LANCASHIRE AND THE FAR EAST
JAPAN’S FEET OF CLAY
JAPAN’S GAMBLE IN CHINA
CHINA AT WAR
THE DREAM WE LOST
THIS BOOK is in part a record of my personal experiences in the U.S.S.R. during the five and a half years I lived there, and in part an account of the new system of exploitation developed in Russia by the Communist dictatorship. This new system is one which not only orthodox Communists, but a whole host of socialists, liberals, and so- called progressives of various kinds, call “socialism,” and regard from afar as a beacon light of hone for a crisis-ridden and war-torn world. Perhaps this new system is socialism, but anyone who knows what life is like in Russia must recognize that this new society has nothing in common with the society of the free and equal which socialists believed would follow the breakdown of the capitalist system. I hope that those socialists and Communist fellow travelers who still reason, and whose humanitarian impulses have not been entirely destroyed by “religious” zeal and scholastic dogma, will have the patience to examine the facts here presented, and to listen to the experiences of one who once also believed that the Communists would emancipate mankind.
Not only do Stalin and his henchmen wield a power more absolute than any despot of past ages, but it is obvious from an examination of official Soviet figures of wages and production under the Five Year Plans that the Russian people are worse fed, housed, and clothed than before the Revolution. There is grave doubt as to the accuracy of the Soviet Government’s statistics, but if the true state of Russia’s national economy is even worse than I have depicted it in Chapters VI, VII, and VIII of this book, the picture revealed by a careful analysis of the official data is dark enough to disillusion all those who do not refuse to see. It should also now be clear to the plan-mad liberals of the Western world that Russia’s reputedly planned economy is a myth, and that production and distribution are in a far more chaotic state in the U.S.S.R. than under the capitalist system in its periods of worst crisis.
I shall, perhaps, be accused of being prejudiced by my personal ex- periences. So also, no doubt, have the victims of all tyrannies been prejudiced, whether they were slaves in the ancient world, or heretics persecuted by the Inquisition, or victims in Nazi concentration camps.
My disillusionment did not, in any case, come suddenly as the result of my husband’s arrest and imprisonment without trial in 1936. It was a disillusionment which had begun in 1930 and had become more abso- lute with each month and year I lived in the U.S.S.R.
Disillusionment is, however, a negative process. Unless one is to abjure life itself one must endeavor not only to learn from experience but also to face disagreeable realities. Because the hopes of one’s youth are dimmed, because history has not worked out in the way one ex- pected, and because certain basic changes are taking place in the world which are distasteful or hateful, one should not ignore them or think one can halt them by force. We can perhaps moderate present histori- cal trends, and to some extent control our destinies, by a fearless ex- amination of what is occurring. But we cannot bid the world stand still because we dislike its evolution. For this reason I have not confined myself in this book to an account of the Soviet way of life, but have added some chapters dealing with the lessons of the Bolshevik Revolution and comparing Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia.
My thanks are due to the authors or publishers who have given me permission to quote from the following books: Stalin’s Russia, by Max Eastman (W. W. Norton) ; Stalin, by Boris Souvarine (Alliance) ; Proletarian Journey, by Fred Beale (Hillman- Curl); World Communism, by Franz Borkenau (W. W. Norton); Vingt Ans au Service de L’U.R.S.S., by Alexandre Barmine (Albin Michel) ; In Stalin’s Secret Service, by W. G. Krivitsky (Harper and Bros.); The Voice of Destruction, by Hermann Rauschning (G. P. Putnam’s Sons); The lrampire Economy, by Guenter Reimann (Vanguard) ; The United States of Europe, by Alfred Bingham (Duell). My particular thanks are due to Professor Vladimir Tchernavin for permission to reproduce in Chapter IX a long passage from his per- sonal account of life in a Russian concentration camp, published in the Slavonic Review. I have made a number of references to the valu- able work done on Soviet economy by Mr. L. E. Hubbard, author of Soviet Trade and Distribution, and other works published in England. I have also referred to data supplied in Professor Florinsky’s well-documented Toward an Understanding of the USSR.
| PART I | ||
| I | Prologue To Disillusionment | 3 |
| II | The Miscarriage Of Bolshevists | 33 |
| III | Learning The Soviet Way Of Life | 59 |
| IV | Life In Moscow-1932-1936 | 94 |
| PART II | ||
| V | What Is Socialism | 125 |
| VI | The Servitude Of The Peasants And Taxation Of The People’s Food | 147 |
| VII | Servitude Of The Workers | 172 |
| VIII | The Cost Of Soviet Industrialization | 196 |
| IX | The New Method Of Exploitation | 218 |
| X | Arrest | 260 |
| PART III | ||
| XI | Nazi Germany And Soviet Russia | 277 |
| XII | Making The World Safe For Stalin | 312 |
| XIII | Can National Socialism Be Tamed? | 335 |
| Index | 365 |
I FIRST VISITED the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1927, at the time when Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” was still in force, Trotsky not yet exiled, although already eliminated from the political scene, and the people of Russia enjoying a measure of material prosperity and a degree of liberty unknown three years later. Although there was still a society which might be called semisocialist, the signs of degeneration were already perceptible if one had the wit to see them. But I came as a delegate, an enthusiastic and youthful Communist recently emerged from the chrysalis of the Labour party, ready to believe most, if not all, that I was told, and without any previous experience of a police state to teach me that no one would dare speak his mind to a foreigner. The days when I was to live in Moscow as an ordinary citizen were still far off; and such Russian friends as I had in Moscow, although not all of them Bolsheviks, still fervently believed in the “good society” being created in the U.S.S.R.
“One’s character is one’s fate,” and one’s character is no doubt mainly the product of environment. But it is only as one approaches middle age that one can look back and see how the influences of one’s early youth determined the course of one’s life. Those influences in my case were both socialist and liberal. It was a passion for the emancipa- tion of mankind rather than the blueprint of a planned society or any mystical yearning to merge myself in a fellowship which led me to enter the Soviet Union and to leave it six years later with my political beliefs and my personal happiness alike shattered.
I came to communism via Greek history, the French revolutionary literature I had read in childhood, and the English nineteenth-century poets of freedom; not as a revolt; against a strict bourgeois upbringing, nor on account of failure to make a place for myself in capitalist society, but profoundly influenced by a happy childhood, a socialist father, and a Continental education. For me the communist ideal seemed the fulfillment of the age-long struggle of mankind for freedom and justice. I was, perhaps, mainly attracted to communism by its internationalism and its anti-imperialism. The Labour party in England had alienated me by its participation in the exploitation and oppression of the conquered races of Africa and Asia. My studies both of ancient history and modern economics made me abhor slavery in any form, and the Communists were the only socialists whose ideal was a world-wide equality and liberty. The same influences of my upbring- ing which by 1925 had turned my hopes toward the U.S.S.R., were to make it impossible for me to accept the Soviet regime once I came to know it intimately. I was, in Stalinist phraseology, a “rotten liberal,” a “petty bourgeois intellectual”-one who foolishly desired social justice, freedom, and equality, and had imagined that socialism meant an end to oppression and injustice.
My father, whose influence over me was profound, had known William Morris in his youth, had been a friend of Marx’s daughters and an associate of Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, and other Fabians. He had taken part in the great labor struggles of the late eighties and nineties, had been arrested with John Burns in a demonstration in Trafalgar Square, and had spoken from the same platform as Friedrich Engels in Manchester. Although he had retired from politics soon after I was born, I had been brought up in the socialist tradition.
My mother, daughter of a radical North Country family, had met my father at the age of sixteen when Aveling (the famous translator of Marx’s Capital, who married Eleanor Marx) had brought him to my grandfather’s house in Manchester. My grandfather, although a “bourgeois,” being a manufacturer, was a free-thinker and a republi- can, and boasted of how his wife’s mother, when very ill, had hidden the great Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor, in her bed when the police were searching the house for him.
My mother, one of nine children, had shown an unusual inde- pendence by leaving her comfortable home to train as a nurse in London, and had there secretly married my father against the wishes of my grandfather. For in spite of his radicalism he considered marriage to a poor journalist most undesirable. When my mother left the hospital to live with my father, he was both leader-writer and musical critic on the Star, most famous liberal newspaper of the time.
My father’s Marxism, like that of many English Socialists, was colored and humanized by the nineteenth-century liberal atmosphere, and he early implanted in my mind those libertarian values which have consciously or unconsciously motivated me all my life.
The favorite tales of my childhood were Greek legends and Norse sagas, and when I first started to read history my heroes were Pericles and the Gracchi. From an early age I loved the poems of Shelley, and in my teens I could recite long passages of Swinburne and the choruses of Euripides by heart. Swinburne’s love poems I rejected as incomprehensible aberrations from the glorification of freedom and the denunciation of tyranny which I loved. I thrilled to such lines as
Pride have all men in their fathers that were free before them, In the wan-iors that begat us freeborn pride have we; But the fathers of their spirit, how may men adore them; With what rapture may we praise who bade our sotlls be free. Sons of Athens born in spirit and truth are all born free men; Most of all, we, nurtured where the North wind holds his reign. Children all we sea-folk of the Salaminian seamen, Sons of them that beat back Persia, they that beat back Spain.
Brought up to be an atheist and to consider religion as the root of tyranny and cruelty, freedom of the spirit appeared to me as an indispensable condition for the economic and political emancipation of mankind, At the outset I failed to perceive the religious side of communism, but later it was my deeply rooted distrust of idolatry and superstition which finally made it impossible for me to accept Stalin as a god, and impelled me to recoil in horror from the degradation and enslavement of the human mind which are the predominant features of Stalin’s Russia. The rationalism of my upbringing and its anti- religious and international emphasis made it impossible for me to persuade myself that “socialist brotherhood” justified the imposition of torture and death on millions of innocent people, and the excommunication of those who questioned a single act of the self- appointed Communist “Leader.”
Max Eastman, in his illuminating analysis of the motive patterns of socialism, has distinguished the “fraternal passion” impulse as the one which finds satisfaction in Stalin’s totalitarian state capitalism. Socialists motivated by the “thirst for co-operative emotion, for the sense of membership in a totality” can excuse the crimes and cruelty and hypocrisy of the U.S.S.R. and find nothing wrong with a society in which not only is human freedom dead, but the very concept of freedom has become “counter-revolutionary.” Hence the Dean of Canterbury praises Soviet Russia from the same unconscious motives as impelled the Dominican friars to uphold the Church of Rome in the days of the Inquisition. The Russian Bolshevik party to him, as to the Webbs, the editors of the New Republic, and scores of other “socialists” in England and America, is-or was-a “brotherhood” which they uphold as Catholics and Protestants upheld the religious fanatics who drenched Europe in blood during the Wars of Religion.
To these so-called socialists and liberals, Stalin’s bloodstained tyranny, which has enslaved the whole Russian people, is a “classless” society to be praised, lied about, and imitated. They have been as ready to condone the crimes of the Soviet Government as sincere Christians on either side were to glorify the devastating wars and the persecution inflicted to ensure entry into Paradise for the converts to the “true faith.”
Those, on the other hand, whose motive pattern is the emancipation of mankind, cannot accept tyranny, cruelty, and oppression as good, merely because a new set of people are inflicting them upon the mass of the people in the name of a new ideal. Lenin himself saw human freedom as the goal of the class struggle. The tragedy has been that in confining the conception of freedom to a minority and in inflaming the hatreds of mankind, he laid the foundations for a worse tyranny than the world had yet known.
