee were busy on the front and

in various parts of Russia. As a matter of fact, the work which that

Committee used to do is now done by Central Committee of the Bolshevik

Party, so that the bulk of the 150 members of the Central Executive are

actually free for other work, a saving of something like 130 men. This

does not involve any very great change, but merely an economy in the use

of men. In the old days, as I well remember, the opening of a session of

the Executive Committee was invariably late, the reason being that the

various parties composing it had not yet finished their preliminary and

private discussions. There is now an overwhelming Communist majority

in the Executive Committee, as elsewhere. I think it may be regarded

as proved that these majorities are not always legitimately obtained.

Non-Communist delegates do undoubtedly find every kind of difficulty put

in their way by the rather Jesuitical adherents of the faith. But, no

matter how these majorities are obtained, the result is that when the

Communist Party has made up its mind on any subject, it is so certain

of being able to carry its point that the calling together of the

All-Russian Executive Committee is merely a theatrical demonstration of

the fact that it can do what it likes. When it does meet, the Communists

allow the microscopical opposition great liberty of speech, listen

quietly, cheer ironically, and vote like one man, proving on every

occasion that the meeting of the Executive Committee was the idlest

of forms, intended rather to satisfy purists than for purposes of

discussion, since the real discussion has all taken place beforehand

among the Communists themselves. Something like this must happen with

every representative assembly at which a single party has a great

preponderance and a rigid internal discipline. The real interest is in

the discussion inside the Party Committees.

This state of affairs would probably be more actively resented if the

people were capable of resenting anything but their own hunger, or of

fearing anything but a general collapse which would turn that hunger

into starvation. It must be remembered that the urgency of the

economic crisis has driven political questions into the background. The

Communists (compare Rykov's remarks on this subject, p. 175) believe

that this is the natural result of social revolution. They think that

political parties will disappear altogether and that people will band

together, not for the victory of one of several contending political

parties, but solely for economic cooperation or joint enterprise in

art or science. In support of this they point to the number of their

opponents who have become Communists, and to the still greater number

of non-Communists who are loyally working with them for the economic

reconstruction of the country. I do not agree with the Communists in

this, nor yet with their opponents, who attribute the death of political

discussion to fear of the Extraordinary Commission. I think that both

the Communists and their opponents underestimate the influence of the

economic ruin that affects everybody. The latter particularly, feeling

that in some way they must justify themselves to politically minded

foreign visitors, seek an excuse for their apathy in the one institution

that is almost universally unpopular. I have many non-Communist friends

in Russia, but have never detected the least restraint that could be

attributed to fear of anybody in their criticisms of the Communist

regime. The fear existed alike among Communists and non-Communists,

but it was like the fear of people walking about in a particularly bad

thunderstorm. The activities and arrests of the Extraordinary Commission

are so haphazard, often so utterly illogical, that it is quite idle for

any one to say to himself that by following any given line of conduct

he will avoid molestation. Also, there is something in the Russian

character which makes any prohibition of discussion almost an invitation

to discuss. I have never met a Russian who could be prevented from

saying whatever he liked whenever he liked, by any threats or dangers

whatsoever. The only way to prevent a Russian from talking is to cut out

his tongue. The real reason for the apathy is that, for the moment, for

almost everybody political questions are of infinitesimal importance in

comparison with questions of food and warmth. The ferment of political

discussion that filled the first years of the revolution has died away,

and people talk about little but what they are able to get for dinner,

or what somebody else his been able to get. I, like other foreign

visitors coming to Russia after feeding up in other countries, am all

agog to make people talk. But the sort of questions which interest me,

with my full-fed stomach, are brushed aside almost fretfully by men who

have been more or less hungry for two or three years on end.

I find, instead of an urgent desire to alter this or that at once,

to-morrow, in the political complexion of the country, a general desire

to do the best that can be done with things as they are, a general fear

of further upheaval of any kind, in fact a general acquiescence in

the present state of affairs politically, in the hope of altering the

present state of affairs economically. And this is entirely natural.

Everybody, Communists included, rails bitterly at the inefficiencies of

the present system, but everybody, Anti-Communists included, admits that

there is nothing whatever capable of taking its place. Its failure is

highly undesirable, not because it itself is good, but because such

failure would be preceded or followed by a breakdown of all existing

organizations. Food distribution, inadequate as it now is, would come to

an end. The innumerable non-political committees, which are rather like

Boards of Directors controlling the Timber, Fur, Fishery, Steel, Matches

or other Trusts (since the nationalized industries can be so considered)

would collapse, and with them would collapse not only yet one more hope

of keeping a breath of life in Russian industry, but also the

actual livelihoods of a great number of people, both Communists and

non-Communists. I do not think it is realized out-side Russia how large

a proportion of the educated classes have become civil servants of one

kind or another. It is a rare thing when a whole family has left

Russia, and many of the most embittered partisans of war on Russia have

relations inside Russia who have long ago found places under the new

system, and consequently fear its collapse as much as any one. One case

occurs to me in which a father was an important minister in one of the

various White Governments which have received Allied support, while his

son inside Russia was doing pretty well as a responsible official under

the Communists. Now in the event of a violent change, the Communists

would be outlaws with a price on every head, and those who have worked

with them, being Russians, know their fellow countrymen well enough to

be pretty well convinced that the mere fact that they are without cards

of the membership of the Communist Party, would not save them in the

orgy of slaughter that would follow any such collapse.

People may think that I underestimate the importance of, the

Extraordinary Commission. I am perfectly aware that without this police

force with its spies, its prisons and its troops, the difficulties of

the Dictatorship would be increased by every kind of disorder, and the

chaos, which I fear may come, would have begun long ago. I believe, too,

that the overgrown power of the Extraordinary Commission, and the

cure that must sooner or later be applied to it, may, as in the French

Revolution, bring about the collapse of the whole system. The Commission

depends for its strength on the fear of something else. I have seen it

weaken when there was a hope of general peace. I have seen it tighten

its grip in the presence of attacks from without and attempted

assassination within. It is dreaded by everybody; not even Communists

are safe from it; but it does not suffice to explain the Dictatorship,

and is actually entirely irrelevant to the most important process of

that Dictatorship, namely, the adoption of a single idea, a single

argument, by the whole of a very large body of men. The whole power of

the Extraordinary Commission does not affect in the slightest degree

discussions inside the Communist Party, and those discussions are the

simple fact distinguishing the Communist Dictatorship from any of the

other dictatorships by which it may be supplanted.

There are 600,000 members of the Communist Party (611,978 on April

2, 1920). There are nineteen members of the Central Committee of that

party. There are, I believe, five who, when they agree, can usually sway

the remaining fourteen. There is no need to wonder how these fourteen

can be argued into acceptance of the views of the still smaller inner

ring, but the process of persuading the six hundred thousand of the

desirability of, for example, such measures as those involved in

industrial conscription which, at first sight, was certainly repugnant

to most of them, is the main secret of the Dictatorship, and is not in

any way affected by the existence of the Extraordinary Commission.

Thus the actual government of Russia at the present time may be not

unfairly considered as a small group inside the Central Committee of the

Communist Party. This small group is able to persuade the majority of

the remaining members of that Committee. The Committee then sets about

persuading the majority of the party. In the case of important measures

the process is elaborate. The Committee issues a statement of its

case, and the party newspapers the Pravda and its affiliated organs are

deluged with its discussion. When this discussion has had time to spread

through the country, congresses of Communists meet in the provincial

centres, and members of the Central Committee go down to these

conferences to defend the "theses" which the Committee has issued. These

provincial congresses, exclusively Communist, send their delegates of

an All-Russian Congress. There the "theses" of the Central Committee

get altered, confirmed, or, in the case of an obviously unpersuaded

and large opposition in the party, are referred back or in other ways

shelved. Then the delegates, even those who have been in opposition at

the congress, go back to the country pledged to defend the position of

the majority. This sometimes has curious results. For example, I heard

Communist Trades Unionists fiercely arguing against certain clauses in

the theses on industrial conscription at a Communist Congress at the

Kremlin; less than a week afterwards I heard these same men defending

precisely these clauses at a Trades Union Congress over the way, they

loyally abiding by the collective opinion of their fellow Communists

and subject to particularly uncomfortable heckling from people who

vociferously reminded them (since the Communist debates had been

published) that they were now defending what, a few days before, they

had vehemently attacked.

The great strength of the Communist Party is comparable to the strength

of the Jesuits, who, similarly, put themselves and their opinions at the

disposal of the body politic of their fellow members. Until a decision

had been made, a Communist is perfectly free to do his best to prevent

it being made, to urge alterations in it, or to supply a rival decision,

but once it has been made he will support it without changing his

private opinion. In all mixed congresses, rather than break the party

discipline, he will give his vote for it, speak in favor of it, and use

against its adversaries the very arguments that have been used against

himself. He has his share in electing the local Communist Committee,

and, indirectly, in electing the all-powerful Central Committee of the

party, and he binds himself to do at any moment in his life exactly what

these Committees decide for him. These Committees decide the use that is

to be made of the lives, not only of the rank and file of the party, but

also of their own members. Even a member of the Central Committee does

not escape. He may be voted by his fellow members into leaving a job

he likes and taking up another he detests in which they think his

particular talents will better serve the party aims. To become a member

of the Communist Party involves a kind of intellectual abdication, or,

to put it differently, a readiness at any moment to place the collective

wisdom of the party's Committee above one's individual instincts or

ideas. You may influence its decisions, you may even get it to endorse

your own, but Lenin himself, if he were to fail on any occasion to

obtain the agreement of a majority in the Central Committee, would have

to do precisely what the Committee should tell him. Lenin's opinion

carries great weight because he is Lenin, but it carries less weight

than that of the Central Committee, of which he forms a nineteenth

part. On the other hand, the opinion of Lenin and a very small group of

outstanding figures is supported by great prestige inside the Committee,

and that of the Committee is supported by overwhelming prestige among

the rank and file. The result is that this small group is nearly always

sure of being able to use the whole vote of 600,000 Communists, in the

realization of its decisions.

Now 600,000 men and women acting on the instructions of a highly

centralized directive, all the important decisions of which have been

thrashed out and re-thrashed until they have general support within the

party; 600,000 men and women prepared, not only to vote in support of

these decisions, but with a carefully fostered readiness to sacrifice

their lives for them if necessary; 600,000 men and women who are

persuaded that by their way alone is humanity to be saved; who are

persuaded (to put it as cynically and unsympathetically as possible)

that the noblest death one can die is in carrying out a decision of the

Central Committee; such a body, even in a country such as Russia, is an

enormously strong embodiment of human will, an instrument of struggle

capable of working something very like miracles. It can be and is

controlled like an army in battle. It can mobilize its members, 10 per

cent. of them, 50 per cent., the local Committees choosing them, and

send them to the front when the front is in danger, or to the railways

and repair shops when it is decided that the weakest point is that of

transport. If its only task were to fight those organizations of loosely

knit and only momentarily united interests which are opposed to

it, those jerry-built alliances of Reactionaries with Liberals,

United-Indivisible-Russians with Ukrainians, Agrarians with

Sugar-Refiners, Monarchists with Republicans, that task would long ago

have been finished. But it has to fight something infinitely stronger

than these in fighting the economic ruin of Russia, which, if it is too

strong, too powerful to be arrested by the Communists, would make

short work of those who are without any such fanatic single-minded and

perfectly disciplined organization.

A CONFERENCE AT JAROSLAVL

I have already suggested that although the small Central Committee of

the Communist Party does invariably get its own way, there are essential

differences between this Dictatorship and the dictatorship of, for

example, a General. The main difference is that whereas the General

merely writes an order about which most people hear for the first time

only when it is promulgated, the Central Committee prepares the way

for its dictation by a most elaborate series of discussions and counter

discussions throughout the country, whereby it wins the bulk of the

Communist Party to its opinion, after which it proceeds through local

and general congresses to do the same with the Trades Unions. This done,

a further series of propaganda meetings among the people actually to be

affected smooths the way for the introduction of whatever new measure

is being carried through at the moment. All this talk, besides lessening

the amount of physical force necessary in carrying out a decision, must

also avoid, at least in part, the deadening effect that would be caused

by mere compulsory obedience to the unexplained orders of a military

dictator. Of the reality of the Communist Dictatorship I have no sort

of doubt. But its methods are such as tend towards the awakening of a

political consciousness which, if and when normal conditions-of feeding

and peace, for example-are attained, will make dictatorship of any kind

almost impossible.

To illustrate these methods of the Dictatorship, I cannot do better than

copy into this book some pages of my diary written in March of this year

when I was present at one of the provincial conferences which were held

in preparation of the All-Russian Communist Conference at the end of the

month.

At seven in the evening Radek called for me and took me to the Jaroslavl

station, where we met Larin, whom I had known in 1918. An old Menshevik,

he was the originator and most urgent supporter of the decree annulling

the foreign debts. He is a very ill man, partially paralyzed, having to

use both hands even to get food to his mouth or to turn over the leaves

of a book. In spite of this he is one of the hardest workers in Russia,

and although his obstinacy, his hatred of compromise, and a sort of

mixed originality and perverseness keep him almost permanently at

loggerheads with the Central Committee, he retains everybody's respect

because of the real heroism with which he conquers physical disabilities

which long ago would have overwhelmed a less unbreakable spirit. Both

Radek and Larin were going to the Communist Conference at Jaroslavl

which was to consider the new theses of the Central Committee of the

party with regard to Industrial Conscription. Radek was going to defend

the position of the Central Committee, Larin to defend his own. Both

are old friends. As Radek said to me, he intended to destroy Larin's

position, but not, if he could help it, prevent Larin being nominated

among the Jaroslavl delegates to All-Russian Conference which was in

preparation. Larin, whose work keeps him continually traveling, has his

own car, specially arranged so that his uninterrupted labor shall have

as little effect as possible on his dangerously frail body. Radek and I

traveled in one of the special cars of the Central Executive Committee,

of which he is a member.

The car seemed very clean, but, as an additional precaution, we began

by rubbing turpentine on our necks and wrists and angles for the

discouragement of lice, now generally known as "Semashki" from the name

of Semashko, the Commissar of Public Health, who wages unceasing war

for their destruction as the carriers of typhus germs. I rubbed the

turpentine so energetically into my neck that it burnt like a collar of

fire, and for a long time I was unable to get to sleep.

In the morning Radek, the two conductors who had charge of the wagons

and I sat down together to breakfast and had a very merry meal, they

providing cheese and bread and I a tin of corned beef providently sent

out from home by the Manchester Guardian. We cooked up some coffee on

a little spirit stove, which, in a neat basket together with plates,

knives, forks, etc. (now almost unobtainable in Russia) had been

a parting present from the German Spartacists to Radek when he was

released from prison in Berlin and allowed to leave Germany.

The morning was bright and clear, and we had an excellent view of

Jaroslavl when we drove from the station to the town, which is a mile or

so off the line of the railway. The sun poured down on the white snow,

on the barges still frozen into the Volga River, and on the gilt and

painted domes and cupolas of the town. Many of the buildings had been

destroyed during the rising artificially provoked in July, 1918, and its

subsequent suppression. More damage was done then than was necessary,

because the town was recaptured by troops which had been deserted by

most of their officers, and therefore hammered away with artillery

without any very definite plan of attack. The more important of the

damaged buildings, such as the waterworks and the power station, have

been repaired, the tramway was working, and, after Moscow, the town

seemed clean, but plenty of ruins remained as memorials of that wanton

and unjustifiable piece of folly which, it was supposed, would be the

signal for a general rising.

