CHAPTER I
THE FACTS IN THE CASE
"We are the oldest government in Europe," remarked Chicherin in 1923, during the residence of the present writer in Moscow. This droll comment of the Bolshevist Commissar for Foreign Affairs was historically correct then,—more so to-day,—if by government that astute diplomat understood a given cabinet or a sovnarkom exercising supreme power and performing the customary administrative functions. The parliamentary system which requires sporadically a vote of confidence in support of the dominant political party, failing which the cabinet is expected to resign, has indeed occasioned a bewildering succession of ministries upon the stage of European politics since November 7, 1917. The Moscow system, on the contrary, provides, antecedently, for the liquidation of any menacing opposition by the simple device of eliminating the opposers. Those who attempted serious political resistance found themselves either in the execution chamber of the Loubyanka or on their way to freezing exile in the convict camps on Solovetsky Island in the White Sea.
To be sure, during the decade just ended, there have been notable losses and substitutions in the higher ranks of the Soviet hierarchy. Sverdlov, Volodarsky, and Uritsky, all active leaders, were assassinated in the early days of the Revolution. Lenin, the flaming torch that fired the Russian masses and sought to fire the world, the creator of the Soviet State and founder of the Third International, died the thousand living deaths of a deranged paralytic before his actual demise in 1924. Vorovsky, able propagandist and first Soviet representative to Italy, was murdered in Switzerland in 1923 and lies buried outside the Kremlin walls, close to the grave of John Reed. On the afternoon of Vorovsky's funeral the author of this work wandered through Red Square and meditated on the significance of the strange fellowship that could so unite in common burial a Russian revolutionist and the brilliant but erratic Harvard graduate.
Krassin, easily distinguishable among the other commissars as brains temporizing with victorious passions, recently succumbed to a mortal illness while Soviet Ambassador to France. Dzherzhinsky, chief of the dreaded secret police, the Cheka, executioner of 1,800,000 victims, the man with the eyes of a gazelle and the soul of a Fouquier-Tinville expired suddenly and mysteriously in 1926 after an impassioned speech of protest against certain heterodox tendencies of his colleagues. Voikov, who signed the death warrant of Tzar Nicholas II and the imperial family, was himself murdered in Warsaw on June 7, 1927, falling victim to the vengeance of an exiled Russian youth not twenty years of age. Joffe, veteran revolutionist and pioneer coworker with Karakhan in the Far East, committed suicide in December 1927.
But after each casualty the ranks closed tighter. Internal dissension is met by stern domestic discipline. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev dispute the supremacy of Stalin, Bukharin, and Rykov. They pay the penalty of schism by relegation to obscure posts within the Party; then, when it is safe to do so, they are expelled entirely. Thus the essential dictatorship of ten men, the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, persists unchallenged over 146,000,000 Russians. With unshaken confidence, Moscow is celebrating its tenth year in continuous control of approximately one seventh of the habitable surface of the earth.
If history may be conceived as philosophy teaching by example, may it not be time, even as early as the tenth year after the event, to seek a helpful interpretation of the Russian experiment ?
For Russia not only presents a story that will engage the best historians of the world for generations to come; it is an actual, insistent fact of the present, too. Bolshevism is an international reality which only the hopelessly intransigent can ignore. If the World War did not entirely destroy modern organized society, it assuredly did bring civilization to the crossroads. The victors of the second Russian revolution, that of November 1917, frankly and brutally took the road to the extreme left, driving a weakened, demoralized Russia before them, calling on stronger nations to follow. That way madness lies, as they have now learned and reluctantly admitted, taught by the inexorable laws of nature operating through economic pressure. Naturam furca expellas, tamen usque recurret.(1) But it is my deliberate judgment, based on six years' close observation of European and Russian affairs, that no lasting peace is possible in Europe or Asia until the breach between Russia and the West is securely bridged. For that difference, that breach, is not a chasm dug by national hatred, by historic feud or racial antipathy. One or other of such specific motives made Greeks the natural enemies of Turks, made France distrust Germany, and set Celt against Saxon. But the issue created by the second Russian revolution strikes at the very concept of human society as now organized and proposes an entirely new civilization.