Looking back at the influences which shaped my political thought in early years, I realize that the experience of going to an expensive boarding school in England helped to lay the psychological foundations in my unconscious for the militant communism which in my twenties supplanted the vague and academic socialist outlook of my early youth.
From the age of nine to thirteen, I had lived on the Continent, first traveling with my parents and then, at the age of eleven, being sent to boarding school on the Lake of Geneva. Those two years at school in French Switzerland among German girls “finishing” their education, was one of the happiest periods of my life; the four succeeding years at boarding school in England among the most unhappy. In Switzerland I was at first the only English pupil, and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The atmosphere was not unlike that of my home-studious, tolerant, kindly, and healthy. We skated, skiied, and tobogganed in winter, bathed in the Lake of Geneva, and rowed and walked in the summer. But sport was regarded as a pleasure, not as a duty, and study-real hard study-was demanded of us all. My brother was at school a quarter of a mile away across fields, and I had the run of his school as well as of my own. There were boys there from at least a dozen countries and of all ages from twelve to eighteen. I went there for fencing lessons, and my brother and I also had riding lessons together. One summer I went climbing in the mountains for a fortnight with the boys of his school, dressed as a boy and climbing the same mountains as boys of seventeen and eighteen. In that period of my life I had no feeling that boys and girls were so very different; and, mixing with English, Germans, French, Swiss, Italians, and other nationalities, speaking French fluently and German almost as well, I was little aware of national barriers and was imbued with an international outlook which neither my father’s in- fluence nor theoretical socialist teaching alone could ever have given me.
From those pleasant and educative days in Switzerland, I was plunged into the frigid, mentality-destroying atmosphere of an English boarding school for girls which aped the British “Public Schools” for boys. There was no fagging and physical brutality as in the boys’ public schools-being physically very strong I should have been able to cope with that. But there was mental, or perhaps one should call it social, bullying of the worst kind. The greatest offenses against the social code which ruled the school were to study hard, or to show any originality in dress or behavior. I was handicapped from the start by having a slightly foreign accent-my r’s were French r’s-and I offended constantly. I can still remember being made to stand up in class to say “stirrup” over and over again, unable to pronounce the r in the English way.
I worked hard and I refused to be dictated to as to whether I should wear a black or a colored ribbon in my hair. I tried to avoid the disciplined games which bored me to go for walks instead. My sins against the social code were at first unconscious, then deliberate. The spirit of rebellion now, for the first time, had been awakened in me. Dimly I began to feel that the social hierarchy and the social code which governed the school were precisely that “capitalist system” which, as a socialist, 1 thought was the cause of all social injustice. The girls at my school came in later life to symbolize “the imperialist English bourgeoisie” in my unconscious mind : class-conscious, sublimely self-confident and scornful of learning. (The profound change brought about by the World War in the outlook of the English upper classes has since those days transformed the atmosphere of English private schools as of English ruling circles.)
Of course I made some friends, but they were rebels like myself. I was a favorite pupil of the head mistress, who imagined I was going to reflect glory on the school by future academic distinctions. She lent me books, gave me special facilities for study, in particular a room to myself. But in the end she did more to awaken my budding revolutionary outlook than anyone else. When the war came in 1914, my father was ruined. I was sixteen and had already passed my Little Go (entrance to Cambridge University). The head of my school, still thinking I would go to the University and win laurels for the school, gave me a year’s scholarship. I began working for a scholarship to Cambridge, but it soon became clear that when I got it I should not be able to go to Cambridge, because my father was becoming more and more ill of tuberculosis and I should have to start earning money as soon as I left school. The head mistress began to make it very clear to me that my presence at the school was no longer welcome. Instead of arranging for me to go to London University-where, as I learned years later, I could have obtained a scholarship sufficient to keep me altogether-she cast me off, as no longer of any interest or value to the school. She let it be known that I was in the school free and that my people were now almost destitute. My home world had fallen to pieces, my brother was in the army, my father becoming so ill that we knew he would soon die. I left school with no regrets, and with personal experience to teach me that the social system could fling one into poverty from security, and prevent one from having an education even when one had proved one’s mental qualifications.
At school I had been earnest, wary and distrustful of my fellow creatures, purposeful, and, I imagine, sadly lacking in a sense of humor. Life was serious, life was earnest, and one must struggle without ceasing against one’s environment. As soon as I began to earn my living in an office, I began to find the world as friendly and decent a place as I had thought it when I lived in Switzerland, or traveled in France and Italy with my parents. I found the lower middle-class clerks I worked among at the War Office friendly, kind, and pleasant people. I even learned to laugh.
The death of my father in January 1918 brought me the first great grief of my life. I had loved him very dearly, and I had thought him the most wonderful person in the world-wise, tolerant, kind, never ill-tempered, and until the last absorbed in the course of history rather than in himself. He had died in extreme poverty in a tiny cottage in Cornwall, so primitive that my mother had to fetch water in a bucket from a pump across the fields. I was eighteen, and I had seen him choking to death as his exhausted heart could no longer pump blood through his diseased lungs. Half unconscious at the end, he had murmured Shakespeare’s words about the bourne from which no traveler returneth, and said to us he was now only curious to know whether he was right in thinking that death was nothingness.
My brother was in Mesopotamia, and I brought my mother up to London. We lived in a small flat on the £2.5.0. which I was then earning as a clerk in the War Office. Fairly soon I earned more; but with a rent of 16/- and war prices for food, we had a fairly hard time.
During these war years I was too busy coping with the economic difficulties which had overwhelmed us, to think much about socialism; but, although I had gone to work as a clerk in the War Office early in 1917, my father’s teachings and my Continental education pre- vented my ever becoming a “patriot.” I never thought of the Ger- mans, among whom I had been at school from the ages of eleven to thirteen, as any worse than the English, although I had some slight prejudice against the French as the most chauvinist and military- minded nation in Europe. This was probably due to the overdose of French literature I had swallowed while at school in Switzerland, which had given me a conception of the French as a nation eternally seeking la gloire and honoring the Napoleonic tradition above the revolutionary one.
At the War Office I soon became a branch secretary of the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, then endeavoring to organize women “black-coated” workers. Through this trade-union I obtained, in 1920, a Bursary to study at London University. My brother Temple, wounded for the second time in France in 1918 and demobilized early in 1919, was already at London University on a grant from an officers’ fund. Once at college I began to take an active and prominent part in the socialist movement, becoming secretary of the King’s College Socialist Society, and later chairman of the London University Labour party. I joined the Independent Labour party and devoted all the time I had over from study and from teaching in the evenings, to political activity.
Since my brother and I were supporting my mother, our Bursaries were not sufficient for us to live on. We both gave lessons in English to foreigners, helped by our knowledge of French and German. My brother had pupils at the Czecho-Slovak Legations- his checks, we called them-and I had Russians. Teaching English to the Soviet employees of the Trade Delegation first brought me in contact with Bolshevik theory. From the beginning I had been a defender of the Russian Revolution; but I had no more knowledge or understanding of communist theories than the Parlor Bolsheviks of today have of Marx. Nor did my first pupils enlighten me, for they were high Party officials out to enjoy life in the “capitalist world” after the rigors of Moscow, and confining their “propaganda” to jokes about England. Then I met Plavnik, an old Bolshevik who had lived long years in exile in Germany after the revolution of 1905. To him Bolshevik theory was the breath of life. He was honest and sincere, although extremely vain. His “English lessons” usually became my German lessons and lessons in Marxian theory, from which, however, I might have benefited more had he been a little less philosophical, dialectic, and involved, and a little more concrete. For I was by this time an ardent and active member of the Independent Labour party, admiring the Soviet Union, convinced that the official British Labour party was too “reformist” ever to establish socialism, and in revolt against the underlying imperialist concepts of the British Labour movement.
Plavnik was the most humane of men, and later on in Moscow where he remained my friend, he sank more and more into his shell, unable to defend, but unwilling to condemn outright, the atrocities committed by Stalin; unable to face up to the fact that the revolutionary movement to which he had given his whole life had failed and degenerated into Stalin’s tyranny. We saw less and less of him because meetings were too painful between friends who dared not speak out their thoughts to each other. Plavnik was lucky enough to go into an insane asylum just before the great purge began; at least that is where he was supposed to be early in 1936, and we knew his mental faculties had been failing since the death of his wife a year or two before.
As early as 1923 I was a passionate defender of the U.S.S.R. In that year I was the college speaker in a debate on Russia, together with H. N. Brailsford. Our opponents were C. H. Driver, a fellow history student, now a Professor at Yale, and Sir Bernard Pares. When next I met Pares twelve years later, he and I had changed places. He had become the defender of the U.S.S.R. and I was back in England, hold- ing my tongue for my husband’s sake, but hating Stalin’s Russia. The change, I believe, was in Russia, not in us.
From 1925 onwards I was drawing ever closer to the Communists. I stood with them against the Right Wing in the London University Labour party, and in the University Labour Federation. I began to read their literature. The only influence which held me back for a time from joining the Communist party was that of Bertrand Russell, and unfortunately it was insufficient. I had met him first when he came to speak for the King’s College Socialist Society in 1923, and this had led to a friendship which has been one of the most precious and valuable things in my life. In the Easter vacation of 1926 I spent a month with him and Dora Russell in Cornwall, teaching his young son in the mornings, walking, talking, and bathing in the afternoons, reading aloud in the evenings. B. R. tried hard to convince me that the Marxist theory was untenable in the light of modern physics. I wrote to my mother in April 1926:
Tell Temple I have been driven to try and understand relativity in order to understand what Russell thinks about Russia! I am reading the A.B.C. of Relativity, with Russell sitting near me to explain what I don’t understand. He is most awfully kind to me.
Unfortunately, I never understood the theory of relativity. In spite of Russell’s patience and the time he was prepared to waste on my education, my mind could not grasp either the theory or the basic connection between Marxism and Newton’s theory of gravity. Nor would I accept the truth of his Theory and Practise of Bolshevism. This book, written in 1920, is uncannily prophetic of the Russia I was later to know. Bertrand Russell was one of the very few who, in those early days of the Revolution, was able to perceive what manner of tree would grow from the seed which Lenin planted.
Although only experience could teach me the truth of Bertrand I Russell’s philosophy, and he failed in 1926 to prevent my making a mess of my life, his teaching did at least help to prevent my becoming a Trotskyist when I revolted against Stalinism.
When I came back to England for a few months in 1931 and stayed at his house, I was still convinced that the horrible society being created in Russia was Stalin’s fault, and that if Lenin had lived or if Trotsky’s policy had been followed, all would have been well. Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say, “No! Freda, can’t you understand, even now, that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin’s premises and Lenin’s acts? Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics?”
The General Strike of 1926 was the turning point of my earlier political development. The high hopes then raised and the “betrayal” of the workers by the T.U.C. and the Labour party led me finally into the communist fold. I became convinced of the reality of the class war, and of the fact that socialism could not be obtained “gradually”; that there was no solution for unemployment and low wages under the capitalist system; and that only the “overthrow” of the capitalist system and the “unity of the workers of the world” could save humanity from poverty and imperialist wars.