We drove to the Hotel Bristol, now the headquarters of the Jaroslavl

Executive Committee, where Rostopchin, the president, discussed with

Larin and Radek the programme arranged for the conference. It was then

proposed that we should have something to eat, when a very curious state

of affairs (and one extremely Russian) was revealed. Rostopchin admitted

that the commissariat arrangements of the Soviet and its Executive

Committee were very bad. But in the center of the town there is a

nunnery which was very badly damaged during the bombardment and is now

used as a sort of prison or concentration camp for a Labor Regiment.

Peasants from the surrounding country who have refused to give up their

proper contribution of corn, or leave otherwise disobeyed the laws, are,

for punishment, lodged here, and made to expiate their sins by work.

It so happens, Rostopchin explained, that the officer in charge of the

prison feeding arrangements is a very energetic fellow, who had served

in the old army in a similar capacity, and the meals served out to

the prisoners are so much better than those produced in the Soviet

headquarters, that the members of the Executive Committee make a

practice of walking over to the prison to dine. They invited us to

do the same. Larin did not feel up to the walk, so he remained in the

Soviet House to eat an inferior meal, while Radek and I, with Rostopchin

and three other members of the local committee walked round to the

prison. The bell tower of the old nunnery had been half shot away by

artillery, and is in such a precarious condition that it is proposed

to pull it down. But on passing under it we came into a wide courtyard

surrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings that seemed scarcely to

have suffered at all. We found the refectory in one of these buildings.

It was astonishingly clean. There were wooden tables, of course without

cloths, and each man had a wooden spoon and a hunk of bread. A great

bowl of really excellent soup was put down in the middle of table, and

we fell to hungrily enough. I made more mess on the table than any one

else, because it requires considerable practice to convey almost boiling

soup from a distant bowl to one's mouth without spilling it in a shallow

wooden spoon four inches in diameter, and, having got it to one's mouth,

to get any of it in without slopping over on either side. The regular

diners there seemed to find no difficulty in it at all. One of the

prisoners who mopped up after my disasters said I had better join them

for a week, when I should find it quite easy. The soup bowl was followed

by a fry of potatoes, quantities of which are grown in the district. For

dealing with these I found the wooden spoon quite efficient. After that

we had glasses of some sort of substitute for tea.

The Conference was held in the town theatre. There was a hint of comedy

in the fact that the orchestra was playing the prelude to some very

cheerful opera before the curtain rang up. Radek characteristically

remarked that such music should be followed by something more

sensational than a conference, proposed to me that we should form a

tableau to illustrate the new peaceful policy of England with regard to

Russia. As it was a party conference, I had really no right to be

there, but Radek had arranged with Rostopchin that I should come in with

himself, and be allowed to sit in the wings at the side of the stage.

On the stage were Rostopchin, Radek, Larin and various members of the

Communist Party Committee in the district. Everything was ready, but the

orchestra went on with its jig music on the other side of the curtain.

A message was sent to them. The music stopped with a jerk. The curtain

rose, disclosing a crowded auditorium. Everybody stood up, both on the

stage and in the theater, and sang, accompanied by the orchestra, first

the "Internationale" and then the song for those who had died for the

revolution. Then except for two or three politically minded musicians,

the orchestra vanished away and the Conference began.

Unlike many of the meetings and conferences at which I have been present

in Russia, this Jaroslavl Conference seemed to me to include practically

none but men and women who either were or had been actual manual

workers. I looked over row after row of faces in the theatre, and could

only find two faces which I thought might be Jewish, and none that

obviously belonged to the "intelligentsia." I found on inquiry that only

three of the Communists present, excluding Radek and Larin, were old

exiled and imprisoned revolutionaries of the educated class. Of these,

two were on the platform. All the rest were from the working class. The

great majority of them, of course, had joined the Communists in 1917,

but a dozen or so had been in the party as long as the first Russian

revolution of 1905.

Radek, who was tremendously cheered (his long imprisonment in Germany,

during which time few in Russia thought that they would see him

alive again, has made him something of a popular hero) made a long,

interesting and pugnacious speech setting out the grounds on which the

Central Committee base their ideas about Industrial Conscription.

These ideas are embodied in the series of theses issued by the Central

Committee in January (see p. 134). Larin, who was very tired after the

journey and patently conscious that Radek was a formidable opponent,

made a speech setting out his reasons for differing with the Central

Committee, and proposed an ingenious resolution, which, while expressing

approval of the general position of the Committee, included four

supplementary modifications which, as a matter of fact, nullified that

position altogether. It was then about ten at night, and the Conference

adjourned. We drove round to the prison in sledges, and by way of supper

had some more soup and potatoes, and so back to the railway station to

sleep in the cars.

Next day the Conference opened about noon, when there was a long

discussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to the

platform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, as

when one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often before

pointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed

they had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was

much in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to digest, he was

for giving them complete support, confident that, as Comrades Lenin and

Trotsky were in favor of them, they were likely to be right this time,

as so often heretofore. But for the most part the speeches were directly

concerned with the problem under discussion, and showed a political

consciousness which would have been almost incredible three years ago.

The Red Army served as a text for many, who said that the methods which

had produced that army and its victories over the Whites had been proved

successful and should be used to produce a Red Army of Labor and similar

victories on the bloodless front against economic disaster. Nobody

seemed to question the main idea of compulsory labor. The contest

that aroused real bitterness was between the methods of individual and

collegiate command. The new proposals lead eventually towards individual

command, and fears were expressed lest this should mean putting

summary powers into the hands of bourgeois specialists, thus nullifying

"workers' control". In reply, it was pointed out that individual command

had proved necessary in the army and had resulted in victory for the

revolution. The question was not between specialists and no specialists.

Everybody knew that specialists were necessary. The question was how to

get the most out of them. Effective political control had secured that

bourgeois specialists, old officers, led to victory the army of the Red

Republic. The same result could be secured in the factories in the same

way. It was pointed out that in one year they had succeeded in training

32,000 Red Commanders, that is to say, officers from the working class

itself, and that it was not Utopian to hope and work for a similar

output of workmen specialists, technically trained, and therefore

themselves qualified for individual command in the factories. Meanwhile

there was nothing against the employment of Political Commissars in

the factories as formerly in the regiments, to control in other than

technical matters the doings of the specialists. On the other hand,

it was said that the appointment of Commissars would tend to make

Communists unpopular, since inevitably in many cases they would have

to support the specialists against the workmen, and that the collegiate

system made the workmen feel that they were actually the masters, and so

gave possibilities of enthusiastic work not otherwise obtainable. This

last point was hotly challenged. It was said that collegiate control

meant little in effect, except waste of time and efficiency, because at

worst work was delayed by disputes and at best the workmen members

of the college merely countersigned the orders decided upon by the

specialists. The enthusiastic work was said to be a fairy story. If it

were really to be found then there would be no need for a conference to

discover how to get it.

The most serious opposition, or at least the most serious argument put

forward, for there was less opposition than actual discussion, came from

some of the representatives of the Trade Unionists. A good deal was said

about the position of the Trades Unions in a Socialist State. There was

general recognition that since the Trade Unions themselves controlled

the conditions of labor and wages, the whole of their old work of

organizing strikes against capitalists had ceased to have any meaning,

since to strike now would be to strike against their own decisions.

At the same time, certain tendencies to Syndicalism were still in

existence, tendencies which might well lead to conflict between

different unions, so that, for example, the match makers or the metal

worker, might wish to strike a bargain with the State, as of one country

with another, and this might easily lead to a complete collapse of the

socialist system.

The one thing on which the speakers were in complete agreement was the

absolute need of an effort in industry equal to, if not greater than,

the effort made in the army. I thought it significant that in many

of the speeches the importance of this effort was urged as the only

possible means of retaining the support of the peasants. There was a

tacit recognition that the Conference represented town workers only.

Larin, who had belonged to the old school which had grown up with

its eyes on the industrial countries of the West and believed that

revolution could be brought about by the town workers alone, that it

was exclusively their affair, and that all else was of minor importance,

unguardedly spoke of the peasant as "our neighbor." In Javoslavl,

country and town are too near to allow the main problem of the

revolution to be thus easily dismissed. It was instantly pointed out

that the relation was much more intimate, and that, even if it were only

"neighborly," peace could not long be preserved if it were continually

necessary for one neighbor to steal the chickens of the other. These

town workers of a district for the most part agricultural were very sure

that the most urgent of all tasks was to raise industry to the point

at which the town would really be able to supply the village with its

needs.

Larin and Radek severally summed up and made final attacks on each

other's positions, after which Radek's resolution approving the theses

of the Central Committee was passed almost unanimously. Larin's four

amendments received 1, 3, 7 and 1 vote apiece. This result was received

with cheering throughout the theater, and showed the importance of such

Conferences in smoothing the way of the Dictatorship, since it had

been quite obvious when the discussion began that a very much larger

proportion of the delegates than finally voted for his resolution

had been more or less in sympathy with Larin in his opposition to the

Central Committee.

There followed elections to the Party Conference in Moscow. Rostopchin,

the president, read a list which had been submitted by the various

ouyezds in the Jaroslavl Government. They were to send to Moscow fifteen

delegates with the right to vote, together with another fifteen with

the right to speak but not to vote. Larin, who had done much work in the

district, was mentioned as one of the fifteen voting delegates, but he

stood up and said that as the Conference had so clearly expressed

its disagreement with his views, he thought it better to withdraw his

candidature. Rostopchin put it to the Conference that although they

disagreed with Larin, yet it would be as well that he should have the

opportunity of stating his views at the All-Russian Conference, so that

discussion there should be as final and as many-sided as possible.

The Conference expressed its agreement with this. Larin withdrew

his withdrawal, and was presently elected. The main object of these

conferences in unifying opinion and in arming Communists with argument

for the defence of this unified opinion a mong the masses was again

illustrated when the Conference, in leaving it to the ouyezds to choose

for themselves the non-voting delegates urged them to select wherever

possible people who would have the widest opportunities of explaining

on their return to the district whatever results might be reached in

Moscow.

It was now pretty late in the evening, and after another very

satisfactory visit to the prison we drove back to the station. Larin,

who was very disheartened, realizing that he had lost much support in

the course of the discussion, settled down to work, and buried himself

in a mass of statistics. I prepared to go to bed, but we had hardly got

into the car when there was a tap at the door and a couple of railwaymen

came in. They explained that a few hundred yards away along the line a

concert and entertainment arranged by the Jaroslavl railwaymen was going

on, and that their committee, hearing that Radek was at the station, had

sent them to ask him to come over and say a few words to them if he were

not too tired.

"Come along," said Radek, and we walked in the dark along the railway

lines to a big one-story wooden shanty, where an electric lamp lit a

great placard, "Railwaymen's Reading Room." We went into a packed hall.

Every seat was occupied by railway workers and their wives and children.

The gangways on either side were full of those who had not found room on

the benches. We wriggled and pushed our way through this crowd, who were

watching a play staged and acted by the railwaymen themselves, to a side

door, through which we climbed up into the wings, and slid across the

stage behind the scenery into a tiny dressing-room. Here Radek was laid

hold of by the Master of the Ceremonies, who, it seemed, was also part

editor of a railwaymen's newspaper, and made to give a long account of

the present situation of Soviet Russia's Foreign Affairs. The little box

of a room filled to a solid mass as policemen, generals and ladies of

the old regime threw off their costumes, and, in their working clothes,

plain signalmen and engine-drivers, pressed round to listen. When the

act ended, one of the railwaymen went to the front of the stage and

announced that Radek, who had lately come back after imprisonment in

Germany for the cause of revolution, was going to talk to them about

the general state of affairs. I saw Radek grin at this forecast of his

speech. I understood why, when he began to speak. He led off by a direct

and furious onslaught on the railway workers in general, demanding

work, work and more work, telling them that as the Red Army had been

the vanguard of the revolution hitherto, and had starved and fought and

given lives to save those at home from Denikin and Kolchak, so now it

was the turn of the railway workers on whose efforts not only the Red

Army but also the whole future of Russia depended. He addressed himself

to the women, telling them in very bad Russian that unless their men

worked superhumanly they would see their babies die from starvation next

winter. I saw women nudge their husbands as they listened. Instead

of giving them a pleasant, interesting sketch of the international

position, which, no doubt, was what they had expected, he took the

opportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And the

amazing thing was that they seemed to be pleased. They listened with

extreme attention, wanted to turn out some one who had a sneezing fit

at the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheering

when Radek had done. I wondered what sort of reception a man would have

who in another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths about

the need of work into an audience of working men who had gathered solely

for the purpose of legitimate recreation. It was not as if he sugared

the medicine he gave them. His speech was nothing but demands for

discipline and work, coupled with prophecy of disaster in case work and

discipline failed. It was delivered like all his speeches, with a strong

Polish accent and a steady succession of mistakes in grammar.

As we walked home along the railway lines, half a dozen of the

railwaymen pressed around Radek, and almost fought with each other as to

who should walk next to him. And Radek entirely happy, delighted at his

success in giving them a bombshell instead of a bouquet, with one stout

fellow on one arm, another on the other, two or three more listening in

front and behind, continued rubbing it into them until we reached our

wagon, when, after a general handshaking, they disappeared into the

night.

THE TRADE UNIONS

Trade Unions in Russia are in a different position from that which is

common to all other Trades Unions in the world. In other countries the

Trades Unions are a force with whose opposition the Government must

reckon. In Russia the Government reckons not on the possible opposition

of the Trades Unions, but on their help for realizing its most difficult

measures, and for undermining and overwhelming any opposition which

those measures may encounter. The Trades Unions in Russia, instead of

being an organization outside the State protecting the interests of

a class against the governing class, have become a part of the State

organization. Since, during the present period of the revolution the

backbone of the State organization is the Communist Party, the

Trade Unions have come to be practically an extension of the party

organization. This, of course, would be indignantly denied both by

Trade Unionists and Communists. Still, in the preface to the All-Russian

Trades Union Reports for 1919, Glebov, one of the best-known Trade Union

leaders whom I remember in the spring of last year objecting to the use

of bourgeois specialists in their proper places, admits as much in the

following muddleheaded statement:--

"The base of the proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, which

in general directs all the political and economic work of the State,

leaning, first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary form

of dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions,

as organizations which economically unite the proletariat of factory and

workshop as the vanguard of the revolution, and as organizations of the

new socialistic construction of the State. Thus the Trade Unions must

be considered as a base of the Soviet State, as an organic form

complementary to the other forms of the Proletariat Dictatorship." These

two elaborate sentences constitute an admission of what I have just

said.

Trades Unionists of other countries must regard the fate of their

Russian colleagues with horror or with satisfaction, according to their

views of events in Russia taken as a whole. If they do not believe

that there has been a social revolution in Russia, they must regard

the present position of the Russian Trades Unions as the reward of a

complete defeat of Trade Unionism, in which a Capitalist government has

been able to lay violent hands on the organization which was protecting

the workers against it. If, on the other hand, they believe that there

has been a social revolution, so that the class organized in Trades

Unions is now, identical with the governing, class (of employers, etc.)

against which the unions once struggled, then they must regard the

present position as a natural and satisfactory result of victory.