It was not merely a revolution in the accepted sense as historically understood,—that is, a re-allocation of sovereignty,—but revolution in the domain of economics, religion, art, literature, science, education, and all other human activities. It sought to create a new archetype of humanity, the "collective man," and a new culture adapted to the impersonal "mass man" who should displace forever "the soul-encumbered individual man." It was meant, and so proclaimed by its protagonists, to be a challenge to the modern State as constituted, not merely in Imperial Russia, but throughout the entire civilized world. It was philosophic materialism in arms, the most radical school of thought that has ever come upon the stage of human affairs.
The leaders of Bolshevism deliberately identified and confused, in the estimation of the masses, all civilization with the particular Russian form detested by the peasants because of their economic serfdom under it and hated by the liberals because of the savage repression of all their efforts for the enlargement of human liberty through constitutional reform interpreting all life, therefore, in terms of their own memories of Siberia, the Bolsheviki generalized savagely, and, of course, erroneously. Lenin registered his bitter oath of universal revenge on the day his brother Alexander Ulianov was exacted by the Tzarist Government in 1887 for attempted regicide. Lenin was wrong. But the Tzars were equally wrong in obstinately refusing to modify an insupportable autocracy that drove men to such desperation.
Revolution in the land of the Tzars swept to inevitable catastrophe with an almost mathematical compulsion. By all the laws of nature and human progress, the disappearance of the Muscovite Empire became a political necessity, and has achieved with a ruination of physical and moral values a scale to challenge the combined creative genius of an Æschylus, a Sophocles, a Euripides, and a Shakespeare adequately to depict. If the individual and, what is more, the imaginary sufferings of an Electra an Œdipus, or an ill-starred Prince of Denmark still move, and probably will continue to stir, the collective heart of humanity because of their universal appeal, what should be the reaction of a properly informed posterity to t recital of the woes through which an entire Christian nation has recently passed? Every conceivable scourge which flesh is heir to came upon them, not singly, but in legions. Few Western nations that I know of could have survived what the Russian people have passed through in the last fourteen years.
For half a century public opinion, like a Greek chorus, waited breathless for the axe to fall, as fall men knew it must; and all the while the press, both within and without Russia, like an unheeded Cassandra, kept uttering prophecy after prophecy.
For the student of political variations, the World War spelled the end of national complacencies based on national isolation and ignorance of international organization. That Russia, like an unheeded Cassandra, kept uttering prophecy after prophecy. For the student of political variations, the World War spelled the end of national complacencies based on national isolation and ignorance of international organization. That devastating conflict was fought in vain if it has not left men convinced that the nations of the earth constitute a huge, international family whose basic interests are common, and whose members are far more interdependent, acting and reacting on one another far more seriously and directly, than we imagined prior to 1914. No mortal sickness, be it physical, spiritual, of intellectual, that attacks one member of this social organism can ever again be regarded with indifference even by the healthiest member of human society.
Experienced rulers needed no World War to teach them that. The Tzar of All the Russias, Nicholas I, on hearing of the European revolutions of 1848, is reported to have said to his Courtiers:—
"Saddle your horses, gentlemen—a Republic is proclaimed in France."
Russia provides still another caveat to give us pause. Once again has it been demonstrated that nations, like individuals and trees, fall to their ruin on their leaning side.
I know, under penalty of being considered unscientific, that history does not moralize; neither does it prophesy. But the facts of history may do both. I am unscientific enough to believe that facts are largely useless unless they result in something more lasting than mere entertainment. If history be a science,—which modern scholarship would seem to demand,—then it must, by its charter, set forth the ultimate causes of things. And causes are vastly more important than effects, at least among free agents capable of penetrating to the hidden sources of transient phenomena.