The General Strike stirred all my emotions, the more so as I was then living at Westfield College1 as a research student among the most conservative set of University teachers I had ever met. My crude, some- what childish, but I believe sincere, revolutionary reaction is expressed in the following letter written to my mother in Devonshire on May 10, 1926:
I have never lived through such a terrible week. I feel all hot inside and trembling all the time. It is such an unequal fight for us, and I want so much to help. I am speaking tonight at Edgware, I am glad to say. I wish I could speak all day-never was there a more unjust issue and more lies told by a government. Yet the Government is so ruthless it may win. It is parading armored cars about and soldiers are all over the place. The buses are running with two policemen on each and volunteer O.M.S. labor. Everything is quite safe for ordinary people like me-1 almost wish it were not! I cannot write properly, dear, I am too worried and upset. It is so dreadful not to be able to help and to have to listen to the mis- representations of the capitalists. Westfield is impossible except for a few students. I spent last night with the Boothroyds. 2 I saw Wilmot,3 who is half expecting to be arrested for sedition. Anything almost can be called sedition. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the churches proposed terms of peace: withdrawal of both lock- out and strike. The Government would not allow the proposal to be broadcast! It would be acceptable to us and not to them. I am sending you a British Worker [organ of the T.U.C.]. Will you ask Cole [a Labour man in Sidmouth] to stick it up in Sid- mouth . . .
A few years later I was to realize that the behavior of the British government was like that of a loving mother in comparison to that of the Soviet government toward the Russian working class. But I still remember the passionate anger I felt in 1926 against the “capitalist government” and its most ruthless member, Winston Churchill, who was responsible for the show of armed force and who was prepared to have the workers shot at if the strike went on. Ten years later Winston Churchill was to be the darling of the Communists and their fellow travelers; to me he has remained the prototype of a Fascist.
Today I also realize how tolerant were the Principal of Westfield College and even the staff members whom I hated and despised. No one interfered with me, even when I took a group of the undergraduates to T.U.C. headquarters to offer our services. Nor when I went off to Cornwall with A. J. Cook, Secretary of the Miners’ Union, and other speakers.
The day I was invested with my M.A. degree was the day the General Strike was called off. After bicycling across to the Senate House at South Kensington and sitting impatiently waiting in a borrowed cap and gown to receive my scroll, I tore off to T.U.C. headquarters. The bitterness of defeat and the long agony of the miners which was to follow the end of the General Strike have quite obliterated from my mind any feelings of satisfaction I may have had at the time at having got an M.A. degree with distinction.
A year later I was invited to visit the Soviet Union as representative of all the Labour and Socialist clubs in British universities (the University Labour Federation). My writings had attracted the attention of Ivan Maisky, then Counselor of the Soviet Embassy in London, and I was by that time well known, not only to the British Communist leaders, but to the chiefs of the Soviet Trade Representation. Moreover, I had met Petrovsky, the Cornintern representative in Eng- land during the General Strike, and had become very friendly with him and his wife. I was regarded, I suppose, as a promising young “intellectual” whose complete “conversion” would be useful, and who had shown some understanding of Bolshevik theory in the articles I was contributing to the New Leader, the Socialist Review, and the Labour Monthly. I intended to join the Party as soon as I returned, since it was considered desirable that I should wait until then. The propaganda effect would be greater if I joined after, not before, I saw the U.S.S.R.
My excitement at the coming trip to the Land of Promise knew no bounds. My brother, then as for a year past lying in bed in a tuberculosis sanitorium in Surrey, wrote me a few last words of caution:
MY DEAR FREDA:
This is just to wish you luck in your adventure. I think in one way you are quite right. I would do the same thing if I wanted to, I expect. After all, one must follow after one’s own thinking and one’s own desires. It is an adventure, but I do not expect for a moment that you will find what you are seeking for intellectually. Men are much of a muchness everywhere, and they behave much in the same way whatever they profess to believe.Of course you will see the country and the people and society as you wish to believe they are, at first. But later, your skepticism will re-assert itself.
But don’t join the Communist party. It seems to me a terrible thing for any intelligent person to adhere to any creed or dogma. To have to say that you accept any empirical generalization as an article of faith. I do not see why you should not work for them and with them and yet reserve your opinion about their fundamental propositions.
These sweeping generalizations are to be distrusted. Even when you are dealing with a subject like Physics-a subject by which human desires and fears are little affected in its findings, as more and more is discovered and its fundamental premises examined you are all the time modifying and modifying.
And what a phrase that “materialistic conception of history” is: “Matter’‘-the word is not really used in Physics. Bodies have mass and the mass of a body is its weight divided by the acceleration due to gravity. That is all Physics knows about it.
Matter psychologically is one’s sense of resistance-pushiness- quite different. Matter is also a “banner word,” a symbol with emotions attached to it used by various sects to throw at one another. But I must end half finished or I will lose the post. I need another four pages to explain myself.
The best of luck, my dear. All my love-
TEMPLE.
But my actions were not guided by science or philosophy; I brushed aside my brother’s arguments as I had those of Bertrand Russell. I couldn’t see that they had anything to do with the question of how to get socialism. They were all too abstract, and mine was then a concrete world. Or perhaps I was disregarding all appeals to reason in much the same way as a convert to Catholicism. I had faith and I must lose myself in the body of the church. The truth of my beliefs was not a matter of philosophical argument.
I replied to Temple from Moscow: “In spite of what you say, I must join the Communist party. I cannot live without feeling I am doing worth-while work, and I see no hope in the Labour party. I think the communist thesis is right.”
I traveled with Maisky from Berlin to Moscow, together with an- other Russian and J. W. Brown, Secretary of the Clerical Association, one of the most militant trade-unions in England. Two days after our arrival we stood in the Red Square in Moscow to witness the funeral of Voikov, murdered in Poland. This was the first demonstration I saw in the “socialist fatherland”; and I still remember vividly the exaltation, triumph, and excitement which filled my heart and mind as I stood close to Lenin’s mausoleum in the sunlight under a blue sky and saw the Red Army parade and the thousands upon thousands of demonstrators. My mind in those days was full of romantic libertarian images, and I wrote my mother after the demonstration: “People in the street look well fed enough though poorly clothed, and there seems to be such vitality and purpose among the people one meets. . . . The soldiers in the demonstration especially looked so splendid more like the Greeks of Xenephon must have looked than like the usual wooden soldier.. . .”
Visitors to the U.S.S.R. in those days were comparatively rare. There was no Intourist, and only invited delegates from trade-unions and Labour parties got the chance to travel over Russia. One was lapped around with kindness, hospitality, and good fellowship. Nor were outward signs of prosperity lacking. The market places of Moscow and other towns were overflowing with vegetables, dairy produce, milk, and other foods. New apartment houses and office buildings built in the severe but pleasing style introduced after the Revolution were much in evidence. There were no queues for bread and other foods at the state and co-operative shops, and one could buy the most delicious pastries in the world for only five kopeks. There was a shortage of manufactured goods even in the cities, but it was not to be compared to the shortage which came a few years later after the “gigantic successes on the industrial front.”
One is tempted to imagine what Russia might have become if the N.E.P. had been continued. Lenin was dead and his influence dying out. As early as 1924 the “Scissors Crisis” (the disproportion between the price of manufactures as against agricultural produce) had split the Central Committee into Left and Right factions. The disagree- ments in the Party began concerning the question of how much to take from the peasants for industrial development, and ended in the bitter controversy over collectivization. With the aid of Bucharin, Tomsky, and the others on the Right who maintained that any at- tempt to force the pace of industrialization would destroy the stimulus to labor, Stalin had just overcome Trotsky and was soon to exile him and the rest of the Left Opposition. Once quit of the Trotskyists, Stalin, in 1929, was to wipe out the Right Opposition and embark upon an ultra-Left policy of forced collectivization and intensive industrialization, Soon the U.S.S.R. was to become a country of starved peasants and undernourished workers cowed and whipped by fierce punishments to toil endlessly for a state which could not provide them even with enough to eat. But, unfortunately for my own future, I saw the U.S.S.R. during the brief period of prosperity which began in 1924 and ended in 1928.
In September 1927 I returned to England full of enthusiasm and prepared to tell the world of the wonders of the socialist fatherland. I left the L.L.P., joined the Communist party, and addressed meetings all over England. I admitted that the standard of life in Russia was still lower than in the Western capitalist countries; but I explained the need to accumulate capital for industrialization and demonstrated how, because there was no capitalist class to exploit the workers, the burden of saving was borne equally by all. I said that there was therefore no such acute misery as in the era of Britain’s industrialization in the early nineteenth century, and that all Russians were enthu- siastically collaborating in constructing socialism. And I really believed it. I felt that the gates opening upon the road to Paradise had been unlocked to mankind, and all one had to do was to convince the workers of one’s own country of the need to overthrow the capitalist class and join up with the U.S.S.R. Looking back on that distant time, distant not so much on account of the years between then and now, as on account of my bitter experience later, I wonder, did I really believe it. I suppose I did, or I should never have thrown up my job in the capitalist world and gone off with my husband to take our part, as we thought, in the construction of socialism.
Arcadi Berdichevsky, who became my husband in 1928, had worked from 1920 until 1927 at Arcos (Arcos was the Russian trading organization established in London before diplomatic) or at the Soviet Trade Representation in London. He was a Russian Jew, who had studied at Zurich Uni- versity and emigrated to the United States in 1914. In 1920 he had thrown up a very good job in New York to work for the Soviet government in London. He was not a Bolshevik, but had been a member of the Jewish Social Democratic party in Poland (the Bund), where he had lived until he went to study in Switzerland about 1910. He knew less about Soviet Russia than I did, since he had spent his whole time in England since 1920. He was a sincere Socialist, and although he was too much of a Jew and knew the old Russia too well not to Perceive the naivete of the picture I painted of the U.S.S.R., he believed as I did that a new and better world was being created in Russia. He, like me, wanted to take part in the building of that new socialist world. We knew that material conditions of life would be hard, that “living space” was difficult to obtain, and that the conveniences of life, the comforts and the pleasures, which he had for many years enjoyed abroad, were not obtainable in Russia. We also recognition of the Soviet Government enabled a Trade Representation to be established. knew that, since he was not a member of the Communist party, he could never rise to the higher positions in the Soviet state.
In 1923 Arcadi had been asked to join the Party, but he had the typical intellectual’s feeling that as he had played no part in the Revolution, he could not join now that the fighting was over, and being a member of the Party meant merely rising in the world. Also, he had something of my brother’s feeling about adherence to a creed or dogma. He worked with and for the Bolsheviks, but he was not prepared to subscribe entirely to their philosophy. He was as con- vinced as I was, however, that a new and more satisfying life awaited us in “socialist” Russia than in the “decaying” and “degenerate” bourgeois world.
At the time I met Arcadi he had reached a stage in which neither his personal life nor his comfortable “bourgeois” existence in London as a well-paid Soviet “specialist” satisfied him. He had a wife and a young son, having years before in New York married the daughter of a well-to-do Jewish family of Russian extraction. They had first become estranged when he gave up an income of $600 a month in the United States to work at Arcos for $150. By the time I knew him his salary had been increased to $500;but his wife, Anna Abramovna, had neither understanding nor sympathy for his political views and could not see why he was not satisfied by a comfortable home, a pretty wife, and a secure job. To the last she never understood why he had left her for me since, as she told her friends, I was not pretty and would never make him comfortable.
Arcadi and I knew that we loved each other after only a few meetings, but his separation from Anna Abramovna was a long and painful business. In January 1927 he asked her to divorce him, but she begged him to wait until she could join either her brother in New York or her sister in Paris. She said she could not bear the thought of their friends in London .knowing he had left her. Subsequently it became clear that she hoped all along that his feeling for me was a temporary infatuation and that if they continued to live in the same house he would return to her. Arcadi tried without success to obtain a visa for her to go to the United States but eventually secured a French one for her. However, by that time he himself was being expelled from England, and unfortunately for her own future she insisted on following him to Moscow. Since I had remained in England to finish my work, she continued to hope he would change his mind. When I finally came to Moscow they were divorced.
