William Shakespeare - "All's Well, that Ends Well"

Richard le Gallienne - "The Quest of the Golden Girl"

Thomas H. Huxley - "The Origination of Living Beings"

Plato (see Appendix I) - "Alcibiades I"

Russia in 1919

A >> Arthur Ransome >> Russia in 1919





New rulers are advancing on Moscow from Siberia, but I
do not think that they claim that they are bringing with
them new principles. Though the masses may want new
principles, and might for a moment submit to a
reintroduction of very old principles in desperate hope of
less hunger and less cold, no one but a lunatic could
imagine that they would for very long willingly submit to
them. In the face of the danger that they may be forced to
submit not to new principles but to very old ones, the
non-Communist leaders are unwilling to use to the full the
discontent that exists. Hunger and cold are a good enough
basis of agitation for anyone desirous of overturning any
existing government. But the Left Social Revolutionaries,
led by the hysterical but flamingly honest Spiridonova, are
alone in having no scruples or hesitation in the matter, the
more responsible parties fearing the anarchy and
consequent weakening of the revolution that would
result from any violent change.


THE LEFT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES


The Left Social Revolutionaries want something so much
like anarchy that they have nothing to fear in a collapse of
the present system. They are for a partisan army, not a
regular army. They are against the employment of officers
who served under the old regime. They are against the
employment of responsible technicians and commercial
experts in the factories. They believe that officers and
experts alike, being ex-bourgeois, must be enemies of the
people, insidiously engineering reaction. They are opposed
to any agreement with the Allies, exactly as they were
opposed to any agreement with the Germans. I heard them
describe the Communists as "the bourgeois gendarmes of
the Entente," on the ground that having offered concessions
they would be keeping order in Russia for the benefit of
Allied capital. They blew up Mirbach, and would no doubt
try to blow up any successors he might have. Not wanting
a regular army (a low bourgeois weapon) they would welcome
occupation in order that they, with bees in their bonnets
and bombs in their hands, might go about revolting against it.


I did not see Spiridonova, because on February 11, the very
day when I had an appointment with her, the Communists
arrested her, on the ground that her agitation was dangerous
and anarchist in tendency, fomenting discontent without a
programme for its satisfaction. Having a great respect for
her honesty, they were hard put to it to know what to do
with her, and she was finally sentenced to be sent for a year
to a home for neurasthenics, "where she would be able to
read and write and recover her normality." That the
Communists were right in fearing this agitation was proved
by the troubles in Petrograd, where the workmen in some
of the factories struck, and passed Left Social
Revolutionary resolutions which, so far from showing that
they were awaiting reaction and General Judenitch, showed
simply that they were discontented and prepared to move to
the left.


THE MENSHEVIKS


The second main group of opposition is dominated by the
Mensheviks . Their chief leaders are Martov and Dan. Of
these two, Martov is by far the cleverer, Dan the more
garrulous, being often led away by his own volubility into
agitation of a kind not approved by his friends. Both are
men of very considerable courage. Both are Jews.


The Mensheviks would like the reintroduction of
capitalists, of course much chastened by experience, and
properly controlled by themselves. Unlike Spiridonova and
her romantic supporters they approved of Chicherin's offer
of peace and concessions to the Allies (see page 44). They
have even issued an appeal that the Allies should come to
an agreement with "Lenin's Government." As may be
gathered from their choice of a name for the Soviet
Government, they are extremely hostile to it, but they fear
worse things, and are consequently a little shy of exploiting
as they easily could the dislike of the people for hunger and
cold. They fear that agitation on these lines might well
result in anarchy, which would leave the revolution
temporarily defenceless against Kolchak, Denikin,
Judenitch or any other armed reactionary. Their
non-Communist enemies say of the Mensheviks:
"They have no constructive programme; they would
like a bourgeois government back again, in order
that they might be in opposition to it, on the left"


On March 2nd, I went to an election meeting of workers
and officials of the Moscow Co-operatives. It was
beastly cold in the hall of the University where the
meeting was held, and my nose froze as well as my feet.
Speakers were announced from the Communists,
Internationalists, Mensheviks, and Right
Social Revolutionaries. The last-named did not arrive.
The Presidium was for the most part non-Communist,
and the meeting was about equally divided for and
against the Communists. A Communist led
off with a very bad speech on the general European
situation and to the effect that there was no salvation for
Russia except by the way she was going. Lozovsky, the
old Internationalist, spoke next, supporting the Bolsheviks'
general policy but criticizing their suppression of the
press. Then came Dan, the Menshevik, to hear whom I had
come. He is a little, sanguine man, who gets very hot as he
speaks. He conducted an attack on the whole Bolshevik
position combined with a declaration that so long as they
are attacked from without he is prepared to support them.
The gist of his speech was: 1. He was in favour of fighting
Kolchak. 2. But the Bolshevik policy with regard to the peasants will,
since as the army grows it must contain more and more
peasants, end in the creation of an army with
counter-revolutionary sympathies. 3. He objected to the
Bolshevik criticism of the Berne, delegation (see page 156)
on very curious grounds, saying that though Thomas,
Henderson, etc., backed their own Imperialists during the
war, all that was now over, and that union with them would
help, not hinder, revolution in England and France. 4. He
pointed out that "All power to the Soviets" now means "All
power to the Bolsheviks," and said that he wished that the
Soviets should actually have all power instead of merely
supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for
his own programme, but said he had not time to give
it. I watched the applause carefully. General
dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was obvious,
but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance
that admitted its aim was extinction of the Soviets (which
Dan's ultimate aim certainly is, or at least the changing of
them into non-political industrial organizations) or that was not
prepared to fight against reaction from without.