I am more interested in finding out why Persia fell and Babylon passed than in possessing the exact date of their exit; more concerned to know why modern Greece is not the Hellas of Aristotle and Socrates and Plato, and why her groves and market place are no longer crowded with eager seekers after wisdom, than to determine the exact hour when the well of Hellenic culture ran dry. Rome, I know, was once the seat of a world empire, and "Civis Romanus sum" was the proudest boast of antiquity. But Rome became "the lone mother of dead empires" and her Forum the playing ground for barbarians because she fell into the dry rot of an effete civilization. The First Empire of the French perished at Waterloo, through ambition; the Third crumbled at Sedan, through inefficiency, to be followed by a new Teutonic Federation proclaimed in the very Hall of Versailles where nearly half a century later the whirligig of time reversed the scenes and reassigned the leading parts. Victor became victim and the vanquished conquered. Why did Imperial Russia, greater than all of these, perish before our very eyes in fire and internecine strife and woeful famine ?
Traveling on Alpine heights in the Austrian Tyrol, I have heard native guides warn careless climbers that the loosening of a single stone may send an avalanche down into the peaceful valley beneath. The reverberations of a pistol shot among those silent peaks have been known to dislodge some stray rock or fragment of ice, which, by accumulating snow and dirt and other debris in its mad rush downward increases in size and speed until it becomes a roaring monster, uprooting trees, sweeping men to destruction, and grinding those artistic Swiss chalets into splinters. Thirteen years ago the gunfire of an irresponsible youth at Sarajevo, directed primarily against the heir to the Austrian throne, unloosened an avalanche that had been brooding over Europe for a generation. As a result of the forces then set in motion, eighteen rulers—kings, princes, and other potentates—were swept from their thrones, some into exile, some, like the last of the Romanovs, to absolute physical annihilation.
And not so long before his death Blasco Ibanez was calling upon the Spanish people to unchain the Four Horsemen, of the Apocalypse and hurl the nineteenth king into the discard !
These effects were appalling; they blasted the ears and seared the eyeballs of humanity—because the causes had not penetrated its brain.
If, on the contrary, history be literature, as I am inclined to believe it is, and hence one of the fine arts, it must, somehow, hold the mirror up to Nature and show mankind his unchanging, recurrent characteristics. Nature is not all rocks and fauna; her chief concern is man. And it is immeasurably more important to know where he is going than where he came from. All the pother about evolution has obscured the only thing that counts—his destiny.
If history be a looking-glass, it is intended for seeing men; a mirror is useless to a blind man. It is ruinous conceit and stupid chauvinism to imagine that the perpetuity of any state, be it monarchy or republic can be assured solely by industrial preëminence, superior armament, mastery in the technique of foreign and domestic commerce, or shrewdness in the conduct of international relations. Valuable assets, these, but edged tools and engines of destruction, unless controlled by minds liberalized by habits of self-analysis, comparison, and reflection. Nor have we on the American continent any divine guaranty that these material excellences—too often and too grossly proclaimed as irresistible—will insure indefinitely our institutions against the cycle of regeneration through which sister nations have already passed. Some see signs of that decline already. Oswald Spengler is sure that the process has begun for all Western culture.
It is precisely his attitude toward such considerations that distinguishes the politician from the statesman. A politician is a man who keeps his eyes on the next election; a statesman keeps them fixed on the next generation. Politicians abounded in old Russia. Statesmen were few. That is why the Bolshevik sits grinning in the throne room of the Kremlin, munching sunflower seeds.
It is an easy error to consider the Bolsheviki as simply barbarians and so dismiss their program with a contemptuous gesture. Certainly the rank and file of their followers have been guilty of inhuman excesses and unpardonable bloodshed. But the authorities ruling Russia to-day are not barbarians. They are the fruits of barbarian practices in government extending through three centuries. Russia survived the barbarians from without, outlived the Mongolian conquerors under Genghis Khan. It was the barbarian within that destroyed her—those imperious autocrats in high places and petty tyrants in low places, more concerned with the perpetuation of dynasties and the conquest of new principalities than with the happiness, the natural rights, and the development of the hordes under their control. Human life and human rights were always cheap in the East and still are in Russia to-day, a relic, doubtless, and a blending of two influences that cut themselves deep into the character of the ruling classes—Asiatic callousness and Byzantine haughtiness.