I had been too inexperienced fully to appreciate Arcadi’s dificulties. At times I had rebelled at his long delay in freeing himself to be with me. I had felt that he should either leave her at once or give up the idea of living with me. I knew that leaving his son was very difficult for him, but I had failed to understand that the ties between a man and a woman who have loved each other are hard for a sensitive man to break when the woman tries with every means at her disposal to maintain the old relationship. Moreover, in leaving his wife Arcadi was making a break with the “bourgeois” life he had lived since finishing his studies in Switzerland. For him I was a symbol as well as the companion in the new life in socialist society which we both expected to lead. Nearly ten years later the O.G.P.U. was to deprive me of all the letters Arcadi had written to me. But by some strange chance one he wrote to me during this difficult period of our relationship remained hidden within the pages of a book. I quote from it here as revealing a little not only of Arcadi’s state of mind at the time, but also as showing his attitude toward the Communists with whom he had decided to throw in his lot:
DARLING FREDOCHKA,
I suppose you are right in your own way, your “brutal” way, and that I shall never be able to satisfy you as to the validity of my reason for acting in the way 1 do.
I shall not pick a quarrel on what you say about my “playing about with the idea of living a different sort of life”; “desiring to go on the same way as before” and a number of other things “read at the bottom of my heart.” There is no use to argue about things on which we can never agree, and I shall not appeal to you to re- verse your decision until I can tell you that the way is clear for my giving you as much of myself as you can desire. I love you and I cannot and shall not believe that everything is over until you refuse to come to me when I shall ask you to do so on the strength of changes in my family life. There are for me two possibilities only in tbe future: either I shall embrace fully to the extent of 100 per cent the creed which will keep me going and make me forget you, or I shall accept it partially as I have done until now and you will be my beloved comrade in fighting all doubts which will arise. Nothing else is possible and the “desire to go on the same way as before” is death, which I do not feel I am ready to accept.
In September 1927, while I was still in the U.S.S.R., Arcadi had been suddenly told by the British Home Office that he must leave England at once. He thought his expulsion was due to the indiscreet and fervent letters I had sent to him from Russia, but it may have been due to the fact that, as a trusted “specialist,” the chairman of Amos had detailed him to be one of the few Soviet employees allowed to remain on the premises when the British Home Secretary, Joynson Hicks, raided the Arcos offices in June 1927.
Although at the time I was flattered to think that I was regarded as a dangerous revolutionary by the British Home Office, it was a great blow to have Arcadi expelled. I was very much in love, but I never for a moment thought of giving up my work in England to go with him to Berlin where he was stationed for the next nine months. I visited him there in the 1927 Christmas vacation but, so seriously did I take my political work that when, in February 1928, he was allowed to come to London for ten days to represent Arcos in a lawsuit, I did not give up one single evening to him. As it happened, I was then standing as the Communist party’s candidate in the London County Council Elections and was speaking either to indoor meetings or at street corners every afternoon and evening.
Meanwhile I was earning a living, with the indulgence of C. M. Lloyd, my Director of Studies, as the holder of the Ratan Tata Re- search Fellowship at the London School of Economics. I also took Workers’ Educational Association Classes, reviewed books, and wrote articles. I was by now makin, v a good living, and my mother had inherited a small income from her father. We were better off than we had been for many years, and a successful academic career was open to me. Although being a Communist in those days was a handicap, my academic distinctions and the tolerance which distinguishes most English universities ensured me a secure and pleasant career. But by this time I scorned the fruits of past years of hard study and never paused to regret the life I was leaving. The study of history could not satisfy. I yearned to take part in making it.
My Fellowship came to an end in June 1928; and, since Arcadi was by that time in the U.S.S.R. but expecting to be sent to Japan, I joined him in Moscow. Japan was the one country I particularly wished to visit, since my research work at the London School of Economics had concerned Eastern competition and the Lancashire cotton industry. This may sound a dull subject, but for me it meant a study in modern imperialism. I had chosen the subject immediately after having written a M.A. thesis on the trade guilds of the later Roman Empire, because I thought there was a parallel between the effects of slave labor on the conditions of free labor in the ancient world and the effect of colonial labor on Western labor standards in the modern world. In the course of my studies I had become interested in Japan and wished to see that strange semifeudal, semimodern imperialist state. If we could not yet live in Moscow, I was glad to get a chance to go to the Far East.
This time no smiling delegation met me at the Moscow station, and no luxurious quarters at the New Moscow Hotel awaited me. Arcadi took me to a tiny room, not more than fifteen feet by twelve feet, with a single bed, a chest of drawers, and two straight chairs. We had not even a table, and I used to cook and iron and write on the window sill. But the flat was clean, and there was only one family in each of the four rooms. For Moscow that was not too bad. Unfortunately the room was not ours, but only lent to my husband for a few weeks. During the three months we lived in Moscow we moved twice.
Arcadi’s salary was only 300 rubles a month; and, since we were ex- pecting to leave for Japan, I could not take a job. We just managed to live. Our rent was 50 rubles, meals at a cheap restaurant cost a ruble each. But bread was still cheap; and butter, when obtainable, about the same price as in England, with the ruble stabilized at 2s. Cigarettes were our greatest extravagance and difficulty. At the end of the month I used to cart bottles out to sell, or rake through our pockets for forgotten kopeks, to raise the price of a meal. We were very happy. Discomfort and comparative poverty do not matter much so long as one has faith. And we both still had faith. Arcadi never regretted his house in London, and I had been poor most of the years since 1914 I wrote to my mother:
I feel sometimes that having found Arcadi is too good to be true.
. . . I feel that the fact that we have been able to be happy together in these conditions argues well for the future. We have begun life together in the worst material conditions instead of the best. . . . All the same, we both look forward to the day when we have a bed each and spoons and knives, and a bath and toilet of our own.
I was kept busy for a time finishing a translation from the German, begun in England, of the Illustrated History of the Russian Revolution, but I found it very hard to work that summer.
I attended the sixth Congress of the Cornintern as a translator; listened to Bucharin from the visitors’ gallery; saw Borodin walking in the corridors, already disgraced but still a romantic figure; thrilled at the sight of delegates, white, black, brown and yellow, from every corner of the world assembled in the socialist capital, visible witnesses of the “Unity of the Workers of the World.”
Even in those days I had some slight deviations. I thought of Trotsky as the greatest leader, and my communism was essentially internationalist. But I never dreamed that Stalin would have the power to destroy all that Lenin and Trotsky and the other old Bolsheviks had created. Nor had I any inkling of the fundamental canker at the root of the Marxian doctrine. One believes what one wishes to believe, until experience bangs one’s head against the wall and awakens one from dreams founded on hope, a misreading of history, and ignorance both of human psychology and science.
At last, after the O.G.P.U. had fully satisfied itself concerning my husband, he obtained his passport to go to Japan for the Commissariat of Foreign Trade. We left early in October, in the chill wet Russian autumn, with the first signs of coming hardships already visible in Moscow. For some weeks I had been spending more and more time chasing after food supplies from one shop to another. Rationing had not yet been enforced, but the peasants were already refusing to sell their produce in return for money which could not buy them the clothing and other manufactures they required. Russia was on the eve of the Calvary of forced collectivization.
At Chita, in Siberia, I left my husband-he to proceed alone to Japan, I to China. To my great delight the Comintern in Moscow had entrusted me with secret papers to take to China. I was to travel across the Russian border into Manchuria and on to Shanghai alone, so that I should not be suspect. For a day before I left Moscow I had hunted in the shops for a corset so that I could hide the papers in approved Secret Service style, I was extremely uncomfortable all through that journey, but the thrill of conceiving of myself as a real revolutionary, helping to fan the flames of the world revolution and liberate the “oppressed colonial workers” sustained me even through the ordeal of being corsetted for the first time in my life.
All I remember of Chita is the intense cold, and the memorials of the Decembrists, the 150 exiled revolutionaries of 1825 who had dreamed of liberty, equality, and fraternity under the Iron Tsar, Nicholas I. Only later was it to be borne in on me how mild had been the tyranny of the Tsars compared to that of Stalin. All those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century revolutionaries whose lives were spared and who were allowed to live in Siberia with their families were in exile, it is true; but for the most part not in chains nor herded in concentration camps, and able to escape with ease if they were so minded. Today such humane and civilized treatment of political opponents is unheard of.
I was looked after in Chita by a little O.G.P.U. man who had formerly been a sailor on American boats, and whom I was to meet years later in Moscow at the Comintern. He was the sort of man who loves being conspiratorial for its own sake, and his manner of putting me on the train two days later, from the tracks instead of the platform, into a specially reserved compartment, should have aroused the suspicion of the Japanese or Chinese spies, if there had been any.
I went through a bad half-hour at the Manchurian border. A German with whom I had got friendly on the train remarked to me at the passport and customs-control oflice, that the system was to watch the faces of the travelers rather than to search their baggage carefully. A row of huge White Russian guards stood behind the Chinese customs officials watching the passengers. I have an innocent face and a British passport, and they would need to have been very suspicious to search the person of a British subject. My papers remained safe “in my bosom,” as the old novels would have said.
The Comintern, with the inefficiency characteristic of all Russian institutions, had been unaware that the fighting going on in North China had stopped all passenger traffic on the railway to Peking, and that I would therefore have to get to Shanghai by sea from Dairen. The money I had been provided with for my journey was insufficient to meet the extra expense of waiting in the hotel at Dairen for passage on the crowded boats, and I had hardly a cent of my own. So in order to preserve enough to exist on in Shanghai for the ten days I planned to stay there, I economized in Dairen by eating only one meal a day. I took the table d’hôte midday dinner at the Yamamoto Hotel and ate all through every one of its six or seven courses under the as- tonished and amused eyes of the Japanese waiters.
Eventually I got a ship to Shanghai and delivered my documents. To do this I had to go to the Palace Hotel and telephone to a certain business office, ask for a gentleman with a German name, and tell him I had brought the samples of silk hosiery. I enjoyed it all immensely, especially as I was allowed two days later to come and meet some of the Cornintern agents in Shanghai, who plied me with questions about happenings in Moscow which, in my innocence, I was unable to answer. Probably the men I met, Americans and Germans, were, if not Trotskyists, at least extremely unhappy revolutionaries, who had witnessed Stalin’s callous and cynical sacrifice of the Chinese Communists, and were watching with dismay the beginnings of his transformation of the Comintern into a mere sub-office of the Russian National State.
For a couple of weeks I lived a double, or rather a treble, life in Shanghai, spending part of my time as a serious academic investigator of conditions in the cotton industry, other hours as the guest of “British Imperialists” at luxurious dinner parties and dancing or going to theaters with them, and yet other hours in the secret meeting places of the Comintern’s agents. It was part of the game that I should mix with the “bourgeoisie,” and appear quite innocent of revolutionary activity; and my cotton industry investigations were in any case absolutely genuine. However, I am afraid I should not have been much good as a conspirator if any hard task had been assigned to me, for I was too anxious to testify to the “capitalists” concerning the rottenness of their system and the wickedness of their exploitation of the colonial workers. Thinking on one occasion to kill any doubts they might have about me, I told a Shanghai dinner party that I was doing some correspond- ence for the Manchester Guardian. This was true, and I thought it should establish my bona fides in the capitalist world. However, all values are relative. To my mind the Manchester Guardian signified the capitalist Press, but to my compatriots in Shanghai it was “that Red rag,” the paper for which “that awful fellow Arthur Ransome” wrote.