When I was in Moscow in the spring of this year the Russian Trades

Unions received a telegram from the Trades Union Congress at Amsterdam,

a telegram which admirably illustrated the impossibility of separating

judgment of the present position of the Unions from judgments of the

Russian revolution as a whole. It encouraged the Unions "in their

struggle" and promised support in that struggle. The Communists

immediately asked "What struggle? Against the capitalist system in

Russia which does not exist? Or against capitalist systems outside

Russia?" They said that either the telegram meant this latter only, or

it meant that its writers did not believe that there had been a social

revolution in Russia. The point is arguable. If one believes that

revolution is an impossibility, one can reason from that belief and say

that in spite of certain upheavals in Russia the fundamental arrangement

of society is the same there as in other countries, so that the position

of the Trade Unions there must be the same, and, as in other countries

they must be still engaged in augmenting the dinners of their members at

the expense of the dinners of the capitalists which, in the long run

(if that were possible) they would abolish. If, on the other hand,

one believes that social revolution has actually occurred, to speak of

Trades Unions continuing the struggle in which they conquered something

like three years ago, is to urge them to a sterile fanaticism which has

been neatly described by Professor Santayana as a redoubling of your

effort when you have forgotten your aim.

It 's probably true that the "aim" of the Trades Unions was more clearly

defined in Russia than elsewhere. In England during the greater part of

their history the Trades Unions have not been in conscious opposition

to the State. In Russia this position was forced on the Trades Unions

almost before they had time to get to work. They were born, so to speak,

with red flags in their hands. They grew up under circumstances of

extreme difficulty and persecution. From 1905 on they were in decided

opposition to the existing system, and were revolutionary rather than

merely mitigatory organizations.

Before 1905 they were little more than associations for mutual help,

very weak, spending most of their energies in self-preservation from the

police, and hiding their character as class organizations by electing

more or less Liberal managers and employers as "honorary members." 1905,

however, settled their revolutionary character. In September of that

year there was a Conference at Moscow, where it was decided to call

an All-Russian Trades Union Congress. Reaction in Russia made this

impossible, and the most they could do was to have another small

Conference in February, 1906, which, however, defined their object as

that of creating a general Trade Union Movement organized on All-Russian

lines. The temper of the Trades Unions then, and the condition of the

country at that time, may be judged from the fact that although they

were merely working for the right to form Unions, the right to strike,

etc., they passed the following significant resolution: "Neither from

the present Government nor from the future State Duma can be expected

realization of freedom of coalition. This Conference considers the

legalization of the Trades Unions under present conditions absolutely

impossible." The Conference was right. For twelve years after that there

were no Trades Unions Conferences in Russia. Not until June, 1917, three

months after the March Revolution, was the third Trade Union Conference

able to meet. This Conference reaffirmed the revolutionary character of

the Russian Trades Unions.

At that time the dominant party in the Soviets was that of the

Mensheviks, who were opposed to the formation of a Soviet Government,

and were supporting the provisional Cabinet of Kerensky. The Trades

Unions were actually at that time more revolutionary than the Soviets.

This third Conference passed several resolutions, which show clearly

enough that the present position of the Unions has not been brought

about by any violence of the Communists from without, but was definitely

promised by tendencies inside the Unions at a time when the Communists

were probably the least authoritative party in Russia. This Conference

of June, 1917, resolved that the Trades Unions should not only "remain

militant class organizations... but... should support the activities of

the Soviets of soldiers and deputies." They thus clearly showed on which

side they stood in the struggle then proceeding. Nor was this all. They

also, though the Mensheviks were still the dominant party, resolved

on that system of internal organizations and grouping, which has

been actually realized under the Communists. I quote again from the

resolution of this Conference:

"The evolution of the economic struggle demands from the workers

such forms of professional organization as, basing themselves on

the connection between various groups of workers in the process of

production, should unite within a general organization, and under

general leadership, as large masses of workers as possible occupied

in enterprises of the same kind, or in similar professions. With this

object the workers should organize themselves professionally, not by

shops or trades, but by productions, so that all the workers of a given

enterprise should belong to one Union, even if they belong to different

professions and even different productions." That which was then no

more than a design is now an accurate description of Trades Union

organization in Russia. Further, much that at present surprises the

foreign inquirer was planned and considered desirable then, before the

Communists had won a majority either in the Unions or in the Soviet.

Thus this same third Conference resolved that "in the interests of

greater efficiency and success in the economic struggle, a professional

organization should be built on the principle of democratic centralism,

assuring to every member a share in the affairs of the organization and,

at the same time, obtaining unity in the leadership of the struggle."

Finally "Unity in the direction (leadership) of the economic struggle

demands unity in the exchequer of the Trades Unions."

The point that I wish to make in thus illustrating the pre-Communist

tendencies of the Russian Trades Unions is not simply that if their

present position is undesirable they have only themselves to thank for

it, but that in Russia the Trades Union movement before the October

Revolution was working in the direction of such a revolution, that the

events of October represented something like a Trade Union victory,

so that the present position of the Unions as part of the organization

defending that victory, as part of the system of government set up by

that revolution, is logical and was to be expected. I have illustrated

this from resolutions, because these give statements in words easily

comparable with what has come to pass. It would be equally easy to point

to deeds instead of words if we need more forcible though less accurate

illustrations.

Thus, at the time of the Moscow Congress the Soviets, then Mensheviks,

who were represented at the Congress (the object of the Congress was to

whip up support for the Coalition Government) were against strikes

of protest. The Trades Unions took a point of view nearer that of

the Bolsheviks, and the strikes in Moscow took place in spite of the

Soviets. After the Kornilov affair, when the Mensheviks were still

struggling for coalition with the bourgeois parties, the Trades Unions

quite definitely took the Bolshevik standpoint. At the so-called

Democratic Conference, intended as a sort of life belt for the sinking

Provisional Government, only eight of the Trades Union delegates voted

for a continuance of the coalition, whereas seventy three voted against.

This consciously revolutionary character throughout their much shorter

existence has distinguished Russian from, for example, English Trades

Unions. It has set their course for them.

In October, 1917, they got the revolution for which they had been asking

since March. Since then, one Congress after another has illustrated

the natural and inevitable development of Trades Unions inside a

revolutionary State which, like most if not all revolutionary States, is

attacked simultaneously by hostile armies from without and by economic

paralysis from within. The excited and lighthearted Trades Unionists

of three years ago, who believed that the mere decreeing of "workers'

control" would bring all difficulties automatically to an end, are now

unrecognizable. We have seen illusion after illusion scraped from them

by the pumice-stone of experience, while the appalling state of the

industries which they now largely control, and the ruin of the country

in which they attained that control, have forced them to alter their

immediate aims to meet immediate dangers, and have accelerated the

process of adaptation made inevitable by their victory.

The process of adaptation has had the natural result of producing new

internal cleavages. Change after change in their programme and theory

of the Russian Trades Unionists has been due to the pressure of life

itself, to the urgency of struggling against the worsening of conditions

already almost unbearable. It is perfectly natural that those Unions

which hold back from adaptation and resent the changes are precisely

those which, like that of the printers, are not intimately concerned in

any productive process, are consequently outside the central struggle,

and, while feeling the discomforts of change, do not feel its need.

The opposition inside the productive Trades Unions is of two kinds.

There is the opposition, which is of merely psychological interest, of

old Trades Union leaders who have always thought of themselves as in

opposition to the Government, and feel themselves like watches without

mainsprings in their new role of Government supporters. These are men

in whom a natural intellectual stiffness makes difficult the complete

change of front which was the logical result of the revolution for which

they had been working. But beside that there is a much more interesting

opposition based on political considerations. The Menshevik standpoint

is one of disbelief in the permanence of the revolution, or rather in

the permanence of the victory of the town workers. They point to the

divergence in interests between the town and country populations,

and are convinced that sooner or later the peasants will alter the

government to suit themselves, when, once more, it will be a government

against which the town workers will have to defend their interests. The

Mensheviks object to the identification of the Trades Unions with the

Government apparatus on the ground that when this change, which they

expect comes about, the Trade Union movement will be so far emasculated

as to be incapable of defending the town workers against the peasants

who will then be the ruling class. Thus they attack the present Trades

Union leaders for being directly influenced by the Government in fixing

the rate of wages, on the ground that this establishes a precedent from

which, when the change comes, it will be difficult to break away. The

Communists answer them by insisting that it is to everybody's interest

to pull Russia through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions were

for such academic reasons to insist on their complete independence

instead of in every possible way collaborating with the Government, they

would be not only increasing the difficulties of the revolution in

its economic crisis, but actually hastening that change which the

Mensheviks, though they regard it as inevitable, cannot be supposed

to desire. This Menshevik opposition is strongest in the Ukraine. Its

strength may be judged from the figures of the Congress in Moscow

this spring when, of 1,300 delegates, over 1,000 were Communists or

sympathizers with them; 63 were Mensheviks and 200 were non-party, the

bulk of whom, I fancy, on this point would agree with the Mensheviks.

But apart from opposition to the "stratification" of the Trades Unions,

there is a cleavage cutting across the Communist Party itself and

uniting in opinion, though not in voting, the Mensheviks and a section

of their Communist opponents. This cleavage is over the question of

"workers' control." Most of those who, before the revolution, looked

forward to the "workers' control", thought of it as meaning that the

actual workers in a given factory would themselves control that factory,

just as a board of directors controls a factory under the ordinary

capitalist system. The Communists, I think, even today admit the

ultimate desirability of this, but insist that the important question is

not who shall give the orders, but in whose interest the orders shall

be given. I have nowhere found this matter properly thrashed out, though

feeling upon it is extremely strong. Everybody whom I asked about it

began at once to address me as if I were a public meeting, so that I

found it extremely difficult to get from either side a statement not

free from electioneering bias. I think, however, that it may be fairly

said that all but a few lunatics have abandoned the ideas of 1917, which

resulted in the workmen in a factory deposing any technical expert or

manager whose orders were in the least irksome to them. These ideas

and the miseries and unfairness they caused, the stoppages of work, the

managers sewn up in sacks, ducked in ponds and trundled in wheelbarrows,

have taken their places as curiosities of history. The change in these

ideas has been gradual. The first step was the recognition that the

State as a whole was interested in the efficiency of each factory, and,

therefore, that the workmen of each factory had no right to arrange

things with no thought except for themselves. The Committee idea was

still strong, and the difficulty was got over by assuring that the

technical staff should be represented on the Committee, and that the

casting vote between workers and technical experts or managers should

belong to the central economic organ of the State. The next stage was

when the management of a workshop was given a so called "collegiate"

character, the workmen appointing representatives to share the

responsibility of the "bourgeois specialist." The bitter controversy now

going on concerns the seemingly inevitable transition to a later stage

in which, for all practical purposes, the bourgeois specialist will be

responsible solely to the State. Many Communists, including some of

the best known, while recognizing the need of greater efficiency if

the revolution is to survive at all, regard this step as definitely

retrograde and likely in the long run to make the revolution not worth

preserving. [*]

* Thus Rykov, President of the Supreme Council of Public

Economy: "There is a possibility of so constructing a State

that in it there will be a ruling caste consisting chiefly

of administrative engineers, technicians, etc.; that is, we

should get a form of State economy based on a small group of

a ruling caste whose privilege in this case would be the

management of the workers and peasants." That criticism of

individual control, from a communist, goes a good deal

further than most of the criticism from people avowedly in

opposition.] The enormous importance attached by everybody

to this question of individual or collegiate control, may

be judged from the fact that at every conference I attended,

and every discussion to which I listened, this point, which

might seem of minor importance, completely overshadowed the

question of industrial conscription which, at least inside

the Communist Party, seemed generally taken for granted. It

may be taken now as certain that the majority of the

Communists are in favor of individual control. They say that

the object of "workers' control" before the revolution was

to ensure that factories should be run in the interests of

workers as well of employers. In Russia now there are no

employers other than the State as a whole, which is

exclusively made up of employees. (I am stating now the view

of the majority at the last Trades Union Congress at which I

was present, April, 1920.) They say that "workers' control"

exists in a larger and more efficient manner than was

suggested by the old pre-revolutionary statements on that

question. Further, they say that if workers' control ought

to be identified with Trade Union control, the Trades Unions

are certainly supreme in all those matters with which they

have chiefly concerned themselves, since they dominate the

Commissariat of Labor, are very largely represented on the

Supreme Council of Public Economy, and fix the rates of pay

for their own members. [*]

* The wages of workmen are decided by the Trades Unions, who

draw up "tariffs" for the whole country, basing their

calculations on three criteria: (I) The price of food in the

open market in the district where a workman is employed,

(2)the price of food supplied by the State on the card

system, (3)the quality of the workman. This last is decided

by a special section of the Factory Committee, which in each

factory is an organ of the Trades Union.]

The enormous Communist majority, together with the fact that however

much they may quarrel with each other inside the party, the Communists

will go to almost any length to avoid breaking the party discipline,

means that at present the resolutions of Trades Union Congresses

will not be different from those of Communists Congresses on the same

subjects. Consequently, the questions which really agitate the members,

the actual cleavages inside that Communist majority, are comparatively

invisible at a Trades Union Congress. They are fought over with great

bitterness, but they are not fought over in the Hall of the Unions-once

the Club of the Nobility, with on its walls on Congress days the hammer

and spanner of the engineers, the pestle and trowel of the builders, and

so on-but in the Communist Congresses in the Kremlin and throughout

the country. And, in the problem with which in this book we are mainly

concerned, neither the regular business of the Unions nor their internal

squabbles affects the cardinal fact that in the present crisis the

Trades Unions are chiefly important as part of that organization of

human will with which the Communists are attempting to arrest the steady

progress of Russia's economic ruin. Putting it brutally, so as to offend

Trades Unionists and Communists alike, they are an important part of the

Communist system of internal propaganda, and their whole organization

acts as a gigantic megaphone through which the Communist Party makes

known its fears, its hopes and its decisions to the great masses of the

industrial workers.

THE PROPAGANDA TRAINS

When I crossed the Russian front in October, 1919, the first thing I

noticed in peasants' cottages, in the villages, in the little town where

I took the railway to Moscow, in every railway station along the line,

was the elaborate pictorial propaganda concerned with the war. There

were posters showing Denizen standing straddle over Russia's coal, while

the factory chimneys were smokeless and the engines idle in the yards,

with the simplest wording to show why it was necessary to beat Denizen

in order to get coal; there were posters illustrating the treatment

of the peasants by the Whites; posters against desertion, posters

illustrating the Russian struggle against the rest of the world, showing

a workman, a peasant, a sailor and a soldier fighting in self-defence

against an enormous Capitalistic Hydra. There were also-and this I took

as a sign of what might be-posters encouraging the sowing of corn, and

posters explaining in simple pictures improved methods of agriculture.

Our own recruiting propaganda during the war, good as that was, was

never developed to such a point of excellence, and knowing the general

slowness with which the Russian centre reacts on its periphery, I

was amazed not only at the actual posters, but at their efficient

distribution thus far from Moscow.