The Russian problem derives its hugeness and its complexity from the very soil that gave it birth, inheriting these characteristics as legitimately and historically as the Russian peasant does his wise simplicity and his naïve mysticism. To be sure, such of the intelligentsia as escaped the Cheka during the Terror often begged us foreigners to consider Bolshevism, not as Russian in character and origin at all, but as a distinctly foreign invention, imported into Russia by the German High Staff during the war as a purely military manœuvre to destroy the morale of the Russian people and cripple the army. Both objectives were actually achieved with characteristic efficiency, even though the Frankenstein monster thus created almost destroyed its sponsor when Bolshevist revolutionary propaganda nearly triumphed in Germany in 1923.
In substantiation of their protests, it was often pointed out to us by native Russians that the anti-individualistic character of Soviet institutions is as far removed from the dreamy idealism of Slav peasantry as it is from the avowed aspirations of typical revolutionary leaders like Alexander Herzen, Plekhanov, Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Chernov, Martov, Spiridonova, Milyukov, Pitirim Sorokin, and Grandmother Breshkovskaya. This reservation must, however, be interpreted as their criticism of Bolshevism's impracticable, unworkable answer to Russia's century-long struggle for political freedom and economic independence. It does not, I think, invalidate my contention that Russia's present fate was clearly Russia's destiny, self-imposed, foreseen through decades, and inescapable, granted the policy pursued by the Russian Government for the thirty-seven years that elapsed between the assassination of Alexander II and the murder of Nicholas II.
Time, before whose impartial tribunal all men and institutions pass for judgment, is gradually furnishing the perspective indispensable for an objective and unobstructed view of that sinister record of blunder, Asiatic callousness, reaction, and Byzantine haughtiness. The unfolding panorama of Russian history from 1613—when young Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch Philaret, mounted the throne—until the last of the Romanovs perished in the hideous massacre of Ekaterinburg reveals a destiny that swept to its finale with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. A thesis common in monarchist and émigré circles labors to prove that the Bolshevist revolution was an unnatural, un-Russian phenomenon artificially created by two foreign influences German militarism and Jewish hatred, and then imposed by treachery on a demoralized and exhausted people. But on the strength of the record, and in view of the testimony of representative Russians supported by documentary evidence now becoming increasingly available, I am obliged to reject that theory. Though the instrumental rôle played both by Jews and by Germany was considerable and active, and though I am familiar with the remarkable work of Mrs. Webster tracing the revolutionary movement, through Lenin and Marx, back to Bakunin, Anacharsis Clootz,—"the personal enemy of Jesus Christ,"—Gracchus Babeuf, and the Illuminati of Weishaupt, I maintain that Bolshevism is a natural phase in the evolution of a strictly historical process originating in the soil, the culture, and the politics of Russia itself. When one disentangles the matted roots of that gnarled and knotted growth, he will discover many domestic causes: one philosophic, another geographic, some political, economic, and racial, one religious, and the final, psychological and emotional.
The chronicling of the Russian Revolution may safely be left to the scientific historian. The determination of certain practical political consequences, such as the maintenance of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Government, concerns the statesman. Mutual recrimination, hateful charge and countercharge, will occupy politicians and professional propagandists, White and Red. Concessions and commercial opportunities are fascinating traders and merchandisers of credit. But the basic issue belongs to mankind.