This book is not one about my adventures in the Far East, so I will pass over the year I spent in Japan with my husband. It was the happiest year of my life. We were in love; we had no money worries, for my husband was earning the to my mind princely salary of £1OO a month; and I was investigating labor conditions, calculating costs of production in the cotton industry, studying Japanese economics and politics, doing a series of well-paid articles for the Manchester Guardian Commercial, and writing my first book, Lancashire and the Far East.
Japan, however, gave me my first experience of a police state. Happy as I was under its blue skies, enjoying for the first time in my life a harmonious companionship with a man I loved, the shadow of the tyranny under which the Japanese lived kept my revolutionary fervor alive. Moreover, what my brother used to call my Puritan conscience soon made me restless. I had a deep conviction that it was wrong to be living comfortably and enjoying the greatest happiness which life can give, life with someone one loves more and more dearly as the days pass.
My letters to my mother from Japan are full of these inner misgivings :
I am living in the present for the first time in my life and I know it is dangerous . . . that I am becoming “decomposed.“4
In January 1929 I wrote:
Life now is altogether a different thing, more complete and wonderful than I ever imagined it could be. Even the love I felt for Arcadi a year ago seems a small thing now I love him so much more. There really is complete understanding between us and some- times I feel my happiness is too great to last. You know I have always felt, like the Greeks, that the Gods are jealous of human happiness. But anyhow life is worth having lived for this alone. So you see how I feel, dear, in answer to your birthday letter and whether I am glad I was born. Life seems a wonderful thing now and also I can see that my childhood made this happiness possible. That in me which made me so unhappy five or six years ago is what has given me such great happiness in the end. The memories I have always had of you and Dada which made the substitutes, the second-bests, of no use to me and kept me lonely for so long, have now given me Arcadi and our happiness together. So I love you, Mother dearest, more and more for the happiness you have given me.
On June 25,1929, I wrote:
Ten years ago I could not have believed that life would give so much. Only sometimes I know this happiness is too great to last, especially if I cease to do anything to deserve it. I must come home and do some work for what I believe.
Of course, no one knows his real motive. Perhaps it was not really my feeling that no one has any right to great personal happiness so long as the majority of mankind starve and toil without joy. It may have been love of power or the desire to make one’s mark on the world, which is the same thing as love of power, which impelled me to leave Arcadi and return to work in the Communist party in England. Also, it may have been the feeling I expressed in another letter to my mother, the feeling that Arcadi’s love for me was founded upon his conception of me as a revolutionary, an intellectual, an independent woman, not a “mere wife.” I felt that if I lost myself in his love I might lose it, that I must somehow continue being what I had been when he began to love me. The extent to which it was ambition which impelled me to leave him is suggested in the following letter I wrote my mother soon after my arrival in Japan.
I wish I could go yachting with Temple . . . perhaps some day. But of course I don’t know how to sail a boat properly, I have just a rudimentary idea from the fishing boats in Devonshire. As regards what he says about my being turned into a “bloody intel- ligent,” God forbid-yet already I feel “decomposed” in many ways. I am less inclined to strive and sometimes I feel that the days of my achievements, such as they were, are past. On the whole I am taking life much less strenuously, though I am trying now to work hard on my book. Somehow I don’t get quite so agitated and worried as I used to about the things I do. You and Temple may say this is good but I don’t think so. Perhaps I shall never do any- thing worth while again. I have also discovered about myself that beautiful things, especially beautiful colors, appeal to me much more than in the past. I can sit and look at a beautiful design on silk and just enjoying looking at it. Thus I can waste time instead of sitting down to write articles, etc.
The spirit to sit up all night and work at top pitch to finish a piece of work and do it well somehow, the spirit which used to carry me through the hardest tasks, was lacking last summer in Moscow and may be gone forever. Only I hope that my languidness was due to conditions in Moscow, not getting enough food and the new way of living, which is possibly exhausting at first. But things in Russia won’t be so difficult in a year’s time. I must have got pretty run down because this vaccination business would not have developed such complications otherwise. It is 7 weeks since it was done and the ulcers have only now begun to heal. Also I have had a lot of toothache. This is not to worry you, dear, it is only my feeble way of trying to console myself for having become lazy. . . .
I have begun to think that in the end Temple will go much further than me. He has gone on steadily doing better and better in his line instead of frittering himself away on a multitude of activities as I have. I feel I have attempted too many things in the past instead of doing one thing really well. And now, at 30, I have really got to begin all over again in a new world where my past academic attainments count for little. Even this cotton business is difficult for me because, of course, my background should be economics, not ancient history! Temple will be a famous scientist one day and I shall be nothing at all. You remember too that Arcadi said Temple would never be “decomposed.”
Looking back on things I realize that my unhappy love for Walter made me put all my energies into work whereas now . . . I have just received a letter from Walter, by the way. You might tell him what I say. If he admires my brain and capabilities as he says, tell him that he helped me to achieve things by refusing to love me. I can look back on it all very casually now and genuinely say to Walter, “Peace be with you.” Tell him there is something in Russell Green’s favorite saying: “The hobbyhorse of one’s discontent becomes the Pegasus of one’s ambition.” And yet I am still ambitious only not so vividly so. I enjoy the present too much.
I begin to understand why Christian priests had to be celibate, why Venus was banished to a cave. And yet I hope that in union I may in the end achieve more than alone. Or is this also only an illusion? I seem to have rattled on for a long time. I wish I could talk to you and Temple tonight. Should like to be sitting with you over a bottle of wine at Bertorelli’s.
Today I regret nothing more in my life than not having savored my happiness to the full and lived out the brief period Arcadi and I might have had together before we were engulfed in that hell of disillusionment and suffering in Soviet Russia. Today, I not only know that the gods are jealous gods, but that the way to cheat them is not to be afraid of them. Euripides was right in those choruses in the Bacchae which I knew so well by heart in my youth, but whose meaning and truth only loss and unhappiness could teach me:
What of Man’s endeavorz
Or God’s high grace
So lovely and so great.
To stand from fear set free
To hold a hand uplifted over hate
For shall not loveliness be loved forever?
No grudge hath he of the great,
No scorn of the mean estate,
But to all that liveth
His wine he giveth;
Griefless, immaculate.
Only on them who spurn joy
Does his anger burn.
Happy he on the weary sea
Who has fled the tempest
And found his haven,
But who’er shall know
As the long days go
That to live is happy
Has found his heaven.
To be alive at all is wonderful, and to have known, even for only a short while, the greatest happiness which life can give-to love and be loved utterly-gives life a savor even after it has all vanished with the snows of yesteryear.
Although he knew he would be terribly lonely when I had gone, Arcadi encouraged me to go. For he, even as I, believed in those days in what the Webbs call the Vocation of Leadershipi.e., the duty of the Communist to sacrifice personal happiness to political work. And yet we had already learned something in Japan of what Soviet society is really like. The intrigues, the calumnies, and the factional struggles which went on in the small Russian colony of employees at the Trade Representation and the Embassy should have taught us what to expect in the U.S.S.R. But we thought this was because the Russian colony was composed of “intellectuals” and that in Russia the proletarians ensured a cleaner atmosphere. Moreover, both the Ambassador,\ Tryanovsky, and the Trade Representative, Anikeev, were decent men and the same could be said of Maisky, later to become Ambassador to Britain but then only Counselor of the Embassy in Tokio. True that his wife and Madame Anikeev were at daggers drawn, and a telegram once had to be sent to Moscow to settle the delicate question of precedence at Embassy dinner parties and Japanese state functions: who came first-the wife of Maisky, the Embassy Counselor, or the wife of Anikeev, the Trade Representative. As far as I remember, the question was settled in Madame Anikeev’s favor, but the whole Russian colony was split into factions by the antagonism between these two women. They were fairly evenly matched, because although Maiskaya was a member of the Party and Anikeeva was not, Maisky had not joined the Bolsheviks until 1924, whereas Anikeev was not only an old Bolshevik but also of proletarian origin, having once been a factory worker. Anikeeva being both a beautiful woman and an intelligent one, became a sort of First Lady, in spite of Maiskaya’s qualifications. Tryanovsky’s wife, an unassuming lady, played no part in the faction fights of “Red” society. Tryanovsky’s first wife had been a Bolshevik when he was a Menshevik, and the story told was that during the civil wars she had condemned her husband to death when he was brought before her as a prisoner. Lenin himself had talked Tryanovsky over into joining the Bolsheviks and saved him from the death sentence imposed by his wife. I cannot vouch for the truth of this story, as whispered to me in Tokio; but at least it explained Tryanovsky’s choice of a nonpolitical, rather colorless lady as his second wife. It is more pleasant to have a wife not liable to shoot one on account of one’s political beliefs.
These dissertations are not entirely frivolous, for Soviet society as it really is could not properly be described without some account of the human factors. Russian women are just as prone to social discrimination, pride in their social status, love of fine clothes and admiration, as women in “bourgeois” society. Soviet society has its hierarchies and its jealousies and is not composed of simple-minded, ardent revolutionaries with red cotton handkerchiefs on their heads, intent on constructing socialism regardless of personal advancement and the material comforts such advancement brings. The simply dressed men and women who march in the demonstrations of the proletariat, to the admiration of foreign tourists, are most of them longing to change places with the “boyars of the bureaucracy” who watch them from the reserved seats in the Red Square.
Back in England I threw myself into the work of the British Communist party, and tried to bury in my subconscious the suspicions concerning Soviet “socialist” society which had been engendered by the year I had spent in Tokio and by the fortnight I had spent in Moscow on my way home at the end of 1929. I campaigned for the British Communist party among the textile workers in Lancashire. I campaigned for the Communist candidate at the bye-election in Sheffield. I became a member of the Industrial Committee of the Party in London. I wrote articles for the Communist publications, and I did a pamphlet for the Party on “What’s Wrong with the Cotton Trade!” My husband sent me money to live on, and I never took a penny from the Communist party, even for my articles and pamphlets. I read the works of Marx and Lenin, conscientiously and thoroughly, and tried to explain in simple language the basic tenets of Marxism, which, if one could make them clear to the workers, must make them see that only through the unity of the workers of the world could living standards be improved and unemployment eliminated.
In speaking to the Lancashire cotton operatives and writing for them, I first came up against the basic dilemma of the Marxist revolution, and also against the obstacle of the Comintern’s indifference to the troubles of the working class, or its fate outside Russia.
How could one convince the Lancashire cotton operatives that they should refuse to allow the cotton industry to be rationalized, refuse to work more looms, and go on strike for higher wages, when they knew as well as I did that the immediate result of such action would be more unemployment through the loss of more markets to Japan and other competing countries ? To my mind it seemed clear that the basic need was to explain Marxist theory to them, to make them understand the meaning of “workers of the world, unite” by showing that if all textile workers in all countries got together in one organization they could establish higher wages for all; to make them understand that the capitalist system based on production for profit inevitably doomed them to increasing poverty now that other countries besides England were industrialized, and workers in the Eastwith lower standards of life competed against them.
But now I came up against the Comintern, which was then pursuing an ultra-Left policy and insisting that agitation, agitation alone, was the task of the Communist. No theoretical explanations, no waste of time or energy in exposing the dynamics of capitalism; just tell the workers to strike and strike whatever the consequences. The Comintern, in fact, was not concerned with the livelihood of the workers; it wished only to weaken the capitalist states by continual strikes and the dislocation of economic life. Its only objective was the safety of the U.S.S.R., and it recked nothing of the interests or sufferings of the workers.