I have had an opportunity of seeing two of the propaganda trains, the

object of which is to reduce the size of Russia politically by bringing

Moscow to the front and to the out of the way districts, and so to

lessen the difficulty of obtaining that general unity of purpose which

it is the object of propaganda to produce. The fact that there is some

hope that in the near future the whole of this apparatus may be turned

over to the propaganda of industry makes it perhaps worth while to

describe these trains in detail.

Russia, for purposes of this internal propaganda, is divided into

five sections, and each section has its own train, prepared for the

particular political needs of the section it serves, bearing its own

name, carrying its regular crew-a propaganda unit, as corporate as the

crew of a ship. The five trains at present in existence are the "Lenin,"

the "Sverdlov," the "October Revolution," the "Red East," which is now

in Turkestan, and the "Red Cossack," which, ready to start for Rostov

and the Don, was standing, in the sidings at the Kursk station, together

with the "Lenin," returned for refitting and painting.

Burov, the organizer of these trains, a ruddy, enthusiastic little

man in patched leather coat and breeches, took a party of foreigners-a

Swede, a Norwegian, two Czechs, a German and myself to visit his trains,

together with Radek, in the hope that Radek would induce Lenin to visit

them, in which case Lenin would be kinematographed for the delight of

the villagers, and possibly the Central Committee would, if Lenin were

interested, lend them more lively support.

We walked along the "Lenin" first, at Burov's special request. Burov,

it seems, has only recently escaped from what he considered a bitter

affliction due to the Department of Proletarian Culture, who, in the

beginning, for the decoration of his trains, had delivered him bound

hand and foot to a number of Futurists. For that reason he wanted us to

see the "Lenin" first, in order that we might compare it with the result

of his emancipation, the "Red Cossack," painted when the artists "had

been brought under proper control." The "Lenin" had been painted a year

and a half ago, when, as fading hoarding in the streets of Moscow still

testify, revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement. Every

carriage is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensible

pictures in the brightest colors, and the proletariat was called upon to

enjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most part

failed to understand. Its pictures are "art for art's sake," and cannot

have done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants and

the workmen of the country towns who had the luck to see them. The "Red

Cossack" is quite different. As Burov put it with deep satisfaction,

"At first we were in the artists' hands, and now the artists are in

our hands," a sentence suggesting the most horrible possibilities of

official art under socialism, although, of course, bad art flourishes

pretty well even under other systems.

I inquired exactly how Burov and his friends kept the artists in the

right way, and received the fullest explanation. The political section

of the organization works out the main idea and aim for each picture,

which covers the whole side of a wagon. This idea is then submitted to a

"collective" of artists, who are jointly responsible for its realization

in paint. The artists compete with each other for a prize which is

awarded for the best design, the judges being the artists themselves. It

is the art of the poster, art with a purpose of the most definite kind.

The result is sometimes amusing, interesting, startling, but, whatever

else it does, hammers home a plain idea.

Thus the picture on the side of one wagon is divided into two sections.

On the left is a representation of the peasants and workmen of the

Soviet Republic. Under it are the words, "Let us not find ourselves

again..." and then, in gigantic lettering under the right-hand section

of the picture, "... in the HEAVEN OF THE WHITES." This heaven is shown

by an epauletted officer hitting a soldier in the face, as was done in

the Tsar's army and in at least one army of the counter revolutionaries,

and workmen tied to stakes, as was done by the Whites in certain towns

in the south. Then another wagon illustrating the methods of Tsardom,

with a State vodka shop selling its wares to wretched folk, who, when

drunk on the State vodka, are flogged by the State police. Then there

is a wagon showing the different Cossacks-of the Don, Terek, Kuban,

Ural-riding in pairs. The Cossack infantry is represented on the other

side of this wagon. On another wagon is a very jolly picture of Stenka

Razin in his boat with little old-fashioned brass cannon, rowing up the

river. Underneath is written the words: "I attack only the rich, with

the poor I divide everything." On one side are the poor folk running

from their huts to join him, on the other the rich folk firing at him

from their castle. One wagon is treated purely decoratively, with a

broad effective characteristically South Russian design, framing a

huge inscription to the effect that the Cossacks need not fear that

the Soviet Republic will interfere with their religion, since under its

regime every man is to be free to believe exactly what he likes. Then

there is an entertaining wagon, showing Kolchak sitting inside a fence

in Siberia with a Red soldier on guard, Judenitch sitting in a little

circle with a sign-post to show it is Esthonia, and Denikin running at

full speed to the asylum indicated by another sign-post on which is the

crescent of the Turkish Empire. Another lively picture shows the young

Cossack girls learning to read, with a most realistic old Cossack woman

telling them they had better not. But there is no point in describing

every wagon. There are sixteen wagons in the "Red Cossack," and every

one is painted all over on both sides.

The internal arrangements of the train are a sufficient proof that

Russians are capable of organization if they set their minds to it.

We went through it, wagon by wagon. One wagon contains a wireless

telegraphy station capable of receiving news from such distant stations

as those of Carnarvon or Lyons. Another is fitted up as a newspaper

office, with a mechanical press capable of printing an edition of

fifteen thousand daily, so that the district served by the train,

however out of the way, gets its news simultaneously with Moscow, many

days sometimes before the belated Izvestia or Pravda finds its way to

them. And with its latest news it gets its latest propaganda, and in

order to get the one it cannot help getting the other. Next door to that

there is a kinematograph wagon, with benches to seat about one hundred

and fifty persons. But indoor performances are only given to children,

who must come during the daytime, or in summer when the evenings are too

light to permit an open air performance. In the ordinary way, at night,

a great screen is fixed up in the open. There is a special hole cut in

the side of the wagon, and through this the kinematograph throws its

picture on the great screen outside, so that several thousands can see

it at once. The enthusiastic Burov insisted on working through a couple

of films for us, showing the Communists boy scouts in their country

camps, children's meetings in Petrograd, and the big demonstrations

of last year in honor of the Third International. He was extremely

disappointed that Radek, being in a hurry, refused to wait for a

performance of "The Father and his Son," a drama which, he assured us

with tears in his eyes, was so thrilling that we should not regret being

late for our appointments if we stayed to witness it. Another wagon is

fitted up as an electric power-station, lighting the train, working the

kinematograph and the printing machine, etc. Then there is a clean little

kitchen and dining-room, where, before being kinematographed-a horrible

experience when one is first quite seriously begged (of course by Burov)

to assume an expression of intelligent interest--we had soup, a plate of

meat and cabbage, and tea. Then there is a wagon bookshop, where, while

customers buy books, a gramophone sings the revolutionary songs of

Demian Bledny, or speaks with the eloquence of Trotsky or the logic of

Lenin. Other wagons are the living-rooms of the personnel, divided up

according to their duties-political, military, instructional, and so

forth. For the train has not merely an agitational purpose. It carries

with it a staff to give advice to local authorities, to explain what

has not been understood, and so in every way to bring the ideas of the

Centre quickly to the backwoods of the Republic. It works also in the

opposite direction, helping to make the voice of the backwoods heard

at Moscow. This is illustrated by a painted pillar-box on one of the

wagons, with a slot for letters, labelled, "For Complaints of Every

Kind." Anybody anywhere who has grievance, thinks he is being unfairly

treated, or has a suggestion to make, can speak with the Centre in

this way. When the train is on a voyage telegrams announce its

arrival beforehand, so that the local Soviets can make full use of

its advantages, arranging meetings, kinematograph shows, lectures.

It arrives, this amazing picture train, and proceeds to publish and

distribute its newspapers, sell its books (the bookshop, they tell me,

is literally stormed at every stopping place), send books and posters

for forty versts on either side of the line with the motor-cars which it

carries with it, and enliven the population with its kinematograph.

I doubt if a more effective instrument of propaganda has ever been

devised. And in considering the question whether or no the Russians will

be able after organizing their military defence to tackle with similar

comparative success the much more difficult problem of industrial

rebirth, the existence of such instruments, the use of such propaganda

is a factor not to be neglected. In the spring of this year, when the

civil war seemed to be ending, when there was a general belief that

the Poles would accept the peace that Russia offered (they ignored this

offer, advanced, took Kiev, were driven back to Warsaw, advanced again,

and finally agreed to terms which they could have had in March without

bloodshed any kind), two of these propaganda trains were already being

repainted with a new purpose. It was hoped that in the near future all

five trains would be explaining not the need to fight but the need to

work. Undoubtedly, at the first possible moment, the whole machinery of

agitation, of posters, of broadsheets and of trains, will be turned over

to the task of explaining the Government's plans for reconstruction,

and the need for extraordinary concentration, now on transport, now on

something else, that these plans involve.

SATURDAYINGS

So much for the organization, with its Communist Party, its system of

meetings and counter-meetings, its adapted Trades Unions, its infinitely

various propaganda, which is doing its best to make headway against

ruin. I want now to describe however briefly, the methods it has adopted

in tackling the worst of all Russia's problems-the non-productivity and

absolute shortage of labor.

I find a sort of analogy between these methods and those which we used

in England in tackling the similar cumulative problem of finding men for

war. Just as we did not proceed at once to conscription, but began by

a great propaganda of voluntary effort, so the Communists, faced with

a need at least equally vital, did not turn at once to industrial

conscription. It was understood from the beginning that the Communists

themselves were to set an example of hard work, and I dare say a

considerable proportion of them did so. Every factory had its little

Communist Committee, which was supposed to leaven the factory with

enthusiasm, just as similar groups of Communists drafted into the armies

in moments of extreme danger did, on more than one occasion, as the

non-Communist Commander-in-Chief admits, turn a rout into a stand and

snatch victory from what looked perilously like defeat. But this was

not enough, arrears of work accumulated, enthusiasm waned, productivity

decreased, and some new move was obviously necessary. This first move in

the direction of industrial conscription, although no one perceived its

tendency at the time, was the inauguration of what have become known as

"Saturdayings".

Early in 1919 the Central Committee of the Communist Party put out a

circular letter, calling upon the Communists "to work revolutionally,"

to emulate in the rear the heroism of their brothers on the front,

pointing out that nothing but the most determined efforts and an

increase in the productivity of labor would enable Russia to win through

her difficulties of transport, etc. Kolchak, to quote from English

newspapers, was it "sweeping on to Moscow," and the situation was pretty

threatening. As a direct result of this letter, on May 7th, a meeting

of Communists in the sub-district of the Moscow-Kazan railway passed

a resolution that, in view of the imminent danger to the Republic,

Communists and their sympathizers should give up an hour a day of their

leisure, and, lumping these hours together, do every Saturday six hours

of manual labor; and, further, that these Communist "Saturdayings"

should be continued "until complete victory over Kolchak should be

assured." That decision of a local committee was the actual beginning of

a movement which spread all over Russia, and though the complete victory

over Kolchak was long ago obtained, is likely to continue so long as

Soviet Russia is threatened by any one else.

The decision was put into effect on May 10th, when the first Communist

"Saturdaying" in Russia took place on the Moscow-Kazan railway. The

Commissar of the railway, Communist clerks from the offices, and every

one else who wished to help, marched to work, 182 in all, and put in

1,012 hours of manual labor, in which they finished the repairs of four

locomotives and sixteen wagons and loaded and unloaded 9,300 poods of

engine and wagon parts and material. It was found that the productivity

of labor in loading and unloading shown on this occasion was about 270

per cent. of the normal, and a similar superiority of effort was shown

in the other kinds of work. This example was immediately copied on other

railways. The Alexandrovsk railway had its first "Saturdaying" on May

17th. Ninety-eight persons worked for five hours, and here also did

two or three times as much is the usual amount of work done in the

same number of working hours under ordinary circumstances. One of the

workmen, in giving an account of the performance, wrote: "The Comrades

explain this by saying that in ordinary times the work was dull and they

were sick of it, whereas this occasion they were working willingly and

with excitement. But now it will be shameful in ordinary hours to do

less than in the Communist 'Saturdaying.'" The hope implied in this last

sentence has not been realized.

In Pravda of June 7th there is an article describing one of these early

"Saturdayings," which gives a clear picture of the infectious character

of the proceedings, telling how people who came out of curiosity to

look on found themselves joining in the work, and how a soldier with an

accordion after staring for a long time open-mouthed at these

lunatics working on a Saturday afternoon put up a tune for them on his

instrument, and, delighted by their delight, played on while the workers

all sang together.

The idea of the "Saturdayings" spread quickly from railways to

factories, and by the middle of the summer reports of similar efforts

were coming from all over Russia. Then Lenin became interested, seeing

in these "Saturdayings" not only a special effort in the face of common

danger, but an actual beginning of Communism and a sign that Socialism

could bring about a greater productivity of labor than could be obtained

under Capitalism. He wrote: "This is a work of great difficulty and

requiring much time, but it has begun, and that is the main thing. If

in hungry Moscow in the summer of 1919 hungry workmen who have lived

through the difficult four years of the Imperialistic war, and then the

year and a half of the still more difficult civil war, have been able to

begin this great work, what will not be its further development when we

conquer in the civil war and win peace." He sees in it a promise of

work being done not for the sake of individual gain, but because of a

recognition that such work is necessary for the general good, and in all

he wrote and spoke about it he emphasized the fact that people worked

better and harder when working thus than under any of the conditions

(piece-work, premiums for good work, etc.) imposed by the revolution

in its desperate attempts to raise the productivity of labor. For this

reason alone, he wrote, the first "Saturdaying" on the Moscow-Kazan

railway was an event of historical significance, and not for Russia

alone.

Whether Lenin was right or wrong in so thinking, "Saturdayings" became a

regular institution, like Dorcas meetings in Victorian England, like the

thousands of collective working parties instituted in England during the

war with Germany. It remains to be seen how long they will continue,

and if they will survive peace when that comes. At present the most

interesting point about them is the large proportion of non-Communists

who take an enthusiastic part in them. In many cases not more than ten

per cent. of Communists are concerned, though they take the initiative in

organizing the parties and in finding the work to be done. The movement

spread like fire in dry grass, like the craze for roller-skating swept

over England some years ago, and efforts were made to control it, so

that the fullest use might be made of it. In Moscow it was found

worth while to set up a special Bureau for "Saturdayings." Hospitals,

railways, factories, or any other concerns working for the public good,

notify this bureau that they need the sort of work a "Saturdaying"

provides. The bureau informs the local Communists where their services

are required, and thus there is a minimum of wasted energy. The local

Communists arrange the "Saturdayings," and any one else joins in who

wants. These "Saturdayings" are a hardship to none because they are

voluntary, except for members of the Communist Party, who are considered

to have broken the party discipline if they refrain. But they can avoid

the "Saturdayings" if they wish to by leaving the party. Indeed, Lenin

points, out that the "Saturdayings" are likely to assist in clearing out

of the party those elements which joined it with the hope of personal

gain. He points out that the privileges of a Communists now consist in

doing more work than other people in the rear, and, on the front, in

having the certainty of being killed when other folk are merely taken

prisoners.

The following are a few examples of the sort of work done in the

"Saturdayings." Briansk hospitals were improperly heated because of

lack of the local transport necessary to bring them wood. The Communists

organized a "Saturdaying," in which 900 persons took part, including

military specialists (officers of the old army serving in the new),

soldiers, a chief of staff, workmen and women. Having no horses, they

harnessed themselves to sledges in groups of ten, and brought in the

wood required. At Nijni 800 persons spent their Saturday afternoon in

unloading barges. In the Basman district of Moscow there was a gigantic

"Saturdaying" and "Sundaying" in which 2,000 persons (in this case all

but a little over 500 being Communists) worked in the heavy artillery

shops, shifting materials, cleaning tramlines for bringing in fuel, etc.