In the first place: The impetus and direction given to evolutionary thought by the morbid pessimism of so many Russian intellectuals during the latter half of the nineteenth century only served to tighten the noose around their own necks. Thirty-seven years before the storm broke that destroyed and dispersed such an unbelievably large number of Russian intellectuals, Feodor Dostoievsky, one of Russia's most gifted sons, addressed a notable gathering of fellow authors, publicists, and officials at the unveiling of the Pushkin Memorial in Moscow. This statue stands near the site of the old Tverskaya Gate where the Sadovaya Boulevard crosses the Tverskaya. It is one of the busiest corners in Moscow. I have often paused beneath that huge bronze figure and visualized the brilliant scene on that June day, in the year 1880. Where now congregate innumerable nondescripts, mostly ragged children peddling cigarettes and sunflower seeds to the jostling crowds of young Communists who saunter through this popular boulevard on summer evenings, then stood a distinguished audience composed of the élite of Moscow and old St. Petersburg society. With all the liberty and authority of his literary eminence, and with a vision clarified by his four years of imprisonment in Siberia, Dostoievsky flayed them unmercifully. He pictured the abyss toward which the cynics, lounging luxuriously in gilded salons, were dragging unhappy Russia. Their cosmopolitan education, he said, obtained abroad, had estranged them from their own people; they had formed a little class which despised the common herd for their ignorance, and yet did nothing to remove it, or to develop the sacred ideals that smoulder in the breast of every moujik. He scored the lack of understanding and sympathy shown by the upper classes toward the great peasant masses and accused the Russian intellectuals, as a body, of endeavoring to transform his beloved Russia into a grotesque caricature of Europe. Whereas in Western Europe, he said, he had found that parents strove to evoke patriotism in the hearts of their children and to make them good Englishmen, good Frenchmen, good Italians, Russian parents seemed engaged in awakening in the child a positive hatred of their fatherland as if it were an offense in the nostrils of humanity.
"It is we," writes Dostoievsky's daughter, Aimée, "we, the hapless victims of the Russian Revolution, who now see all his predictions fulfilled and have to expiate the irresponsible chatter of the liberals."
The Viscount de Voguë, in his severe but penetrating analysis of Russian temperament in the "forties," comments on the same blunder:—
The Minister of Education himself sent his own candidates to Berlin or Gottingen. These young men, when properly loaded with moral philosophy and the leaven of Liberalism,—equipped with ideas for which there was no use in their own country,—return to Russia discontented and rebellious. The Minister was eternally bewailing the astonishing sight of a hen hatching ducklings. These suspicious emissaries of the West were recommended to the care of the Police—whilst others continued to be sent the same school.(2)
Griboyedov, in his comedy, Misfortune from Intelligence, satirizes the same superficiality.
Ivan Bunin, perhaps best known for his realistic searching for the roots of evil in The Village (1910), had long before seen the gathering storm cloud. After his escape from Russia he wrote:—
What the Russian Revolution turned into very soon none will comprehend who has not seen it. This spectacle was utterly unbearable to anyone who had not ceased to be a man, in the image and likeness of God, and all who had a chance to flee fled from Russia. Flight was sought by the vast majority of the most prominent Russian writers, primarily, because in Russia there awaited them either senseless death at the hands of the first chance miscreant drunk with licentiousness and impunity, with rapine, with wine, with blood, with cocaine; or an ignominious existence as a slave in the darkness, teeming with lice, in rags, amid epidemic diseases, exposed to cold, to hunger, to the primitive torments of the stomach, and absorbed in that single degrading concern, under the eternal threat of being thrown out of his mendicant's den into the street, of being sent to the barracks to clean up the soldiers' filth, of being, without any reason whatever, arrested, beaten, abused, of seeing one's own mother, sister, or wife violated, and yet having to preserve utter silence....
Some critics have called me bitter and gloomy. I do not think that this definition is fair and accurate. But of course I have derived much honey and still more bitterness from my wanderings throughout the world and my observations of human life. I had felt a vague fear for the fate of Russia when I was depicting her. Is it my fault that reality, the reality in which Russia has been living for over five years now, has justified my apprehensions beyond all measure; that those pictures of mine which had once upon a time appeared black and wide of the truth, even in the eyes of Russian people, have become prophetic, as some call them now?