One day in Blackburn, the great weaving center of Lancashire, an elderly textile worker complained bitterly to me of the fact that it was all very well for the paid officials of the Communist party to get themselves arrested for deliberately and unnecessarily holding meetings where they obstructed the traffic, but how could we expect men with families to do so, especially since it was an utterly useless performance? Of course, he did not know how proud Communist party members were if, when they went to Moscow, they could boast that they had gone to jail in the class struggle. Such an accomplishment might be held to wipe out the stigma of their nonproletarian origin.
Finally I got myself into trouble with the Politbureau of the Party in London on account of an article of mine which the editor of the Communist Review had inadvertently allowed to be published. I had been reading Lenin’s writings of the “Iskra period” and had discovered that he had condemned the “economists” who maintained that the intellectual has no role to play in the Party and that the socialist idea can spring “spontaneously” out of the experience of the working class. Lenin had insisted that the ordinary worker, by the experience of his daily life, develops not a full revolutionary class consciousness but only that of “a trade-unionist.” Clearly, to my mind, in this period of declining markets for Britain, the workers’ trade-union consciousness was likely to impel him to accept wage reductions and join with the bosses in attempting to recapture their markets, I did not, of course, foresee that this would lead Europe to a fascist development, but I dimly perceived that, unless the Marxist conception of international working-class unity could be put across to the workers, they would unite with their employers against other countries. Today we see how Hitler and Mussolini can rouse their people to fight under the slogan of the proletarian nations against the pluto-democracies.
Although my article was buttressed by quotations from Lenin, I was held to have deviated seriously from the Party line by maintaining that theory was of primary importance and that the intellectual, accordingly, need not play at being a proletarian, since he had an important part to perform in bringing knowledge of socialism to the working class. I was not directly accused of Trotskyism, but I was held to be slightly tainted with heresy.
Even at this stage of my communist experience I had not the sense to see that nothing good would come out of the U.S.S.R. and that the foreign Communist parties were already corrupted and impotent. I had a great respect and liking for Harry Pollitt, Secretary of the British Communist party, who had encouraged me and backed me up, and prevented the little bureaucrats in the Agitprop department from sabotaging my pamphlet and my Party work. To this day I find it difficult to understand how this British working-class leader of Non- conformist traditions came to subordinate his conscience and sacrifice his personal integrity to become a stooge of the Stalinists. The fact that Pollitt led the British Communist party deluded me into thinking that it was still a revolutionary working-class party.
Late in September I left for Moscow, expecting that my husband would join me there that month from Japan. Before leaving England I had spent a few days with my brother on the yacht in which he was preparing to sail across the Atlantic and on to the South Seas. He wanted me to come with him, at least as far as Spain; but I was, as usual, driven by that sense of urgency which has so often made me miss the greatest pleasures in life. I expected Arcadi soon to reach Moscow from Japan; and, much as I loved sailing, I felt one could not just dash off like that to no purpose. My brother and I were more intimate those last days, sailing down the English coast to Cornwall, than since our childhood. His skeptical outlook on life, his avowed lack of any exalted motives, and his insistence on both the joyousness and futility of life, now seemed to me less reprehensible than a few years back. The Norse sagas and Greek legends which had inspired me to dreams of human liberty through the economic reorganization of society, had led him to throw up his job in London to sail to the South Sea Islands, of which he had dreamed since childhood. Perhaps his dream was as worthy and no more futile than mine. This I could not yet acknowledge, but at least I had grown tolerant enough not to reproach him.
In the night watches, sitting together on deck under the stars, Temple warned me of the certain disappointments which awaited me. He knew the motive forces of my life better than I knew them myself. For me, as he realized, the concept of human freedom formed the axis of my socialist beliefs. I was in revolt against tyranny and oppression-not, as in the case of so many of those who have accepted Stalin’s tyranny, a craving to lose myself and my reason in a universal brotherhood. In my mind Pericles’ funeral speech, Shelley’s and Swinburne’s poems, Marx’s and Lenin’s writings, were all part and parcel of the same striving for the emancipation of mankind from oppression.
Temple foresaw that I would not be able to accept and condone a new kind of oppression, even if tyranny wore the mask of socialism. “You will probably end up in a Siberian prison, my dear,” he said. “But so long as you don’t deceive yourself, they will not break you. Only don’t ever be a hyprocite to yourself; that is the only real sin against the Holy Ghost.”
These words stuck in my mind. One can preserve one’s inner integrity anywhere, even in the U.S.S.R., if one does not deceive oneself in order to be comforted.
Temple sailed away from Newlyn Harbor toward the setting sun one golden September evening. He waved to me from the deck of the Inyala;, steering with the other hand. We never saw each other again, for he died five years later in Fiji, During those five years we were about as far away from each other as one can be on this earth.
Two weeks later I was on the boat going to Leningrad. I wrote from Hamburg to my mother:
I am beginning dimly to realize how blind and how much in a rut most people are. You see even people like Henry [a friend in the Party who knew a little of my doubts about the Cornintern] do not want to see everything-it is too dangerous and too windswept and too awful. One must have courage, above all one must have courage, mentally as well as physically.
How much courage I was to require in the future was unknown to me, but I was to learn that it is not courage, but love, which can enable one to endure even the death of one’s hopes and the loss of love itself.
LENIN IN HIS youth was perhaps clearer sighted than when, in 1917, the opportunity to establish the dictatorship of his party proved too great a temptation to the great revolutionary strategist. In 1905 he said:
Anyone who attempts to achieve socialism by any other route than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at the most absurd reactionary deductions, both political and economic.
Lenin, “sleeping by Scamander’s river,” is luckier than Trotsky, who lived to witness the truth of this prophecy fulfilled; but who, even today, refuses to see the development of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin as inevitable from the premises on which it started out.
When, following the Revolution of 1917, Lenin perforce abolished Soviet democracy and established the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, he thought that the “reactionary deductions” could be avoided. Perhaps if he had lived they might have been. But to think that one man could affect the course of history to the extent of changing its direction is un-Marxist. The Marxist must perforce believe that his- tory, in broad outline, would have taken the same course had Lenin lived. If he had lived he might have shared Trotsky’s fate. But if he had lived it is unlikely that Stalin would have been able to carry out the counter-revolution so unobtrusively. There would have been a split in the Bolshevik party and Stalin’s victory would not have been won without an armed clash. It would then have been obvious to the whole world that the Bolsheviks had been defeated, and Stalin would not have been able to win influence over the radical movements of the West. The revolution would have been buried instead of its corpse poisoning the air of a whole generation of progressives in Europe and America.
As it was, Stalin was able to camouflage his counter-revolution, to accomplish it piecemeal, and to confuse socialists all over the world by his zigzags from Right to Left and back to Right until these terms have lost their meaning. He has divested socialism of its humanitarian content and its original nobility and strength, and left only a whited sepulcher to warn the world against all hope of a juster social order than the capitalist.
To understand the miscarriage of Bolshevism, one must summarize the views expressed by Lenin and Trotsky both in 1917 and when the New Economic Policy was introduced in 1921. One must also glance back at the profound and contradictory changes in the policy of the Soviet Government over the past two decades.
In the summer and autumn following the February Revolution of 1917, Lenin saw with that political clear-sightedness which was his peculiar genius, that in Russia the choice was one between a return to reaction or an advance to social revolution. Kerensky’s government was powerless to solve the agrarian problem, to reorganize the collapsing national economy, to wage war or to make peace. Either Russia would lapse into anarchy or the old ruling class would return to power. There was no strong middle class capable of leading the “bourgeois democratic revolution”; i.e., solving the agrarian problem and estab- lishing a democratic capitalist social and political order. Therefore, as Lenin saw it, “the proletariat” must take the lead. It would be “a crime” if the only new class capable of seizing power on the collapse of the old social order failed to do so.
“We must perish or go forward,” was Lenin’s constant refrain. Kerensky’s government had begun to crush the peasant rebellion; and this meant “to lose the whole revolution forever and beyond recall.” The proletariat alone could accomplish nothing; the peasants must be the motive force of the revolution. If their insurrection were once crushed, the motive force would be destroyed. Hence, as Lenin re- iterated over and over again in October 1917, “waiting becomes a crime.” He was also convinced that the world revolution was at hand, so that to wait was to betray not only the Russian Revolution but that of the workers of the world.
In his “Letter to the Petrograd and Moscow Committees of the Bolshevik Party”5 in October 1917, he writes:
The agrarian movement is developing, and the government is repressing it more and more savagely. . . . In February, the beginning of the revolution is doubtless at hand. The elections at Moscow have given 47% of the votes to the Bolsheviks. With the Left Social Revolutionaries we have obviously a majority in the country.
The railwaymen and postal workers are in conflict with the government.. . . In these conditions, to wait is a crime.
The Bolsheviks must take power immediately. In so doing they will save the world revolution (for it is to be feared, especially after the executions in Germany, that the capitalists of all countries will compose their differences and unite against us). They will also save the Russian revolution (for if we delay, perhaps the rising wave of real anarchy will be too strong for us) and they will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of men at the front.
“To wait is a crime . . . . It is to betray the revolution.”
In Lenin’s mind it was absolutely clear that Russia faced either a return to reaction or anarchy. The tide was at the flood; the Bolsheviks must ride out upon it before it ebbed.
From all his writings at this period it is clear that he was certain of the coming world revolution. “Doubt is no longer permissible,” he says over and over again, “We are on the eve of the world proletarian revolution.”
Thus, at the decisive moment, Lenin gave no thought to what would happen in Russia should the Bolsheviks, having seized power, find that the world revolution was delayed. He gave no thought to this problem in 1917 because he was quite certain that it would not arise.
When he found out his mistake, he retreated and instituted the New Economic Policy, but where this was to lead he never clearly stated.
It has been truly said that all Lenin’s activities were stretched be- tween two extremes: Russia and his political instinct on the one hand, the West and his theoretical convictions on the other. In the endeavor to reconcile the two, he twisted Marxist doctrine out of all recognition and outraged the convictions of the Social Democrats. For in the con- flict between theory and instinct it was always theory which went to the wall. An opportunist of genius for whom the revolution was the primary objective, and what was to come afterwards dependent upon circumstances and opportunity, Lenin appears to have originally believed, like the Mensheviks, that the overthrow of the Tsar’s autocracy must be succeeded by a “bourgeois democratic republic”; but to have shared Trotsky’s belief that the proletariat alone was capable of leading such a revolution. Realizing to the full that in a predominantly peasant country such as Russia only an alliance with the peasantry could give victory to the proletariat, he had not hesitated to enlist that support by telling the peasants to take the land, knowing that by so doing he was laying the foundations for a capitalist, not a socialist, society. It would be more correct to say that he decided to go with the tide and proclaim as Bolshevik policy what was occurring spontaneously: the seizure of the estates of the landowners and church by the peasants. This inevitably meant either the creation of a satisfied peasantry, surest bulwark of a capitalist state, or deceiving the peasants as to their future under the Soviet regime. The Bolsheviks could in fact only ensure the victory of the revolution at the cost of the future certain and final de- feat of their attempt to set up a socialist state, since either they must abandon the attempt to create a socialist state, or do it by force against the wishes of the majority of the population. In either case, their course could not lead to socialism within the original meaning of the term: communal ownership and direction of the productive forces.