Then there was a "Saturdaying" the main object of which was a

general autumn cleaning of the hospitals for the wounded. One form of

"Saturdaying" for women is going to the hospitals, talking with the

wounded and writing letters for them, mending their clothes, washing

sheets, etc. The majority of "Saturdayings" at present are concerned

with transport work and with getting and shifting wood, because at

the moment these are the chief difficulties. I have talked to many

"Saturdayers," Communist and non-Communist, and all alike spoke of these

Saturday afternoons of as kind of picnic. On the other hand, I have met

Communists who were accustomed to use every kind off ingenuity to find

excuses not to take part in them and yet to preserve the good opinion of

their local committee.

But even if the whole of the Communist Party did actually indulge in

a working picnic once a week, it would not suffice to meet Russia's

tremendous needs. And, as I pointed out in the chapter specially devoted

to the shortage of labor, the most serious need at present is to keep

skilled workers at their jobs instead of letting them drift away into

non-productive labor. No amount of Saturday picnics could do that, and

it was obvious long ago that some other means, would have to be devised.

INDUSTRIAL CONSCRIPTION

The general principle of industrial conscription recognized by the

Russian Constitution, section ii, chapter v, paragraph 18, which reads:

"The Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic recognizes that work is

an obligation on every citizen of the Republic," and proclaims, "He who

does not work shall not eat." It is, however, one thing to proclaim such

a principle and quite another to put it into action.

On December 17, 1919, the moment it became clear that there was a real

possibility that the civil war was drawing to an end, Trotsky allowed

the Pravda to print a memorandum of his, consisting of "theses" or

reasoned notes about industrial conscription and the militia system.

He points out that a Socialist State demands a general plan for the

utilization of all the resources of a country, including its human

energy. At the same time, "in the present economic chaos in which are

mingled the broken fragments of the past and the beginnings of the

future," a sudden jump to a complete centralized economy of the country

as a whole is impossible. Local initiative, local effort must not

be sacrificed for the sake of a plan. At the same time industrial

conscription is necessary for complete socialization. It cannot be

regardless of individuality like military conscription. He suggests a

subdivision of the State into territorial productive districts which

should coincide with the territorial districts of the militia system

which shall replace the regular army. Registration of labor necessary.

Necessary also to coordinate military and industrial registration. At

demobilization the cadres of regiments, divisions, etc., should form

the fundamental cadres of the militia. Instruction to this end should

be included in the courses for workers and peasants who are training to

become officers in every district. Transition to the militia system must

be carefully and gradually accomplished so as not for a moment to leave

the Republic defenseless. While not losing sight of these ultimate aims,

it is necessary to decide on immediate needs and to ascertain exactly

what amount of labor is necessary for their limited realization. He

suggests the registration of skilled labor in the army. He suggests that

a Commission under general direction of the Council of Public Economy

should work out a preliminary plan and then hand it over to the War

Department, so that means should be worked out for using the military

apparatus for this new industrial purpose.

Trotsky's twenty-four theses or notes must have been written in odd

moments, now here now there, on the way from one front to another. They

do not form a connected whole. Contradictions jostle each other, and

it is quite clear that Trotsky himself had no very definite plan in his

head. But his notes annoyed and stimulated so many other people that

they did perhaps precisely the work they were intended to do. Pravada

printed them with a note from the editor inviting discussion. The

Ekonomitcheskaya Jizn printed letter after letter from workmen,

officials and others, attacking, approving and bringing new suggestions.

Larin, Semashko, Pyatakov, Bucharin all took a hand in the discussion.

Larin saw in the proposals the beginning of the end of the revolution,

being convinced that authority would pass from the democracy of the

workers into the hands of the specialists. Rykov fell upon them with

sturdy blows on behalf of the Trades Unions. All, however, agreed on the

one point--that something of the sort was necessary. On December 27th

a Commission for studying the question of industrial conscription was

formed under the presidency of Trotsky. This Commission included the

People's Commissars, or Ministers, of Labor, Ways of Communication,

Supply, Agriculture, War, and the Presidents of the Central Council of

the Trades Unions and of the Supreme Council of Public Economy. They

compiled a list of the principal questions before them, and invited

anybody interested to bring them suggestions and material for

discussion.

But the discussion was not limited to the newspapers or to this

Commission. The question was discussed in Soviets and Conferences of

every kind all over the country. Thus, on January 1st an All-Russian

Conference of local "departments for the registration and distribution

of labor," after prolonged argument, contributed their views. They

pointed out (1) the need of bringing to work numbers of persons who

instead of doing the skilled labor for which they were qualified were

engaged in petty profiteering, etc.; (2) that there evaporation of

skilled labor into unproductive speculation could at least be checked

by the introduction of labor books, which would give some sort of

registration of each citizen's work; (3) that workmen can be brought

back from the villages only for enterprises which are supplied with

provisions or are situated in districts where there is plenty. ("The

opinion that, in the absence of these preliminary conditions, it will be

possible to draw workmen from the villages by measures of compulsion or

mobilization is profoundly mistaken.") (4) that there should be a census

of labor and that the Trades Unions should be invited to protect the

interests of the conscripted. Finally, this Conference approved the idea

of using the already existing military organization for carrying out a

labor census of the Red Army, and for the turning over to labor of parts

of the army during demobilization, but opposed the idea of giving the

military organization the work of labor registration and industrial

conscription in general.

On January 22, 1920, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, after

prolonged discussion of Trotsky's rough memorandum, finally adopted

and published a new edition of the "theses," expanded, altered, almost

unrecognizable, a reasoned body of theory entirely different from

the bundle of arrows loosed at a venture by Trotsky. They definitely

accepted the principle of industrial conscription, pointing out the

immediate reasons for it in the fact that Russia cannot look for much

help from without and must somehow or other help herself.

Long before the All-Russian Congress of the Communist Party approved the

theses of the Committee, one form of industrial conscription was already

being tested at work. Very early in January, when the discussion on the

subject was at its height, the Soviet of the Third Army addressed itself

to the Council of Defense of the Republic with an invitation to make use

of this army (which at least for the moment had finished its military

task) and to experiment with it as a labor army. The Council of Defense

agreed. Representatives of the Commissariats of Supply, Agriculture,

Ways and Communications, Labor and the Supreme Council of Public Economy

were sent to assist the Army Soviet. The army was proudly re-named "The

First Revolutionary Army of Labor," and began to issue communiques

"from the Labor front," precisely like the communiques of an army in the

field. I translate as a curiosity the first communique issued by a Labor

Army's Soviet:

"Wood prepared in the districts of Ishim, Karatulskaya, Omutinskaya,

Zavodoutovskaya, Yalutorovska, Iushaly, Kamuishlovo, Turinsk, Altynai,

Oshtchenkovo, Shadrinsk, 10,180 cubic sazhins. Working days, 52,651.

Taken to the railway stations, 5,334 cubic sazhins. Working days on

transport, 22,840. One hundred carpenters detailed for the Kizelovsk

mines. One hundred carpenters detailed for the bridge at Ufa. One

engineer specialist detailed to the Government Council of Public Economy

for repairing the mills of Chelyabinsk Government. One instructor

accountant detailed for auditing the accounts of the economic

organizations of Kamuishlov. Repair of locomotives proceeding in the

works at Ekaterinburg. January 20, 1920, midnight."

The Labor Army's Soviet received a report on the state of the district

covered by the army with regard to supply and needed work. By the end of

January it had already carried out a labor census of the army, and found

that it included over 50,000 laborers, of whom a considerable number

were skilled. It decided on a general plan of work in reestablishing

industry in the Urals, which suffered severely during the Kolchak regime

and the ebb and flow of the civil war, and was considering a suggestion

of one of its members that if the scheme worked well the army should be

increased to 300,000 men by way of mobilization.

On January 23rd the Council of Defense of the Republic, encouraged

to proceed further, decided to make use of the Reserve Army for the

improvement of railway transport on the Moscow-Kazan railway, one of

the chief arteries between eastern food districts and Moscow. The main

object is to be the reestablishment of through traffic between Moscow

and Ekaterinburg and the repair of the Kazan-Ekaterinburg line, which

particularly suffered during the war. An attempt was to be made to

rebuild the bridge over the Kama River before the ice melts. The

Commander of the Reserve Army was appointed Commissar of the eastern

part of the Moscow-Kazan railway, retaining his position as Commander

of the Army. With a view of coordination between the Army Soviet and the

railway authorities, a member of the Soviet was also appointed Commissar

of the railway. On January 25th it was announced that a similar

experiment was being made in the Ukraine. A month before the ice broke

the first train actually crossed the Kama River by the rebuilt bridge.

By April of this year the organization of industrial conscription had

gone far beyond the original labor armies. A decree of February 5th had

created a Chief Labor Committee, consisting of five members, Serebryakov

and Danilov, from the Commissariat of War; Vasiliev, from the

Commissariat of the Interior; Anikst, from the Commissariat of Labor;

Dzerzhinsky, from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Dzerzhinsky was

President, and his appointment was possibly made in the hope that the

reputation he had won as President of the Extraordinary Committee for

Fighting Counter-Revolution would frighten people into taking this

Committee seriously. Throughout the country in each government or

province similar committees, called "Troikas," were created, each of

three members, one from the Commissariat of War, one from the Department

of Labor, one from the Department of Management, in each case from

the local Commissariats and Departments attached to the local Soviet.

Representatives of the Central Statistical Office and its local organs

had a right to be present at the meeting of these committees of three,

or "Troikas," but had not the right to vote. An organization or a

factory requiring labor, was to apply to the Labor Department of the

local Soviet. This Department was supposed to do its best to satisfy

demands upon it by voluntary methods first. If these proved insufficient

they were to apply to the local "Troika," or Labor Conscription

Committee. If this found that its resources also were insufficient, it

was to refer back the request to the Labor Department of the Soviet,

which was then to apply to its corresponding Department in the

Government Soviet, which again, first voluntarily and then through the

Government Committee of Labor Conscription, was to try to satisfy the

demands. I fancy the object of this arrangement was to prevent local

"Troikas" from referring to Government "Troikas," and so directly to

Dzerzhinsky's Central Committee. If they had been able to do this there

would obviously have been danger lest a new network of independent and

powerful organizations should be formed. Experience with the overgrown

and insuppressible Committees for Fighting Counter-Revolution had taught

people how serious such a development might be.

Such was the main outline of the scheme for conscripting labor. A

similar scheme was prepared for superintending and safeguarding labor

when conscripted. In every factory of over 1,000 workmen, clerks, etc.,

there was formed a Commission (to distinguish it from the Committee) of

Industrial Conscription. Smaller factories shared such Commissions

or were joined for the purpose to larger factories near by. These

Commissions were to be under the direct control of a Factory Committee,

thereby preventing squabbles between conscripted and non-conscripted

labor. They were to be elected for six months, but their members could

be withdrawn and replaced by the Factory Committee with the approval of

the local "Troika." These Commissions, like the "Troikas," consisted

of three members: (1) from the management of the factory, (2) from the

Factory Committee, (3) from the Executive Committee of the workers. (It

was suggested in the directions that one of these should be from the

group which "has been organizing 'Saturdayings,' that is to say that he

or she should be a Communist.) The payment of conscripted workers was

to be by production, with prizes for specially good work. Specially bad

work was also foreseen in the detailed scheme of possible punishments.

Offenders were to be brought before the "People's Court" (equivalent

to the ordinary Civil Court), or, in the case of repeated or very bad

offenses, were to be brought before the far more dreaded Revolutionary

Tribunals. Six categories of possible offenses were placed upon the new

code:

(1)Avoiding registration, absenteeism, or desertion.

(2)The preparation of false documents or the use of such.

(3)Officials giving false information to facilitate these crimes.

(4)Purposeful damage of instruments or material.

(5)Uneconomical or careless work.

(6)(Probably the most serious of all: Instigation to any of

these actions.

The "Troikas" have the right to deal administratively with the less

important crimes by deprival of freedom for not more than two weeks.

No one can be brought to trial except by the Committee for Industrial

Conscription on the initiative of the responsible director of work, and

with the approval either of the local labor inspection authorities or

with that of the local Executive Committee.

No one with the slightest knowledge of Russia will suppose for a moment

that this elaborate mechanism sprang suddenly into existence when

the decree was signed. On the contrary, all stages of industrial

conscription exist simultaneously even today, and it would be possible

by going from one part of Russia to another to collect a series of

specimens of industrial conscription at every stage of evolution, just

as one can collect all stages of man from a baboon to a company director

or a Communist. Some of the more primitive kinds of conscription were

not among the least successful. For example, at the time (in the spring

of the year) when the Russians still hoped that the Poles would be

content with the huge area of non-Polish territory they had already

seized, the army on the western front was without any elaborate system

of decrees being turned into a labor army. The work done was at first

ordinary country work, mainly woodcutting. They tried to collaborate

with the local "Troikas," sending help when these Committees asked

for it. This, however, proved unsatisfactory, so, disregarding the

"Troikas," they organized things for themselves in the whole area

immediately behind the front. They divided up the forests into definite

districts, and they worked these with soldiers and with deserters.

Gradually their work developed, and they built themselves narrow-gauge

railways for the transport of the wood. Then they needed wagons and

locomotives, and of course immediately found themselves at loggerheads

with the railway authorities. Finally, they struck a bargain with

the railwaymen, and were allowed to take broken-down wagons which the

railway people were not in a position to mend. Using such skilled labor

as they had, they mended such wagons as were given them, and later made

a practice of going to the railway yards and in inspecting "sick" wagons

for themselves, taking out any that they thought had a chance even

of temporary convalescence. Incidentally they caused great scandal

by finding in the Smolensk sidings among the locomotives and wagons

supposed to be sick six good locomotives and seventy perfectly healthy

wagons. Then they began to improve the feeding of their army by sending

the wood they had cut, in the trains they had mended, to people who

wanted wood and could give them provisions. One such train went to

Turkestan and back from the army near Smolensk. Their work continually

increased, and since they had to remember that they were an army and

not merely a sort of nomadic factory, they began themselves to mobilize,

exclusively for purposes of work, sections of the civil population.

I asked Unshlicht, who had much to do with this organization, if the

peasants came willingly. He said, "Not very," but added that they did

not mind when they found that they got well fed and were given packets

of salt as prizes for good work. "The peasants," he said, "do not

grumble against the Government when it shows the sort of common

sense that they themselves can understand. We found that when we said

definitely how many carts and men a village must provide, and used them

without delay for a definite purpose, they were perfectly satisfied and

considered it right and proper. In every case, however, when they saw

people being mobilized and sent thither without obvious purpose or

result, they became hostile at once." I asked Unshlicht how it was that

their army still contained skilled workmen when one of the objects of

industrial conscription was to get the skilled workmen back into the

factories. He said: "We have an accurate census of the army, and when we

get asked for skilled workmen for such and such a factory, they go there

knowing that they still belong to the army."