But nobody—at least among the autocrats—heeded the rumbling of a distant drum. They could not see Birnam Wood for the trees until each tree moved, with its armed man, on Dunsinane, and the witches' curse was fulfilled.
Secondly: The "land hunger" of the peasants, that perennial thirst of primitive agricultural communities, was but poorly satisfied, nay, was aggravated, by the terms of the political Emancipation of 1861, which still left them, to all intents and purposes, economic serfs. In the latter part of the following chapter we shall examine that phase in greater detail.
Thirdly: The "constitution hunger" of the moderate and truly patriotic liberals and constructive intellectual was answered by a stupid policy of savage repression and a reassertion of autocracy that drove the revolutionaries underground, thus creating a multiplicity of secret organizations dedicated to the overthrow of Tzardom through ruthless direct action and political assassination. In a succeeding chapter we shall see more of this duel between the government and the secret societies, particularly during the typical reigns of Alexander III and Nicholas II, when governmental reaction reached its apex of folly.
Fourthly: The rapid growth of industrial and factory life in Russia, notably from 1867 to 1897, without a corresponding improvement in the status of labor gave rise to a bitter class consciousness. And class consciousness is the fertile soil where professional agitators sow the bitter seeds of class hatred. Class hatred is the sure herald of revolution.
Fifthly: The bewildering ethnological composition of the population, which was nothing more than a loose agglomeration of over two hundred unassimilated nationalities, will, I think, bear me out in believing that Russia was probably the only land on the face of the earth that could have produced so swiftly and so completely the chaotic enigma she now presents to the civilized world. Walk with me through the streets of Moscow, that mart where East and West meet, but blend not. Let your gaze range from the fair-haired Slav of Aryan Russia and Siberia to the semibarbaric countenances and Asiatic types discernible among the slant-eyed soldiers, worshipers of Buddha, who thronged the streets in 1922. Scrutinize the brutal physiognomy of the Lettish janizaries that guard the Kremlin, worshipers of no God save Nikolai Lenin, whose corpse now lies embalmed before its walls; read the consciousness of an awakened East in the swarthy Mohammedan peddler from Turkestan, in the emancipated Jew already uneasy for his life because of his swift ascent to power and affluence and in the turbaned rug dealer from Bokhara, squatting idly on his wares and dreaming of the promises of the Prophet.
Then ride southward and eastward to the Cossack villages along the frozen Don, there to study the pitiful remnants of those incomparable horsemen whose wild riding struck terror into the finest troops of Europe; or push farther eastward to the settlements of the Mongoloid Kalmuks, worshipers of Lama; enter the tents of skin that shelter the Kirghiz and the Chuvash; undertake even to catalogue those other seminomadic tribes inhabiting the foothills of the Urals and the mountainous regions between the Black Sea and the Caspian.
Russian ethnologists find in the Caucasus alone, that sieve which caught and deposited so many types from the unceasing migrations surging to and from Europe, something like two hundred distinct races. You will find tribes in the mountains of Daghestan whose speech is absolutely unintelligible to their neighbors in the nearest village! On his return from this region, in March 1923, Dr. Frank Golder, special investigator of famine conditions for the American Relief Administration, regaled us at Moscow headquarters with reports that would have sounded fantastic on the lips of another man. The learned Professor of History at Leland Stanford University described the inquisitive interest shown in this strange American by the primitive mountaineers. Their first curiosity satisfied, they interrogated Professor Golder about America. Was it not on the under side of the earth and so in darkness? Did not men plough the fields with oxen bearing candles on their horns? How did he get to their land, except by a big hole through the earth? They knew the Tzar had a ladder for that. But how could men walk upright in America, being, as it were, upside down? They must crawl about like flies on a ceiling!