In thus sacrificing ends to means, Lenin laid the foundation of the economic and social problem which wrecked the Bolshevik party after his death, and eventually led to the establishment of Stalin’s totalitarian tyranny. Stalin cut the Gordian knot of the insoluble problem of the contradiction between the desires and interests of peasantry and prole- tariat by enslaving both alike to his personal despotism.
Trotsky, who was Lenin’s inferior as a practical revolutionist, was perhaps his superior as a theoretician. Whereas Lenin subordinated everything to his immediate aim and twisted the theory to fit his actions, Trotsky insisted that action conform to theory. To the Social Democratic argument that socialism could nor be constructed in a backward country, and that Russia must therefore pass through a stage of capitalist development, Lenin replied that the Bolsheviks would establish a smytchka (“alliance”) of proletariat and peasantry, presumably with the conviction in his mind that with himself to guide them the seemingly irreconcilable interests of workers and peasants could be harmonized. Lenin thus took refuge in what one can con- sider either a typical Russian and mystically vague conception of what was to follow the Bolshevik seizure of power, or a sublime belief in his power to defeat the materialistic interpretation of history. But Trotsky took the bull by the horns and proclaimed that the problem of the Russian Revolution was in fact insoluble so long as the revolution did not spread to other, more advanced, countries, in particular to Germany. If Germany joined up with Russia, the problem of Russian industrialization could be solved, the conflict of interests between workers and peasants resolved, and socialism made possible in Russia.
Both he and Lenin were at first convinced that their revolution would spread from country to country and that this would relieve the beleaguered fortress held by the small Russian proletariat. This was Trotsky’s famous theory of “permanent revolution.” From this theory it followed logically that the main energies of the Russian Bolsheviks should be devoted to inciting and assisting revolutionary movements in other countries, since alone they could not construct socialism in Russia.
Lenin, intent on the practical problem of getting an economy of any kind to function after the disorganization and destruction which was the legacy of the World War, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War and intervention, left much of the theorizing to Trotsky. But it was Lenin who stated that he would willingly sacrifice all the gains of the Russian Revolution for the hope of revolution in Germany. In 1918he stated at the First Congress of the Supreme Economic Council that: “We must not forget that we alone cannot achieve a socialist revolution in one country only, even if it were a less backward country than Russia.”
The partnership of Lenin and Trotsky can be said to have been based largely upon Lenin’s leaving points of theory to Trotsky and upon Trotsky’s submitting to Lenin on all organizational questions, and when immediate courses of action had to be decided upon. The dif- ference between the two men can in some sort be compared to the difference between those Englishmen who are now (1940) busy discussing war aims, and those who, like Churchill, insist that winning the war is what matters at present. Since Lenin was a great statesman, and states can be run best without a logical theory, he could do without Trotsky; but Trotsky, the schematic thinker, could neither retain power nor form a party without Lenin.
Marx, although rather vague concerning the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” had had no doubt that it was to be absolutely democratic, for in his view socialism was to come after capitalism had reduced all but a small minority to the condition of “proletarians.” For him, seizure of power by the proletariat meant the overthrow of a small group of capitalist exploiters by the overwhelming majority of the people. Socialist society was to be the only truly democratic society since socialism alone could deprive an exploiting class of its economic and political power. Engels, commenting upon Marx’s vindication of the Paris Commune of 1871,had proclaimed that absolute democracy was the natural form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. As we have seen, Lenin himself in 1905 had declared that without democracy there could be no socialism.
Nevertheless, Lenin, in his insistence from 1907 onwards that the Social Democratic party should be composed of professional revolutionaries, was denying the democratic basis of Marxian socialism. This was realized by the minority of the Russian Social Democratic party (the Mensheviks) and also by Trotsky, who did not join the Bolsheviks (the majority party) until 1917. In effect, Lenin saw what the Social Democrats failed to see, that the working class did not naturally desire socialism, and that if one waited for it to become revolutionary by itself, one might wait until the Greek Kalends. Marx had believed that the course of capitalist development would of itself turn the working class into revolutionaries. Lenin saw before 1914 that it wouldn't, and after 1914 that the workers were patriots first and a class-conscious proletariat second. He did not on that account reject Marxism, but carried Engels’ thesis of the corruption of the British working class through imperialism, to the further hypothesis that the working class in all European countries had been corrupted. His solution was a revolution, led by professional revolutionaries who knew better than the workers what the latter needed for their own good-viz., socialism. All along he distrusted “the masses” and saw “the Party” as necessary to prevent their falling away from the revolutionary path.
This transmutation of Marxism was the easier for Lenin because he was a Russian. The belief in democracy was inherent and deep-rooted in the minds of the Marxists of western Europe; and it was the rational side of Marx, not his mystical belief in the inevitability of progress, which appealed to them. But Lenin was a Russian, and his ideas were unconsciously affected by the fanaticism and naivete of his country and his people. For him what one may term the religious side of Marx, the bedrock belief that history was “inevitably” leading mankind to a better social system, was fundamental. To him Marxism was a creed and a body of dogma which he could interpret according to the practical needs of the moment. This made him far more resolute and immediately successful than the hesitant, tolerant, and essentially humanitarian leaders of the western Social Democratic parties; but it also made possible the later grotesque distortions of the aims of the revolution under Stalin.
Marx had deliberately refused to consider “utopian schemes.” He had stated that the workers had “no ideals to realize” but needed only “to set free the elements of the new society which the old society carries in its womb.” So Lenin had little to go upon when once the revolution had been accomplished. This was his strength and his successors’ weakness. He approached the problem of how to organize the new society realistically and disinterestedly as regards immediate policy, but with vagueness as to the future. Did Lenin consider the distant future at all in 1917 Did he imagine that the “reactionary deductions” which he himself had said must follow from the attempt to achieve socialism by tyranny could be avoided? He may have believed it because he thought he himself and his comrades in the Bolshevik party would be strong enough and incorruptible enough to steer Russia against all the contrary winds of its internal contradictions. This belief was founded on faith, not upon political philosophy. It was in fact in direct contravention of the Marxist philosophy, and showed the tremendous power of ideas over the material world, to have even attempted to establish a socialist economy in Russia.
As Franz Borkenau has expressed it:6
On his native Russian soil his naivete and fanaticism hampered Lenin as little as it had hampered Mohammed to be, at the same time, a visionary and the shrewdest politician. On the contrary, inconsistencies and adaptations which would have broken the resolution of any less deeply convinced man did not distress Lenin: he could take every liberty with the principles he confessed because something deeper than intellectual formulae guaranteed him against becoming what he called a “traitor,” against losing sight of the ultimate aim, “the revolution.”
As a politician and a practical revolutionary, Lenin was bound to recognize in 1917 that democracy, as ordinarily understood, doomed the Russian proletariat and its “vanguard,” the Bolshevik party, to impotence. Following the February Revolution, all organized parties in Russia were for continuing the “war of defense” against Germany, although it was clear that the mass of the people had no interest in the war and that the peasant soldiers wished only to get home and get their share of the landowners’ estates. Until Lenin’s return from exile, even the Bolshevik party in Petrograd, led by Kameniev and Stalin, supported the war. The Constituent Assembly, which up to then the Bolsheviks had demanded equally with the Mensheviks and the liberals, if elected would probably have given the Bolsheviks only a few seats. So Lenin abruptly switched over to championship of the Soviets, which he had rejected in 1905 and which up to 1917 Trotsky alone had viewed as the organ of the new political order. Lenin now perceived that the Soviets (the elected representatives of the workers in each factory and of the regiments and villages) which had come into being more or less spontaneously, could be utilized to overthrow bourgeois democracy, or, as Lenin saw it, to establish the democratic dictatorship of the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Since the Soviets were directly elected by the “toilers” and excluded the “exploiters,” the establishment of a Soviet state should ensure the victory of the proletariat and yet preserve democracy. But when it was found after the experiences of war communism that not even a majority of the workers were Bolshevik in sympathy and aim, Lenin’s conception of “democracy” had to be narrowed yet further: the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party was established over the Soviets. This was done by the simple method of proscribing all other parties, and so preventing the Soviets from expressing any opinions but those of the one legal party-the Communist party.
Thus was Soviet democracy abolished and the Soviets converted into mere administrative organs and rubber stamps for the ukases of the Party.
The Cheka, inheritor of the powers and methods of the Tsarist Okrana, was created in the days of the Civil War to discover and stamp out the counter-revolutionaries. It was converted into an instrument for terrorizing not merely the old bourgeoisie but all workers and peasants who expressed opinions unfavorable to the Bolshevik regime. In Lenin’s day its powers were kept within bounds and exercised mainly against the remnants of the “exploiting classes,” though also against the Social Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, i.e., against the now proscribed parties of the peasants and working class. Under Stalin, its successor, the O.G.P.U., became an instrument of terror exercised not only against the proletariat in whose name the dictatorship was exercised, not only against the peasants without whose support the Bolsheviks could never have won power, but also against those members of the Party who disagreed with Stalin.
In 1920 the dissatisfied workers were still permitted to voice their opinions although already excluded from the Press. The following statement made to the visiting delegation of the British Trade-Union Congress and Labour party by the Russian Printers’ Trade-Union, is amazingly prescient of what was to come. Although the statement is so sharply critical of the Bolshevik dictatorship, it is important to note the immense change in the status and rights of the workers then and ten years later. Under Lenin the workers could still dare to make such protests; under Stalin they were deprived of even that privilege:
All Russian socialists are convinced that the triumph of Socialism in Russia is possible only if there is a socialist revolution in the West. All endeavors to force Socialism upon one backward country alone will give no positive results. They will only lead to endless sufier- ings of the working population. That is why the Russian working class insists on the independent fight against its class enemies and on the independence of the labor organizations contrary to the wishes of the present ruling power.
Our present government is not only a workers’ government; it is a worker-peasant government. The interests of workers and peasants are not always identical. The Russian working class must therefore be on its guard against any attempt of the present government to go beyond necessary concessions to the peasantry and in any way to harm labor interests.
Utopian endeavors, on the other hand, to enforce the immediate introduction of Socialism in Russia, meet with desperate opposition from the peasantry; they increase civil war and deepen the chronic disorganization of the country resulting from four years of civil war. The economic policy of the Soviet Government in introducing all-round nationalization leads to a further disorganization of the whole economic life of Russia.
The national economy of Russia cannot be improved by methods of violence against workers, by the militarization of labor, by miserable rates of pay and long hours of work. . . . It can only be saved by the free and independent labor organizations. The heroic efforts of the working population will be crowned with success if the Government itself adopts a rational economic policy at home and abroad.
A system of reconstruction based on the compulsory labor of hungry and enslaved workers and on the destructive policy of the Government with its grotesque, parasitic, administrative machine kept going out of the earnings of the working masses, will lead to further economic decay and the breakdown of the Revolution and of Socialism.
The system of reconstruction brings into opposition to the Government not only the peasantry but the workers themselves. The working class in Russia is decaying and losing its power and influence: it is dying out physically through hunger and ill-health; it is degenerating morally and politically, for the worker is on the one hand being converted into a bureaucrat in the factory, and on the other being subject to constant supervision exercised through the communist “cells” and commissars.
The Communist party has set itself up as the dictator not only to the enemies of the working class, but to the working class itself. The Communist party, which embraces only a small part of the working population and makes use of the state machinery and the country’s resources, is imposing its will on the majority of the population and depriving the working masses of the right to have independent free organizations.