That, of course, is the army point of view, and indicates one of the

main squabbles which industrial conscription has produced. Trotsky would

like the various armies to turn into units of a territorial militia, and

at the same time to be an important part of the labor organization

of each district. His opponents do not regard the labor armies as a

permanent manifestation, and many have gone so far as to say that

the productivity of labor in one of these armies is lower than among

ordinary workmen. Both sides produce figures on this point, and Trotsky

goes so far as to say that if his opponents are right, then not only

are labor armies damned, but also the whole principle of industrial

conscription. "If compulsory labor-independently of social condition-is

unproductive, that is a condemnation not of the labor armies, but of

industrial conscription in general, and with it of the whole Soviet

system, the further development of which is unthinkable except on a

basis of universal industrial conscription."

But, of course, the question of the permanence of the labor armies is

not so important as the question of getting the skilled workers back

to the factories. The comparative success or failure of soldiers or

mobilized peasants in cutting wood is quite irrelevant to this recovery

of the vanished workmen. And that recovery will take time, and will be

entirely useless unless it is possible to feed these workers when they

have been collected. There have already been several attempts, not

wholly successful, to collect the straying workers of particular

industries. Thus, after the freeing of the oil-wells from the Whites,

there was a general mobilization of naphtha workers. Many of these had

bolted on or after the arrival of Krasnov or Denikin and gone far into

Central Russia, settling where they could. So months passed before the

Red Army definitely pushed the area of civil war beyond the oil-wells,

that many of these refugees had taken new root and were unwilling to

return. I believe, that in spite of the mobilization, the oil-wells

are still short of men. In the coal districts also, which have passed

through similar experiences, the proportion of skilled to unskilled

labor is very much smaller than it was before the war. There have also

been two mobilizations of railway workers, and these, I think, may be

partly responsible for the undoubted improvement noticeable during

the year, although this is partly at least due to other things beside

conscription. In the first place Trotsky carried with him into the

Commissariat of Transport the same ferocious energy that he has shown in

the Commissariat of War, together with the prestige that he had gained

there. Further, he was well able in the councils of the Republic to

defend the needs of his particular Commissariat against those of all

others. He was, for example able to persuade the Communist Party to

treat the transport crisis precisely as they had treated each crisis

on the front-that is to say, to mobilize great numbers of professed

Communists to meet it, giving them in this case the especial task of

getting engines mended and, somehow or other, of keeping trains on the

move.

But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the labor armies,

nor the improvement in transport, are any final proof of the success of

industrial conscription. Industrial conscription in the proper sense

of the words is impossible until a Government knows what it has to

conscript. A beginning was made early this year by the introduction of

labor books, showing what work people were doing and where, and serving

as a kind of industrial passports. But in April this year these had not

yet become general in Moscow although the less unwieldy population of

Petrograd was already supplied with them. It will be long even if it is

possible at all, before any considerable proportion of the people not

living in these two cities are registered in this way. A more useful

step was taken at the end of August, in a general census throughout

Russia. There has been no Russian census since 1897. There was to have

been another about the time the war began. It was postponed for obvious

reasons. If the Communists carry through the census with even moderate

success (they will of course have to meet every kind of evasion), they

will at least get some of the information without which industrial

conscription on a national scale must be little more than a farce.

The census should show them where the skilled workers are. Industrial

conscription should enable them to collect them and put them at their

own skilled work. Then if, besides transplanting them, they are able to

feed them, it will be possible to judge of the success or failure of a

scheme which in most countries would bring a Government toppling to the

ground.

"In most countries"; yes, but then the economic crisis has gone

further in Russia than in most countries. There is talk of introducing

industrial conscription (one year's service) in Germany, where things

have not gone nearly so far. And perhaps industrial conscription, like

Communism itself, becomes a thing of desperate hope only in a country

actually face to face with ruin. I remember saying to Trotsky, when

talking of possible opposition, that I, as an Englishman, with the

tendencies to practical anarchism belonging to my race, should certainly

object most strongly if I were mobilized and set to work in a particular

factory, and might even want to work in some other factory just for the

sake of not doing what I was forced to do. Trotsky replied: "You would

now. But you would not if you had been through a revolution, and seen

your country in such a state that only the united, concentrated effort

of everybody could possibly reestablish it. That is the position here.

Everybody knows the position and that there is no other way."

WHAT THE COMMUNISTS ARE TRYING TO DO IN RUSSIA

We come now to the Communist plans for reconstruction. We have seen, in

the first two chapters, something of the appalling paralysis which is

the most striking factor in the economic problem to-day. We have seen

how Russia is suffering from a lack of things and from a lack of labor,

how these two shortages react on each other, and how nothing but a vast

improvement in transport can again set in motion what was one of the

great food-producing machines of the world. We have also seen something

of the political organization which, with far wider ambitions before

it, is at present struggling to prevent temporary paralysis from turning

into permanent atrophy. We have seen that it consists of a political

party so far dominant that the Trades Unions and all that is articulate

in the country may be considered as part of a machinery of propaganda,

for getting those things done which that political party considers

should be done. In a country fighting, literally, for its life, no man

can call his soul his own, and we have seen how this fact-a fact that

has become obvious again and again in the history of the world, whenever

a nation has had its back to the wall-is expressed in Russia in terms

of industrial conscription; in measures, that is to say, which would be

impossible in any country not reduced to such extremities; in measures

which may prove to be the inevitable accompaniment of national crisis,

when such crisis is economic rather than military. Let us now see what

the Russians, with that machinery at their disposal are trying to do.

It is obvious that since this machinery is dominated by a political

party, it will be impossible to understand the Russian plans, without

understanding that particular political party's estimate of the

situation in general. It is obvious that the Communist plans for Russia

must be largely affected by their view of Europe as a whole. This view

is gloomy in the extreme. The Communists believe that Europe is steadily

shaking itself to pieces. They believe that this process has already

gone so far that, even given good will on the part of European

Governments, the manufacturers of Western countries are already

incapable of supplying them with all the things which Russia was

importing before the war, still less make up the enormous arrears which

have resulted from six years of blockade. They do not agree with M.

Clemenceau that "revolution is a disease attacking defeated countries

only." Or, to put it as I have heard it stated in Moscow, they believe

that President Wilson's aspiration towards a peace in which should be

neither conqueror nor conquered has been at least partially realized in

the sense that every country ended the struggle economically defeated,

with the possible exception of America, whose signature, after all, is

still to be ratified. They believe that even in seemingly prosperous

countries the seeds of economic disaster are already fertilized. They

think that the demands of labor will become greater and more difficult

to fulfill until at last they become incompatible with a continuance of

the capitalist system. They think that strike after strike, irrespective

of whether it is successful or not, will gradually widen the cracks

and flaws already apparent in the damaged economic structure of Western

Europe. They believe that conflicting interests will involve our nations

in new national wars, and that each of these will deepen the cleavage

between capital and labor. They think that even if exhaustion makes

mutual warfare on a large scale impossible, these conflicting interests

will produce such economic conflicts, such refusals of cooperation, as

will turn exhaustion to despair. They believe, to put it briefly, that

Russia has passed through the worst stages of a process to which

every country in Europe will be submitted in turn by its desperate and

embittered inhabitants. We may disagree with them, but we shall not

understand them if we refuse to take that belief into account. If, as

they imagine, the next five years are to be years of disturbance and

growing resolution, Russia will get very little from abroad. If, for

example, there is to be a serious struggle in England, Russia will get

practically nothing. They not only believe that these things are

going to be, but make the logical deductions as to the effect of such

disturbances on their own chances of importing what they need. For

example, Lenin said to me that "the shock of revolution in England would

ensure the final defeat of capitalism," but he said at the same time

that it would be felt at once throughout the world and cause such

reverberations as would paralyze industry everywhere. And that is why,

although Russia is an agricultural country, the Communist plans for her

reconstruction are concerned first of all not with agriculture, but with

industry. In their schemes for the future of the world, Russia's part is

that of a gigantic farm, but in their schemes for the immediate future

of Russia, their eyes are fixed continually on the nearer object of

making her so far self-supporting that, even if Western Europe is

unable to help them, they may be able to crawl out of their economic

difficulties, as Krassin put it to me before he left Moscow, "if

necessary on all fours, but somehow or other, crawl out."

Some idea of the larger ambitions of the Communists with regard to the

development of Russia are given in a conversation with Rykov, which

follows this chapter. The most important characteristic of them is that

they are ambitions which cannot but find an echo in Russians of any

kind, quite regardless of their political convictions. The old anomalies

of Russian industry, for example, the distances of the industrial

districts from their sources of fuel and raw material are to be done

away with. These anomalies were largely due to historical accidents,

such as the caprice of Peter the Great, and not to any economic reasons.

The revolution, destructive as it has been, has at least cleaned the

slate and made it possible, if it is possible to rebuild at all, to

rebuild Russia on foundations laid by common sense. It may be said

that the Communists are merely doing flamboyantly and with a lot of

flag-waving, what any other Russian Government would be doing in their

place. And without the flamboyance and the flag-waving, it is doubtful

whether in an exhausted country, it would be possible to get anything

done at all. The result of this is that in their work of economic

reconstruction the Communists get the support of most of the best

engineers and other technicians in the country, men who take no interest

whatsoever in the ideas of Karl Marx, but have a professional interest

in doing the best they can with their knowledge, and a patriotic

satisfaction in using that knowledge for Russia. These men, caring not

at all about Communism, want to make Russia once more a comfortably

habitable place, no matter under what Government. Their attitude is

precisely comparable to that of the officers of the old army who have

contributed so much to the success of the new. These officers were not

Communists, but they disliked civil war, and fought to put an end of it.

As Sergei Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief, and not a Communist, said

to me, "I have not looked on the civil war as on a struggle between two

political ideas, for the Whites have no definite idea. I have considered

it simply as a struggle between the Russian Government and a number of

mutineers." Precisely so do these "bourgeois" technicians now working

throughout Russia regard the task before them. It will be small

satisfaction to them if famine makes the position of any Government

impossible. For them the struggle is quite simply a struggle between

Russia and the economic forces tending towards a complete collapse of

civilization.

The Communists have thus practically the whole intelligence of the

country to help them in their task of reconstruction, or of salvage.

But the educated classes alone cannot save a nation. Muscle is wanted

besides brain, and the great bulk of those who can provide muscle

are difficult to move to enthusiasm by any broad schemes of economic

rearrangement that do not promise immediate improvement in their own

material conditions. Industrial conscription cannot be enforced

in Russia unless there is among the conscripted themselves an

understanding, although a resentful understanding, of its necessity. The

Russians have not got an army of Martians to enforce effort on an alien

people. The army and the people are one. "We are bound to admit," says

Trotsky, "that no wide industrial mobilization will succeed, if we do

not capture all that is honorable, spiritual in the peasant working

masses in explaining our plan." And the plan that he referred to was

not the grandiose (but obviously sensible) plan for the eventual

electrification of all Russia, but a programme of the struggle before

them in actually getting their feet clear of the morass of industrial

decay in which they are at present involved. Such a programme has

actually been decided upon-a programme the definite object of which

is to reconcile the workers to work not simply hand to mouth, each for

himself, but to concentrate first on those labors which will eventually

bring their reward in making other labors easier and improving the

position as a whole.

Early this year a comparatively unknown Bolshevik called Gusev, to whom

nobody had attributed any particular intelligence, wrote, while busy on

the staff of an army on the southeast front, which was at the time being

used partly as a labor army, a pamphlet which has had an extraordinary

influence in getting such a programme drawn up. The pamphlet is based

on Gusev's personal observation both of a labor army at work and of

the attitude of the peasant towards industrial conscription. It was

extremely frank, and contained so much that might have been used by

hostile critics, that it was not published in the ordinary way but

printed at the army press on the Caucasian front and issued exclusively

to members of the Communist Party. I got hold of a copy of this

pamphlet through a friend. It is called "Urgent Questions of Economic

Construction." Gusev sets out in detail the sort of opposition he had

met, and says: "The Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks

have a clear, simple economic plan which the great masses can

understand: 'Go about your own business and work freely for yourself in

your own place.' They have a criticism of labor mobilizations equally

clear for the masses. They say to them, 'They are putting Simeon in

Peter's place, and Peter in Simeon's. They are sending the men of

Saratov to dig the ground in the Government of Stavropol, and the

Stavropol men to the Saratov Government for the same purpose.' Then

besides that there is 'nonparty' criticism:

"'When it is time to sow they will be shifting muck, and when it is time

to reap they will be told to cut timber.' That is a particularly clear

expression of the peasants' disbelief in our ability to draw up a proper

economic plan. This belief is clearly at the bottom of such questions

as, 'Comrade Gusev, have you ever done any plowing?' or 'Comrade Orator,

do you know anything about peasant work?' Disbelief in the townsman who

understands nothing about peasants is natural to the peasant, and we

shall have to conquer it, to get through it, to get rid of it by showing

the peasant, with a clear plan in our hands that he can understand, that

we are not altogether fools in this matter and that we understand more

than he does." He then sets out the argument which he himself had found

successful in persuading the peasants to do things the reward for which

would not be obvious the moment they were done. He says, "I compared our

State economy to a colossal building with scores of stories and tens of

thousands of rooms. The whole building has been half smashed; in places

the roof has tumbled down, the beams have rotted, the ceilings are

tumbling, the drains and water pipes are burst; the stoves are falling

to pieces, the partitions are shattered, and, finally, the walls

and foundations are unsafe and the whole building is threatened with

collapse. I asked, how, must one set about the repair of this building?

With what kind of economic plan? To this question the inhabitants of

different stories, and even of different rooms on one and the same story

will reply variously. Those who live on the top floor will shout that

the rafters are rotten and the roof falling; that it is impossible to

live, there any longer, and that it is immediately necessary, first of

all, to put up new beams and to repair the roof. And from their point of

view they will be perfectly right. Certainly it is not possible to live

any longer on that floor. Certainly the repair of the roof is necessary.

The inhabitants of one of the lower stories in which the water pipes

have burst will cry out that it is impossible to live without water, and

therefore, first of all, the water pipes must be mended. And they, from

their point of view, will be perfectly right, since it certainly is

impossible to live without water. The inhabitants of the floor where the

stoves have fallen to pieces will insist on an immediate mending of the

stoves, since they and their children are dying of cold because there is

nothing on which they can heat up water or boil kasha for the children;

and they, too, will be quite right. But in spite of all these just

demands, which arrive in thousands from all sides, it is impossible to

forget the most important of all, that the foundation is shattered and

that the building is threatened with a collapse which will bury all

the inhabitants of the house together, and that, therefore, the only

immediate task is the strengthening of the foundation and the walls.

Extraordinary firmness, extraordinary courage is necessary, not only not

to listen to the cries and groans of old men, women, children and

sick, coming from every floor, but also to decide on taking from the

inhabitants of all floors the instruments and materials necessary for

the strengthening of the foundations and walls, and to force them to

leave their corners and hearths, which they are doing the best they can

to make habitable, in order to drive them to work on the strengthening

of the walls and foundations."