Or, traveling westward, take your stand among the sturdy Ukrainian peasants in the "Black Earth" region that was once the richest granary in Europe. Pass through the trim, orderly villages of German colonists in the North Crimea and round about Saratov. In a word, visualize the component human elements of the far-flung empire of the Tzars and you will begin to appreciate what Kipling mean when he wrote that Russia must be considered, not as the most eastern of Western nations, but as the most westerly nation of the East. And you cannot help but agree that this heterogeneous admixture of races, religions, and antagonistic interests contained within itself the fatal germs of domestic discord, the seeds of fratricidal strife and bloody revolution, to end eventually in complete economic and social disintegration.
Russia was an ethnological museum superintended by a vigilant autocrat and policed by the notorious Third Section of Chancery, the Political Police. The origin and activities of this progenitor of the Bolshevist "Cheka" have been minutely described by one who felt its heavy hand, Prince Peter Kropotkin, in his Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Founded by Peter the Great as a Secret Department, it was an omnipotent institution, a true "state within a state"; its agents were found in every populous town and at every railway station, spying on functionaries of the Empire as well as on citizens suspected of liberal thought or action. Ignoring law and law courts, the Third Section arrested whom it chose, kept its victims imprisoned as long as it pleased, and transported thousands to Northeast Russia or Siberia at the whim of its all-powerful camarilla. The fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul was its Bastille. There Peter the Great tortured his son Alexis and killed him with his own hand; there Princess Tarakonova was immured in a cell which filled with water during an inundation, the rats climbing upon her shoulders to save themselves from drowning; there the relentless Minich tortured his enemies and Catherine II buried alive those who objected to her having murdered her husband. From the days of Peter I, throughout two hundred years, this forbidding pile of stone rising from the Neva directly in front of the Winter Palace of the Tzars received an unending procession of men and women condemned to a living death, or to be murdered outright, or to be driven to insanity in the loneliness of those damp and dismal dungeons below the level of the river.
This central stronghold of the autocracy was plainly visible from the windows of the Winter Palace. When the overseer fell and his policeman was murdered, bedlam broke loose in the Empire. It cannot be too often repeated, therefore, that the Russian fact, as crystallized in Bolshevism, is essentially different from reparations, the evacuation of the Ruhr, immigration, disarmament, the League, or the World Court. Each of these current themes, though of tremendous international importance, is nevertheless a political problem, a military question, or a legal device to promote peace. But the Russian challenge involves all these elements, because it is a human problem, a social challenge directed not only to the 146,000,000 Russians directly involved, but extending its influence to every corner of the globe where men strive for human betterment or gird themselves to die for liberty.
Russia was a pyramid, but an inverted pyramid with a huge, unwieldy, and inert superstructure of discontented, illiterate masses balanced unsteadily on that slender apex furnished by the fraction of the population included in the nobility, the aristocracy, and the bureaucracy. With the crumbling of the demoralized autocracy, upon which practically the whole of organized life was balanced, human society turned turtle. As the area affected was one sixth of the surface of this planet, and as the human element then involved numbered over 180,000,000 people, the resulting chaos was proportionate to the possibilities for disorder and destruction, which were boundless, inherent in such an unstable system, never far from the surface and only outwardly controlled by the Okhrana, the secret police of the Tzars. Consequently, when the crash came, it marked the most stupendous single political event, I believe, since the break-up of the Roman Empire. Not only did the ensuing human wreckage cover the plains of Muscovy, but the flotsam and the jetsam have been washed up on every shore of the civilized world.
Russia was the last island fortress of absolutism in the rising tide of democracy, the outstanding anachronism of the twentieth century. Ringed round by the bayonets of the Preobrazhensky and Volinsky regiments, its ukases executed by the knouts of Cossacks and the flashing sabres of the Hussars, it defied the elements for three hundred years—until the deluge came.