Freedom of the press and of election do not exist even for the workers themselves. The Communist party alone may issue daily papers, journals, print pamphlets and books, giving no chance for the opposition to let itself be heard. All the socialist parties work underground, in constant fear of being arrested, sent into exile, or deprived of their right of citizenship. Many workers have been shot for their political views and for criticizing the Communist party. . . .
There are only a few trade-unions left whose council or Praesidium has been properly elected; and those trade-unions whose officers have managed to keep in touch with the working masses are under constant watch and suspicion.. . .
The Soviets in Russia represent only to a small extent the views of the workers and peasants. All non-Communist Soviets are usually dissolved. . . .
In spite of all this we are against foreign intervention or the in- tervention of the old Russian bourgeoisie in our quarrel with the Communist party. We admit only the intervention of the international proletariat in our affairs. We hope that the working class of other countries will bring moral pressure to bear on the Communist party to give a chance to the Russian working class to fight for the economic regeneration of Russia, for their rights, for their liberation, and for Socialism.7
During the years of civil war and foreign intervention which soon followed the October Revolution, the consequences of Lenin’s abandonment of democracy were still hidden. In those years of confusion, war, and pestilence, discussions as to future Bolshevik policy were largely academic. The all-absorbing problem of the Bolsheviks was how to save the revolution in face of the Allied intervention, and how to keep the Red armies supplied when the whole economic mechanism of the country was breaking down. This was the period of military communism when the war industries were the only ones to which any attention could be paid. The original conception of workers’ management of the factories inevitably gave place to rigorous state control.
In 1919, at the second Trade-Union Congress, Lenin declared: “It is inevitable to give a state character to the trade-unions, inevitable to merge them with the organs of state power.”
The question of peasant ownership or state ownership of the land became a question of little moment when the exigencies of war forced the state to requisition grain from the peasantry to feed the army and the towns. War drove the Bolsheviks to apply their theories in an extreme form, not because it was considered theoretically the best policy to abolish the market and for the state to undertake the collection and distribution of food, but because there was no other way. Industrial production of consumers’ goods sank almost to zero, and the peasants were hiding their grain because there were no goods to exchange it for. At least so the war communist period was represented later by Lenin and by Trotsky, who called it “the systematic regimentation of consumption in a besieged fortress.” Nevertheless, in those years of starvation, degradation, suffering, and terror, it was believed by many of the Bolsheviks that “socialism” could spring full-grown from their minds like Athena from the head of Zeus.
The retreat from war communism in 1921 was therefore regarded by many, not as a return to normal after the cessation of civil war and intervention, but as the abandonment of the attempt to set up a socialist economy.
Nineteen twenty-one was the year of the great famine, more terrible than any Russia had known. The Soviet Government was forced to retreat or to collapse. Russia had sunk down almost into that savage state when every man’s hand is against his fellow. There were reports of cannibalism in some villages, and the whole population starved. There could be no hope of instituting a “planned economy” by the methods of forced collections with industry almost at a standstill and agricultural production lower than ever before in Russia’s history. Nor was there any longer any expectation of the proletarian revolution in Germany, which, until 1921,had been expected to solve Russia’s problems. A Soviet Germany would have enabled the U.S.S.R. to obtain German machinery and manufactures, skilled workers and engineers to build up Russia’s shattered productive forces. But without an alliance with an advanced industrialized country, socialism in Russia could not be.
The Bolsheviks had triumphed, but Russia was becoming a desert. The protests of the Kronstadt sailors, although drowned in blood, showed that both workers and peasants could stand no more.
Lenin did not hesitate. He introduced the New Economic Policy. The peasants were no longer forced to give up their produce to the state. The market was reconstituted in place of state distribution of goods. By heroic efforts industry began to produce manufactures for sale to the village in exchange for bread.8 Private trading was again permitted and even industrial production on a small scale for private profit. The “commanding heights,” as Lenin called them: large-scale industry, transport, communications, power stations, banking, and foreign trade, remained state monopolies; but outside these, private enterprise was permitted and encouraged. Freed of the strait jacket of enforced communism, the almost defunct national economy was set functioning. The machine which had slowed down almost to a stand still began to gather momentum. Shakily and uncertainly at first, the wheels of industry and trade began once more to revolve. Industrial production doubled in 1922 and 1923, and by 1926 had reached its prewar level. Meanwhile, the harvests were increasing now that the peasant had not only got the land but had been given an assurance that he could work it for his own profit; he brought production of grain up to and beyond the prewar level. For a few years the Russian peasant enjoyed a prosperity he had never known before; he no longer paid rent, his taxes were comparatively light, and he was encouraged to produce for profit and told to “get rich.” Manufactured goods being very scarce, and the seizure of the great estates having increased the number of peasant landholders from sixteen to twenty-five million, the peasants did not bring the same proportion of the harvest to market as in the past. The peasant ate more himself and brought less to market. For the first and last time in Russian history the peasants had enough to eat and were not forced to starve to support either an aristocracy or a bureaucracy.
This fact was the great obstacle to industrialization. The peasant could not be induced to sell more so long as industry could not produce more goods for him to buy. But industries could not be expanded and new ones developed unless more produce could be obtained from the peasants to feed the workers engaged on new construction, and to export in exchange for machinery. In other words, the only source of capital accumulation in the U.S.S.R. was the peasantry; yet, unless the peasants were coerced, they would not finance industrialization. If they were coerced, as the years 1918-21 had proved, they would sit back and produce no more than they themselves consumed.
Lenin was an opportunist, but he was not prepared consciously to sacrifice end to means. The idea of deliberately starving some millions of peasants to death to teach them a lesson, and transforming the whole peasantry into serfs of the state, was not one which Lenin could for a moment have envisaged. In his mind the problem was to be solved by controlling the country’s economy, not by war upon the village by the state.
Other undeveloped countries could borrow from the advanced capitalist countries; could, that is to say, get machinery and construction goods on credit and pay for them when they began to produce goods. This had been the method of industrialization of the United States, Canada, Australia. But the U.S.S.R., which had expropriated the former capitalists and refused compensation to foreign bond-holders, could not get loans abroad. It is probable that in the course of time she would have been able to, if she had finally repudiated the world revolutionary aim of the Bolsheviks and liquidated the Comintern. At this stage such an idea was inconceivable; Lenin had introduced the N.E.P. in Russia as the policy to be pursued while awaiting the communist revolution in other countries, which alone could solve the problems of the U.S.S.R.
N.E.P., then, for Lenin, constituted a strategic retreat while await- ing reinforcements-not the abdication of power by the proletariat but concessions to capitalist tendencies. But he apparently relied as much upon the gradual development of Russia’s productive forces as upon reinforcements from abroad. His idea was for the proletariat to hold the fort-state power-either until revolution occurred in Germany or until Russia herself was sufficiently industrialized to make socialism possible. In answer to the Social Democratic argument that Russia lacked the objective economic premises for socialism, he said:9
If the creation of socialism demands a definite level of culture, then why cannot we begin by winning with a revolution the prem- ises for that definite level of culture, and then afterwards, on the basis of the workers’ and peasants’ power and the Soviet structure, set out to catch up to the other peoples?
Lenin died too soon to instruct the Party as to what should be done if reinforcements never came, if no other communist revolution occurred, and if Russian agriculture failed to provide the means to industrialize Russia. But we know that he envisaged state capitalism for Russia, not socialism, should the world revolution be indefinitely delayed. (See Chapter V.)
For the Right wing of the Party, for men like Bucharin, who had perhaps at heart always been Mensheviks, N.E.P. was a permanent change. For Trotsky it was a breathing space, a strategical retreat as the preliminary for another attempt to establish socialism.
To Stalin the whole discussion was purely of personal interest. He saw that by setting the Right wing of the Party against the Left he would be able to destroy both and obtain absolute power himself. SO all through those years 1921-26 he was busy in the background spin- ning the web in which both the Right and the Left oppositions were to find themselves helplessly enmeshed. Securing the key positions in the Party for his own men, getting control of the whole Party ap- paratus from local to regional party secretaries, he put himself in a position to destroy both the Left and the Right.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, the hope of revolution elsewhere grew ever fainter. The capitalist world which Lenin had believed to be breaking down was recovering from the war. In 1923, even before Lenin died, the revolutionary movement of the German proletariat had been defeated and the acceptance of the Dawes Plan had sounded the death knell of proletarian revolution in Germany. There was still prospect of revolution in the colonial and semicolonial countries some until Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat of the Cornintern in 1927. But even a victorious “socialist” revolution in another backward country such as China could not have helped to solve Russia’s problem. Only a proletarian revolution in an advanced, industrialized country, in particular Germany, could have enabled the Soviet Government to escape from the dilemma: how to acquire capital for industrialization without either oppressing and alienating the peasantry or permitting a restoration of capitalism.
Bucharin and the Right wing of the Bolshevik party said carry on with the N.E.P.; don’t expect we can industrialize the U.S.S.R. rapidly, but bit by bit industry can be expanded, can produce more and sell more to the peasants so that capital accumulation will be gradually accelerated. These Right wing Bolsheviks also undoubtedly hoped to get credits from the capitalist world. They were apparently prepared to abandon the aim of world revolution, and Bucharin went so far as to develop the thesis that capitalism would reorganize itself and not go smash as orthodox Communists insisted. Unfortunately for the Russian people, Bucharin, although a great theoretician, was completely deceived by Stalin, He could not from his very nature compete with Stalin’s gangster methods and was as putty in his hands. Stalin used him only so long as his arguments were needed to destroy Trotsky.
The Left opposition, headed by Trotsky, pointed to the widening of the scissors-i.e., the growing disparity between industrial and agricultural prices as industry failed to keep pace with mounting agricultural production. Handicraft industries, revived in the villages and financed by the richer peasants, threatened to create a self-sufficient village economy. If, said Trotsky, industry continues to lag, there will be a break between city and country. Already the free market has in tensified the differentiation of classes in the village, some peasants growing rich and others becoming landless laborers. The growth of the Kulak class, said Trotsky, is creating a new capitalist class in the village: the wealthy peasant who exploits the other peasants, While Bucharin told the peasantry to “get rich,” Trotsky insisted that this slogan meant the enrichment of a minority of the peasants at the expense of the great majority and the gradual emergence of a “bourgeoisie.” True that only thus could the surplus produce of the village be sold to the state in the Soviet condition of scarcity of manufactures; for if all were independent farmers, consumption of food in the village would be much higher than if a comparatively small number of peasants owned most of the land and many worked as their hired laborers for a low wage which did not permit of their eating as much as they needed.
In its desire to increase agricultural production and ensure the delivery of grain to the market, the Soviet Government in 1925 had legalized the hiring of labor power and the renting of land. Ah, said the Left opposition, here you are creating a new capitalist class; soon we shall be back in a capitalist state. As Trotsky expressed it:
The peasantry was becoming polarized between the small capitalist on one side and the hired hand on the other. At the same time, lacking industrial commodities, the State was crowded out of the rural market. Between the Kulak and the petty home crafts man there appeared, as though from under the earth, the middle-man. The State enterprises themselves, in search of raw material, were more and more compelled to deal with the private trader. The rising tide of capitalism was visible everywhere. Thinking people saw plainly that a Revolution in the forms of property does not solve the problem of Socialism, but only raises it.”10
Trotsky and his followers were absolutists. They were determined that the U.S.S.R. must become a completely socialist state, and that any small capitalist blossoms must at once be struck down. And yet they themselves held that “socialism in one country” was an impossibility. Preobrazhensky, the most honest of the Left opposition group, stated openly that only by treating the Russian countryside as a colonial area could the necessary super-profits be obtained