Gusev's main idea was that the Communists were asking new sacrifices

from a weary and exhausted people, that without such sacrifices these

people would presently find themselves in even worse conditions, and

that, to persuade them to make the effort necessary to save themselves,

it was necessary to have a perfectly clear and easily understandable

plan which could be dinned into the whole nation and silence the

criticism of all possible opponents. Copies of his little book came to

Moscow. Lenin read it and caused excruciating jealousy in the minds

of several other Communists, who had also been trying to find the

philosopher's stone that should turn discouragement into hope, by

singling out Gusev for his special praise and insisting that his plans

should be fully discussed at the Supreme Council in the Kremlin. Trotsky

followed Lenin's lead, and in the end a general programme for Russian

reconstruction was drawn up, differing only slightly from that which

Gusev had proposed. I give this scheme in Trotsky's words, because they

are a little fuller than those of others, and knowledge of this plan

will explain not only what the Communists are trying to do in Russia,

but what they would like to get from us today and what they will want to

get tomorrow. Trotsky says:--

"The fundamental task at this moment is improvement in the condition of

our transport, prevention of its further deterioration and preparation

of the most elementary stores of food, raw material and fuel. The whole

of the first period of our reconstruction will be completely occupied in

the concentration of labor on the solution of these problems, which is a

condition of further progress.

"The second period (it will be difficult to say now whether it will

be measured in months or years, since that depends on many factors

beginning with the international situation and ending with the unanimity

or the lack of it in our own party) will be a period occupied in the

building of machines in the interest of transport, and the getting of

raw materials and provisions.

"The third period will be occupied in building machinery, with a view to

the production of articles in general demand, and, finally, the fourth

period will be that in which we are able to produce these articles."

Does it not occur, even to the most casual reader, that there is very

little politics in that program, and that, no matter what kind of

Government should be in Russia, it would have to endorse that programme

word for word? I would ask any who doubt this to turn again to my first

two chapters describing the nature of the economic crisis in Russia, and

to remind themselves how, not only the lack of things but the lack of

men, is intimately connected with the lack of transport, which keeps

laborers ill fed, factories ill supplied with material, and in this way

keeps the towns incapable of supplying the needs of the country, with

the result that the country is most unwilling to supply the needs of

the town. No Russian Government unwilling to allow Russia to subside

definitely to a lower level of civilization can do otherwise than to

concentrate upon the improvement of transport. Labor in Russia must be

used first of all for that, in order to increase its own productivity.

And, if purchase of help from abroad is to be allowed, Russia must

"control" the outflow of her limited assets, so that, by healing

transport first of all, she may increase her power of making new assets.

She must spend in such a way as eventually to increase her power of

spending. She must prevent the frittering away of her small purse on

things which, profitable to the vendor and doubtless desirable by the

purchaser, satisfy only individual needs and do not raise the producing

power of the community as a whole.

RYKOV ON ECONOMIC PLANS AND ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

Alexei Rykov, the President of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, is

one of the hardest worked men in Russia, and the only time I was able to

have a long talk with him (although more than once he snatched moments

to answer particular questions) was on a holiday, when the old Siberian

Hotel, now the offices of the Council, was deserted, and I walked

through empty corridors until I found the President and his secretary at

work as usual.

After telling of the building of the new railway from Alexandrovsk

Gai to the Emba, the prospects of developing the oil industry in that

district, the relative values of those deposits and of those at Baku,

and the possible decreasing significance of Baku in Russian industry

generally, we passed to broader perspectives. I asked him what he

thought of the relations between agriculture and industry in Russia, and

supposed that he did not imagine that Russia would ever become a great

industrial country. His answer was characteristic of the tremendous

hopes that nerve these people in their almost impossible task, and I

set it down as nearly as I can in his own words. For him, of course, the

economic problem was the first, and he spoke of it as the director of

a huge trust might have spoken. But, as he passed on to talk of what he

thought would result from the Communist method of tackling that problem,

and spoke of the eventual disappearance of political parties, I felt I

was trying to read a kind of palimpsest of the Economist and

News from Nowhere, or listening to a strange compound of William Morris

and, for example, Sir Eric Geddes. He said: "We may have to wait a

long time before the inevitable arrives and there is a Supreme Economic

Council dealing with Europe as with a single economic whole. If that

should come about we should, of course, from the very nature of our

country, be called upon in the first place to provide food for Europe,

and we should hope enormously to improve our agriculture, working on

a larger and larger scale, using mechanical plows and tractors, which

would be supplied us by the West. But in the meantime we have to face

the fact that events may cause us to be, for all practical purposes, in

a state of blockade for perhaps a score of years, and, so far as we

can, we must be ready to depend on ourselves alone. For example, we want

mechanical plows which could be procured abroad. We have had to start

making them ourselves. The first electric plow made in Russia and used

in Russia started work last year, and this year we shall have a number

of such plows made in our country, not because it is economic so to make

them, but because we could get them in no other way. In so far as is

possible, we shall have to make ourselves self-supporting, so as

somehow or other to get along even if the blockade, formal or perhaps

willy-nilly (imposed by the inability of the West to supply us), compels

us to postpone cooperation with the rest of Europe. Every day of such

postponement is one in which the resources of Europe are not being used

in the most efficient manner to supply the needs not only of our own

country but of all."

I referred to what he had told me last year about the intended

electrification of Moscow by a station using turf fuel.

"That," he said, "is one of the plans which, in spite of the war, has

gone a very long way towards completion. We have built the station in

the Ryezan Government, on the Shadul peat mosses, about 110 versts from

Moscow. Before the end of May that station should be actually at work.

(It was completed, opened and partially destroyed by a gigantic fire.)

Another station at Kashira in the Tula Government (on the Oka), using

the small coal produced in the Moscow coalfields, will be at work

before the autumn. This year similar stations are being built at

Ivano-Voznesensk and at Nijni-Novgorod. Also, with a view to making the

most economic use of what we already possess, we have finished both

in Petrograd and in Moscow a general unification of all the private

power-stations, which now supply their current to a single main cable.

Similar unification is nearly finished at Tula and at Kostroma. The big

water-power station on the rapids of the Volkhov is finished in so far

as land construction goes, but we can proceed no further until we have

obtained the turbines, which we hope to get from abroad. As you know, we

are basing our plans in general on the assumption that in course of time

we shall supply the whole of Russian industry with electricity, of which

we also hope to make great use in agriculture. That, of course, will

take a great number of years."

[Nothing could have been much more artificial than the industrial

geography of old Russia. The caprice of history had planted great

industrial centers literally at the greatest possible distance from the

sources of their raw materials. There was Moscow bringing its coal from

Donetz, and Petrograd, still further away, having to eke out a living by

importing coal from England. The difficulty of transport alone must

have forced the Russians to consider how they could do away with such

anomalies. Their main idea is that the transport of coal in a modern

State is an almost inexcusable barbarism. They have set themselves,

these ragged engineers, working in rooms which they can hardly keep

above freezing-point and walking home through the snow in boots without

soles, no less a task than the electrification of the whole of Russia.

There is a State Committee presided over by an extraordinary optimist

called Krzhizhanovsky, entrusted by the Supreme Council of Public

Economy and Commissariat of Agriculture with the working out of a

general plan. This Committee includes, besides a number of well-known

practical engineers, Professors Latsinsky, Klassen, Dreier, Alexandrov,

Tcharnovsky, Dend and Pavlov. They are investigating the water power

available in different districts in Russia, the possibilities of using

turf, and a dozen similar questions including, perhaps not the least

important, investigation to discover where they can do most with least

dependence on help from abroad.]

Considering the question of the import of machinery from abroad, I asked

him whether in existing conditions of transport Russia was actually in a

position to export the raw materials with which alone the Russians could

hope to buy what they want. He said:

"Actually we have in hand about two million poods (a pood is a little

over thirty-six English pounds) of flax, and any quantity of light

leather (goat, etc.), but the main districts where we have raw material

for ourselves or for export are far away. Hides, for example, we have in

great quantities in Siberia, in the districts of Orenburg and the Ural

River and in Tashkent. I have myself made the suggestion that we should

offer to sell this stuff where it is, that is to say not delivered at a

seaport, and that the buyers should provide their own trains, which we

should eventually buy from them with the raw material itself, so that

after a certain number of journeys the trains should become ours. In

the same districts we have any quantity of wool, and in some of these

districts corn. We cannot, in the present condition of our transport,

even get this corn for ourselves. In the same way we have great

quantities of rice in Turkestan, and actually are being offered rice

from Sweden, because we cannot transport our own. Then we have over a

million poods of copper, ready for export on the same conditions. But

it is clear that if the Western countries are unable to help in the

transport, they cannot expect to get raw materials from us."

I asked about platinum. He laughed.

"That is a different matter. In platinum we have a world monopoly, and

can consequently afford to wait. Diamonds and gold, they can have as

much as they want of such rubbish; but platinum is different, and we

are in no hurry to part with it. But diamonds and gold ornaments, the

jewelry of the Tsars, we are ready to give to any king in Europe who

fancies them, if he can give us some less ornamental but more useful

locomotives instead."

I asked if Kolchak had damaged the platinum mines. He replied, "Not at

all. On the contrary, he was promising platinum to everybody who wanted

it, and he set the mines going, so we arrived to find them in good

condition, with a considerable yield of platinum ready for use."

(I am inclined to think that in spite of Rykov's rather intransigent

attitude on the question, the Russians would none the less be willing to

export platinum, if only on account of the fact in comparison with its

great value it requires little transport, and so would make possible for

them an immediate bargain with some of the machinery they most urgently

need.)

Finally we talked of the growing importance of the Council of Public

Economy. Rykov was of opinion that it would eventually become the centre

of the whole State organism, "it and Trades Unions organizing the actual

producers in each branch."

"Then you think that as your further plans develop, with the creation

of more and more industrial centres, with special productive populations

concentrated round them, the Councils of the Trades Unions will tend to

become identical with the Soviets elected in the same districts by the

same industrial units?"

"Precisely," said Rykov, "and in that way the Soviets, useful during the

period of transition as an instrument of struggle and dictatorship, will

be merged with the Unions." (One

important factor, as Lenin pointed out when considering the same

question, is here left out of count, namely the political development of

the enormous agricultural as opposed to industrial population.)

"But if this merging of political Soviets with productive Unions occurs,

the questions that concern people will cease to be political questions,

but will be purely questions of economics."

"Certainly. And we shall see the disappearance of political parties.

That process is already apparent. In the present huge Trade Union

Conference there are only sixty Mensheviks. The Communists are

swallowing one party after another. Those who were not drawn over to us

during the period of struggle are now joining us during the process of

construction, and we find that our differences now are not political at

all, but concerned only with the practical details of construction." He

illustrated this by pointing out the present constitution of the Supreme

Council of Public Economy. There are under it fifty-three Departments or

Centres (Textile, Soap, Wool, Timber, Flax, etc.), each controlled by

a "College" of three or more persons. There are 232 members of these

Colleges or Boards in all, and of them 83 are workmen, 79 are

engineers, 1 was an ex-director, 50 were from the clerical staff, and 19

unclassified. Politically 115 were Communists, 105 were "non-party," and

12 were of non-Communist parties. He continued, "Further, in swallowing

the other parties, the Communists themselves will cease to exist as a

political party. Think only that youths coming to their manhood during

this year in Russia and in the future will not be able to confirm from

their own experience the reasoning of Karl Marx, because they will have

had no experience of a capitalist country. What can they make of

the class struggle? The class struggle here is already over, and the

distinctions of class have already gone altogether. In the old days,

members of our party were men who had read, or tried to read, Marx's

"Capital," who knew the "Communist Manifesto" by heart, and were

occupied in continual criticism of the basis of capitalist society. Look

at the new members of our party. Marx is quite unnecessary to them. They

join us, not for struggle in the interests of an oppressed class, but

simply because they understand our aims in constructive work. And, as

this process continues, we old social democrats shall disappear, and our

places will be filled by people of entirely different character grown up

under entirely new conditions."

NON-PARTYISM

Rykov's prophecies of the disappearance of Political parties may be

falsified by a development of that very non-partyism on which he bases

them. It is true that the parties openly hostile to the Communists

in Russia have practically disappeared. Many old-time Mensheviks have

joined the Communist Party. Here and there in the country may be found

a Social Revolutionary stronghold. Here and there in the Ukraine the

Mensheviks retain a footing, but I doubt whether either of these parties

has in it the vitality to make itself once again a serious political

factor. There is, however, a movement which, in the long run, may alter

Russia's political complexion. More and more delegates to Soviets

or Congresses of all kinds are explicitly described as "Non-party."

Non-partyism is perhaps a sign of revolt against rigid discipline of

any kind. Now and then, of course, a clever Menshevik or Social

Revolutionary, by trimming his sails carefully to the wind, gets himself

elected on a non-party ticket. 'When this happens there is usually

a great hullabaloo as soon as he declares himself. A section of his

electors agitates for his recall and presently some one else is elected

in his stead. But non-partyism is much more than a mere cloak of

invisibility for enemies or conditional supporters of the Communists. I

know of considerable country districts which, in the face of every kind

of agitation, insist on returning exclusively non-party delegates. The

local Soviets in these districts are also non-party, and they elect

usually a local Bolshevik to some responsible post to act as it were as

a buffer between themselves and the central authority. They manage local

affairs in their own way, and, through the use of tact on both sides,

avoid falling foul of the more rigid doctrinaires in Moscow.

Eager reactionaries outside Russia will no doubt point to non-partyism

as a symptom of friendship for themselves. It is nothing of the sort.

On all questions of the defense of the Republic the non-party voting is

invariably solid with that of the Communists. The non-party men do not

want Denikin. They do not want Baron Wrangel. They have never heard of

Professor Struhve. They do not particularly like the Communists.

They principally want to be left alone, and they principally fear any

enforced continuation of war of any kind. If, in the course of time,

they come to have a definite political programme, I think it not

impossible that they may turn into a new kind of constitutional

democrat. That does not mean that they will have any use for M. Milukov

or for a monarch with whom M. Milukov might be ready to supply them.

The Constitution for which they will work will be that very Soviet

Constitution which is now in abeyance, and the democracy which they

associate with it will be that form of democracy which were it to be

accurately observed in the present state of Russia, that Constitution

would provide. The capitalist in Russia has long ago earned the position

in which, according to the Constitution, he has a right to vote,

since he has long ago ceased to be a capitalist. Supposing the Soviet

Constitution were today to be literally applied, it would be found

that practically no class except the priests would be excluded from

the franchise. And when this agitation swells in volume, it will be

an agitation extremely difficult to resist, supposing Russia to be at

peace, so that there will be no valid excuse with which to meet it.

These new constitutional democrats will be in the position of saying to

the Communists, "Give us, without change, that very Constitution which

you yourselves drew up." I think they will find many friends inside the

Communist Party, particularly among those Communists who are also Trade

Unionists. I heard something very like the arguments of this new variety

of constitutional democrat in the Kremlin itself at an All-Russian

Conference of the Communist Party. A workman, Sapronov, turned suddenly

aside in a speech on quite another matter, and said with great violence

that the present system was in danger of running to seed and turning

into oligarchy, if not autocracy. Until the moment when he put his

listeners against him by a personal attack on Lenin, there was no doubt

that he had with him the sympathies of quite a considerable section of

an exclusively Communist audience.