Then, too, the influence of sectarianism cannot be overlooked in any complete account of the progress of revolution in Russia. Apart from the twelve million Roman Catholics residing within the confines of the Empire, mainly of Polish origin and consequently treated with hostility as tolerated aliens, and the seven millions or more of Lutherans, there existed a bewildering complexity of dissident sects. Tenacious of their old and new beliefs, fanatically opposed to the state religion, the sectarians were prepared to die, as they frequently did, for their religious practices. If we add to the strictly Orthodox communities of Raskolniks (Separatists) and Starovyeri (Old Believers) the rationalist and chiliastic groups, the Adventists and the New Adventists, the Nemoliakhi and Neplatel'schiki (nonpayers of taxes), the Stranniki (pilgrims), the Medal'shchiki (medalists), the Jehovists (universal brothers), the Sviadodukhovsti (adherents of the Holy Ghost), the Dukhobors and Molokani (Zionists), the Fire Baptists and Morelashchiki (self-immolators), the Khlysty (scourgers), the Skoptsy (self-mutilators), and the Trudnoviki (cloistral communists), a total is reached which embraced probably a third of the population. And since orthodoxy and autocracy were inseparably linked in the Russian idea of the State, non-conformists were penalized and systematically oppressed. The victims were in moral and intellectual rebellion long before the armed revolt of 1917. They constituted a socio-political factor of truly elemental power, smouldering with resentment and ripe for explosion.
You must revise your standards of measurement when you approach things Russian, at least if you would understand her and judge her aright. Russia always suggested to Occidental minds men and events on a huge scale—physical giants bearded and wrapped in skins of animals, imposing grenadiers, boundless plains called "steppes" that tire the eye with their unending monotony, wildernesses of snow and ice, bitter, cruel cold, hunger, famine, bloody peasant revolts like those of Pugachev and Stenka Razin, and other elemental things.
Four words, Tzar, Siberia, vodka, pogrom, exhausted the common ideology. And that mythical band of hard-pressed travelers, galloping madly across snow fields and casting a succulent child into the gleaming fangs of yelping wolves, sufficed as a satisfactory epitome of Russian manners and customs.
The literary, the spiritual, the scientific, and the artistic achievements of Russia were, until comparatively recent times, known only to connoisseurs, students, and occasional pioneers. "Very few people born west of Riga," writes Prince Mirsky in his Contemporary Russian Literature, "knew anything at all about the facts that are relevant in this connection." In the United States, particularly, the common judgment was inspired by experience with the streams of Jewish immigrants and husky Slavs making for the Scranton coal fields or Pittsburgh factories; a Mousorgsky, a Tchaikovsky, and a Rimski-Korsakov in music, a Mendeléev in science, and Soloviev, the Newman of Russian philosophy, could with difficulty hope for the popular acclaim accorded to a Mr. Irving Berlin.
It was only the occasional traveler or diplomat and trader who came to appreciate the cosmopolitan refinements of the Nevsky Prospekt that made old St. Petersburg another Paris transplanted to northern snows by the Europeanizing policies of Peter the Great, and made the Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most in Moscow rival the Rue de la Paix of Paris. Even the railroads in Russia are built with a wider gauge than those of Western Europe. This peculiarity was as deliberate as it was symbolic, serving as a physical device to isolate Russia. It caused considerable inconvenience to the American Relief Administration during the famine, as all supplies shipped via the Polish route had to be unloaded at Stolpce and reloaded into Russian wagons. But on the through line from Berlin to Riga via Eydtkunen in East Prussia, and Wirballen in Lithuania, the Germans, during heir occupation of the Baltic provinces, had the foresight to Europeanize the tracks. They moved one rail nearer the other and then cut off the superfluous ends of the crossties, so that the Russian gauge could not be restored without rebuilding the entire system.
Geographically, Russia was a Triton among the minnows. Glance at a map of Europe! Politically, Russia was "the bear that walks like a man." Now, the bear is a huge, lumbering animal whose hug means death. Persia, Mongolia, Manchuria, and China experienced that squeeze within our own memory and Constantinople has never been quite out of the shadow of the overstretched paw.
1. " Drive out Nature with a pitchfork, she will come back every time."—Horace