Given peace, given an approximate return to normal conditions,

non-partyism may well profoundly modify the activities of the

Communists. It would certainly be strong enough to prevent the rasher

spirits among them from jeopardizing peace or from risking Russia's

chance of convalescence for the sake of promoting in any way the growth

of revolution abroad. Of course, so long as it is perfectly obvious that

Soviet Russia is attacked, no serious growth of non-partyism is to be

expected, but it is obvious that any act of aggression on the part of

the Soviet Government, once Russia had attained peace-which she has not

known since 1914-would provide just the basis of angry discontent which

might divide even the disciplined ranks of the Communists and give

non-partyism an active, instead of a comparatively passive, backing

throughout the country.

Non-partyism is already the peasants' way of expressing their aloofness

from the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defend

that revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin,

talking to me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: "Hegel

wrote 'What is the People? The people is that part of the nation which

does not know what it wants.' That is a good description of the Russian

peasantry at the present time, and it applies equally well to your

Arthur Hendersons and Sidney Webbs in England, and to all other

people like yourself who want incompatible things. The peasantry are

individualists, but they support us. We have, in some degree, to

thank Kolchak and Denikin for that. They are in favor of the Soviet

Government, but hanker after Free Trade, not understanding that the

two things are self-contradictory. Of course, if they were a united

political force they could swamp us, but they are disunited both in

their interests and geographically. The interests of the poorer and

middle class peasants are in contradiction to those of the rich peasant

farmer who employs laborers. The poorer and middle class see that we

support them against the rich peasant, and also see that he is ready

to support what is obviously not in their interests." I said, "If State

agriculture in Russia comes to be on a larger scale, will there not be

a sort of proletarianization of the peasants so that, in the long run,

their interests will come to be more or less identical with those of the

workers in other than agricultural industry!" He replied, "Something in

that direction is being done, but it will have to be done very carefully

and must take a very long time. When we are getting many thousands of

tractors from abroad, then something of the sort would become possible."

Finally I asked him point blank, "Did he think they would pull through

far enough economically to be able to satisfy the needs of the peasantry

before that same peasantry had organized a real political opposition

that should overwhelm them!" Lenin laughed. "If I could answer that

question," he said, "I could answer everything, for on the answer to

that question everything depends. I think we can. Yes, I think we can.

But I do not know that we can."

Non-partyism may well be the protoplasmic stage of the future political

opposition of the peasants.

POSSIBILITIES

I have done my best to indicate the essential facts in Russia's problem

today, and to describe the organization and methods with which she is

attempting its solution. I can give no opinion as to whether by these

means the Russians will succeed in finding their way out of the quagmire

of industrial ruin in which they are involved. I can only say that they

are unlikely to find their way out by any other means. I think this is

instinctively felt in Russia. Not otherwise would it have been possible

for the existing organization, battling with one hand to save the towns

front starvation, to destroy with the other the various forces clothed

and armed by Western Europe, which have attempted its undoing. The mere

fact of continued war has, of course, made progress in the solution of

the economic problem almost impossible, but the fact that the economic

problem was unsolved, must have made war impossible, if it were not that

the instinct of the people was definitely against Russian or foreign

invaders. Consider for one moment the military position.

Although the enthusiasm for the Polish war began to subside (even among

the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to

their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area

of non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude

with Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of Soviet

Russia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In

1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the

Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flattering

letter to the Kaiser. In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov,

Vitebsk and Mohilev. We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel. In the

east, the front which became known as that of Kolchak, was on the

Volga. Soviet Russia was a little hungry island with every prospect of

submersion. A year later the Germans had vanished, the flatterers of the

Kaiser had joined hands with those who were temporarily flattering the

Allies, Yudenitch's troops were within sight of Petrograd, Denikin was

at Orel, almost within striking distance of Moscow; there had been a

stampede of desertion from the Red Army. There was danger that Finland

might strike at any moment. Although in the east Kolchak had been swept

over the Urals to his ultimate disaster, the situation of Soviet Russia

seemed even more desperate than in the year before. What is the position

today! Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland are at peace with

Russia. The Polish peace brings comparative quiet to the western front,

although the Poles, keeping the letter rather than the spirit of their

agreement, have given Balahovitch the opportunity of establishing

himself in Minsk, where, it is said, that the pogroms of unlucky Jews

show that he has learnt nothing since his ejection from Pskov.

Balahovitch's force is not important in itself, but its existence will

make it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier of

Poland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polish

population, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmen

may again choose war as the least of many threatening evils. Still,

for the moment, Russia's western frontier is comparatively quiet. Her

northern frontier is again the Arctic Sea. Her eastern frontier is in

the neighborhood of the Pacific. The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupied

by no enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding is

the small semi-circle north of the Crimea. There Denikin's successor,

supported by the French but exultantly described by a German

conservative newspaper as a "German baron in Cherkass uniform," is

holding the Crimea and a territory slightly larger than the peninsula

on the main land. Only to the immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevik

propaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic to

any one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on

the eve of military collapse.

In any case it is easy in a revolution to magnify the influence of

military events on internal affairs. In the first place, no one who

has not actually crossed the Russian front during the period of active

operations can well realize how different are the revolutionary wars

from that which ended in 1918. Advance on a broad front no longer

means that a belt of men in touch with each other has moved definitely

forward. It means that there have been a series of forward movements

at widely separated, and with the very haziest of mutual, connections.

There will be violent fighting for a village or a railway station or the

passage of a river. Small hostile groups will engage in mortal combat to

decide the possession of a desirable hut in which to sleep, but, except

at these rare points of actual contact, the number of prisoners is far

in excess of the number of casualties. Parties on each side will be

perfectly ignorant of events to right or left of them, ignorant even of

their gains and losses. Last year I ran into Whites in a village which

the Reds had assured me was strongly held by themselves, and these

same Whites refused to believe that the village where I had spent the

preceding night was in the possession of the Reds. It is largely an

affair of scouting parties, of patrols dodging each other through the

forest tracks, of swift raids, of sudden conviction (often entirely

erroneous) on the part of one side or the other, that it or the enemy

has been "encircled." The actual number of combatants to a mile of front

is infinitely less than during the German war. Further, since an immense

proportion of these combatants on both sides have no wish to fight at

all, being without patriotic or political convictions and very badly fed

and clothed, and since it is more profitable to desert than to be

taken prisoner, desertion in bulk is not uncommon, and the deserters,

hurriedly enrolled to fight on the other side, indignantly re-desert

when opportunity offers. In this way the armies of Denikin and Yudenitch

swelled like mushrooms and decayed with similar rapidity. Military

events of this kind, however spectacular they may seem abroad, do not

have the political effect that might be expected. I was in Moscow at the

worst moment of the crisis in 1919 when practically everybody outside

the Government believed that Petrograd had already fallen, and I could

not but realize that the Government was stronger then than it had been

in February of the same year, when it had a series of victories and

peace with the Allies seemed for a moment to be in sight. A sort of fate

seems to impel the Whites to neutralize with extraordinary rapidity any

good will for themelves which they may find among the population.

This is true of both sides, but seems to affect the Whites especially.

Although General Baron Wrangel does indeed seem to have striven more

successfully than his predecessors not to set the population against him

and to preserve the loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolute

certainty that any large success on his part would bring crowding to

his banner the same crowd of stupid reactionary officers who brought

to nothing any mild desire for moderation that may have been felt by

General Denikin. If the area he controls increases, his power of

control over his subordinates will decrease, and the forces that led to

Denikin's collapse will be set in motion in his case also. [*]

* On the day on which I send this book to the printers news

comes of Wrangel's collapse and flight. I leave standing

what I have written concerning him, since it will apply to

any successor he may have. Each general who has stepped

into Kolchak's shoes has eventually had to run away in them,

and always for the same reasons. It may be taken almost as

an axiom that the history of great country is that of its

centre, not of its periphery. The main course of English

history throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries was never deflected from London. French history

did not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or at

Quiberon Bay. And only a fanatic could suppose that Russian

history would run away from Moscow, to begin again in a

semi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea. Moscow changes

continually, and may so change as to make easy the return of

the "refugees." Some have already returned. But the

refugees will not return as conquerors. Should a Russian

Napoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts)

appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of a

revolutionary war-cry. He will have to fight some one, or

he will not be a Napoleon. And whom will he fight but the

very people who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbed

Aladdin's ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no means

kindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avenge

the breaking of his sleep?

And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polish

frontier, should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack,

Russian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, no

miracles of diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows. For all these

reasons a military collapse of the Soviet Government at the present

time, even a concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely.

It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely to

be worse this winter than it has yet been. Forcible attempts to get food

from the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town and

country. There has been a very bad harvest in Russia. The bringing of

food from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make that

impossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequate

transport. Yet I think internal collapse unlikely. It may be said almost

with certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no one

left to defend them. That moment had arrived in the case of the Tsar. It

had arrived in the case of Kerensky. It has not arrived in the case

of the Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons. For one thing,

a collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time would be

disconcerting, if not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies.

It would, of course, open the way to a practically unopposed military

advance, but at the same time it would present its enemies with enormous

territory, which would overwhelm the organizing powers which they have

shown again and again to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Nor

would collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into a

good one. Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of all existing

organizations, and would intensify the horrors of famine for every town

dweller. Consequently, though the desperation of hunger and resentment

against inevitable requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and

there throughout the country, the men who, in other circumstances, might

coordinate such events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort.

I do not say that collapse is impossible. I do say that it would be

extremely undesirable from the point of view of almost everybody

in Russia. Collapse of the present Government would mean at best a

reproduction of the circumstances of 1917, with the difference that no

intervention from without would be necessary to stimulate indiscriminate

slaughter within. I say "at best" because I think it more likely that

collapse would be followed by a period of actual chaos. Any Government

that followed the Communists would be faced by the same economic

problem, and would have to choose between imposing measures very like

those of the Communists and allowing Russia to subside into a new area

for colonization. There are people who look upon this as a natural, even

a desirable, result of the revolution. They forget that the Russians

have never been a subject race, that they have immense powers of

passive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea that they

understand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is difficult

not to understand. Any country that takes advantage of the Russian

people in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later, first

that it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given all

Russians a single and undesirable view of the history of the last

three years. There will not be a Russian who will not believe that the

artificial incubation of civil war within the frontiers of old Russia

was not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of so

far weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy. Those who look

with equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe

of a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign

nations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum

will set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a

struggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will

have done for Russia.

It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolution

may prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a stricken

civilization. My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russia

will not die without infecting us with its disease. It seems to me that

our own civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, and

liable, like a man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravate

the malady. I think that the whole of the Russian war, waged directly

or indirectly by Western Europe, is an example of this sort of dementia,

but I cannot help believing that sanity will reassert itself in time.

At the present moment, to use a modification of Gusev's metaphor, Europe

may be compared to a burning house and the Governments of Europe to fire

brigades, each one engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of the

building. It seems a pity that these fire brigades should be fighting

each other, and forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact that

some of them wear red uniforms and some wear blue. Any single room to

which the fire gains complete control increases the danger of the whole

building, and I hope that before the roof falls in the firemen will come

to their senses.

But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculations

as to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to the

changes in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely to

happen supposing it does not collapse. I have already said that I think

collapse unlikely. Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carry

out their programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrelling

of the firemen as to make that task impossible?

I think that there is still a hope. There is as yet no sign of a general

improvement in Russia, nor is such an improvement possible until the

Russians have at least carried out the first stage of their programme.

It would even not be surprising if things in general were to continue to

go to the bad during the carrying out of that first stage. Shortages of

food, of men, of tools, of materials, are so acute that they have had

to choose those factories which are absolutely indispensable for the

carrying out of this stage, and make of them "shock" factories, like the

"shock" troops of the war, giving them equipment over and above their

rightful share of the impoverished stock, feeding their workmen even at

the cost of letting others go hungry. That means that other factories

suffer. No matter, say the Russians, if only that first stage makes

progress. Consequently, the only test that can be fairly applied is that

of transport. Are they or are they not gaining on ruin in the matter of

wagons and engines! Here are the figures of wagon repairs in the seven

chief repairing shops up to the month of June:

December 1919............475 wagons were repaired.

January 1920.............656

February.................697

March...................1104

April...................1141

May.....................1154

June....................1161

After elaborate investigation last year, Trotsky, as temporary Commissar

of Transport, put out an order explaining that the railways, to keep up

their present condition, must repair roughly 800 engines every month.

During the first six months of 1920 they fulfilled this task in the

following percentages:

January..................32 per cent

February.................50

March....................66

April....................78

May......................98

June....................104

I think that is a proof that, supposing normal relations existed between

Russia and ourselves, the Russian would be able to tackle the first

stage of the problem that lies before them, and would lie before them

whatever their Government might be. Unfortunately there is no proof that

this steady improvement can be continued, except under conditions of

trade with Western Europe. There are Russians who think they can pull

through without us, and, remembering the miracles of which man is

capable when his back is to the wall, it would be rash to say that this

is impossible. But other Russians point out gloomily that they have been

using certain parts taken from dead engines (engines past repair) in

order to mend sick engines. They are now coming to the mending, not of

sick engines merely, but of engines on which post-mortems have already

been held. They are actually mending engines, parts of which have

already been taken out and used for the mending of other engines. There

are consequently abnormal demands for such things as shafts and piston

rings. They are particularly short of Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. In

normal times the average number of new tubes wanted for each engine put

through the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15 for engines used in the more

northerly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines in the south where the

water is not so good). This number must now be taken as much higher,

because during recent years tubes have not been regularly renewed.

Further, the railways have been widely making use of tubes taken from

dead engines, that is to say, tubes already worn. Putting things at

their very best, assuming that the average demand for tubes per engine

will be that of normal times, then, if 1,000 engines are to be repaired

monthly, 150,000 tubes will be wanted every six months. Now on the

15th of June the total stock of tubes ready for use was 58,000, and the

railways could not expect to get more than another 13,000 in the

near future. Unless the factories are able to do better (and their

improvement depends on improvement in transport), railway repairs must

again deteriorate, since the main source of materials for it in Russia,

namely the dead engines, will presently be exhausted.

On this there is only one thing to be said. If, whether because we do

not trade with them, or from some other cause, the Russians are unable

to proceed even in this first stage of their programme, it means an

indefinite postponement of the moment when Russia will be able to export

anything, and, consequently, that when at last we learn that we need

Russia as a market, she will be a market willing to receive gifts, but

unable to pay for anything at all. And that is a state of affairs a

great deal more serious to ourselves than to the Russians, who can,

after all, live by wandering about their country and scratching the

ground, whereas we depend on the sale of our manufactured goods for the

possibility of buying the food we cannot grow ourselves. If the Russians

fail, their failure will affect not us alone. It will, by depriving her

of a market, lessen Germany's power of recuperation, and consequently

her power of fulfilling her engagements. What, then, is to happen to

France? And, if we are to lose our market in Russia, and find very

much weakened markets in Germany and France, we shall be faced with an

ever-increasing burden of unemployment, with the growth, in fact, of the

very conditions in which alone we shall ourselves be unable to recover

from the war. In such conditions, upheaval in England would be possible,

and, for the dispassionate observer, there is a strange irony in the

fact that the Communists desire that upheaval, and, at the same time,

desire a rebirth of the Russian market which would tend to make that

upheaval unlikely, while those who most fear upheaval are precisely

those who urge us, by making recovery in Russia impossible, to improve

the chances of collapse at home. The peasants in Russia are not alone in

wanting incompatible things.