I went to see Sukhanov (the friend of Gorky and Martov,
though his political opinions do not precisely agree with
those of either), partly to get the proofs of his first volume
of reminiscences of the revolution, partly to hear what he
had to say. I found him muffled up in a dressing gown or
overcoat in an unheated flat, sitting down to tea with no
sugar, very little bread, a little sausage and a surprising
scrap of butter, brought in, I suppose, from the country by a
friend. Nikitsky, a Menshevik, was also there, a hopeless
figure, prophesying the rotting of the whole system and of
the revolution. Sukhanov asked me if I had noticed the
disappearance of all spoons (there are now none, but
wooden spoons in the Metropole) as a symbol of the
falling to pieces of the revolution. I told him that though I
had not lived in Russia thirty years or more, as he had, I
had yet lived there long enough and had, before the
revolution, sufficient experience in the loss of fishing
tackle, not to be surprised that Russian peasants, even
delegates, when able, as in such a moment of convulsion as
the revolution, stole spoons if only as souvenirs to show
that they had really been to Moscow.


We talked, of course, of their attitude towards the
Bolsheviks. Both work in Soviet institutions. Sukhanov
(Nikitsky agreeing) believed that if the Bolsheviks came
further to meet the other parties, Mensheviks, etc.,
"Kolchak and Denikin would commit suicide and your
Lloyd George would give up all thought of intervention." I
asked, What if they should be told to hold a Constituent
Assembly or submit to a continuance of the blockade?
Sukhanov said, "Such a Constituent Assembly would be
impossible, and we should be against it." Of the Soviets,
one or other said, "We stand absolutely on the platform of
the Soviet Government now: but we think that such a form
cannot be permanent. We consider the Soviets perfect
instruments of class struggle, but not a perfect form of
government." I asked Sukhanov if he thought counter
revolution possible. He said "No," but admitted that there
was a danger lest the agitation of the Mensheviks or others
might set fire to the discontent of the masses against the
actual physical conditions, and end in pogroms destroying
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Their general theory
was that Russia was not so far developed that a Socialist
State was at present possible. They therefore wanted a state
in which private capital should exist, and in which factories
were not run by the state but by individual owners. They
believed that the peasants, with their instincts of small
property-holders, would eventually enforce something of
the kind, and that the end would be some form of
democratic Republic. These two were against the offering
of concessions to the Allies, on the ground that those under
consideration involved the handing over to the
concessionaires of the whole power in northern Russia-railways,
forests, the right to set up their own banks in the
towns served by the railway, with all that this implied.
Sukhanov was against concessions on principle, and
regretted that the Mensheviks were in favour of them.


I saw Martov at the offices of his newspaper, which had
just been suppressed on account of an article, which he
admitted was a little indiscreet, objecting to the upkeep of
the Red Army (see page 167). He pointed eloquently to the
seal on some of the doors, but told me that he had started a
new paper, of which he showed me the first number, and
told me that the demand for it was such that although he
had intended that it should be a weekly he now expected to
make it a daily. Martov said that he and his party were
against every form of intervention for the following
reasons:
1. The continuation of hostilities, the need of an army and
of active defence were bound to intensify the least desirable
qualities of the revolution whereas an agreement, by
lessening the tension, would certainly lead to moderation of
Bolshevik Policy. 2. The needs of the army overwhelmed
every effort at restoring the economic life of the country.
He was further convinced that intervention of any kind
favoured reaction, even supposing that the Allies did not
wish this. "They cannot help themselves," he said,
"the forces that would support intervention must be
dominated by those of reaction, since all of the
non-reactionary parties are prepared to sink their
differences with the Bolsheviks, in order to defend the
revolution as a whole." He said he was convinced that
the Bolsheviks would either have to alter or
go. He read me, in illustration of this, a letter from a
peasant showing the unreadiness of the peasantry to go into
communes (compulsion in this matter has already been
discarded by the Central Government). "We took the land,"
wrote the peasant in some such words, "not much, just as
much as we could work, we ploughed it where it had not
been ploughed before, and now, if it is made into a
commune, other lazy fellows who have done nothing will
come in and profit by our work." Martov argued that life
itself, the needs of the country and the will of the peasant
masses, would lead to the changes he thinks desirable in the
Soviet regime.


THE RIGHT SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES


The position of the Right Social Revolutionaries is a good
deal more complicated than that of the Mensheviks.
In their later declarations they are as far from their
romantic anarchist left wing as they are from their
romantic reactionary extreme right. They stand,
as they have always stood, for a Constituent Assembly, but
they have thrown over the idea of instituting a Constituent
Assembly by force. They have come into closer contact
with the Allies than any other party to the left of the Cadets.
By doing so, by associating themselves with the Czech
forces on the Volga and minor revolts of a reactionary
character inside Russia, they have pretty badly
compromised themselves. Their change of attitude towards
the Soviet Government must not be attributed to any change
in their own programme, but to the realization that the
forces which they imagined were supporting them were
actually being used to support something a great deal
further right. The Printers' Gazette, a non-Bolshevik
organ, printed one of their resolutions, one point of which
demands the overthrow of the reactionary governments
supported by the Allies or the Germans, and another
condemns every attempt to overthrow the Soviet
Government by force of arms, on the ground that such
an attempt would weaken the working class as a whole and
would be used by the reactionary groups for their own
purposes.



Volsky is a Right Social Revolutionary, and was President
of that Conference of Members of the Constituent
Assembly from whose hands the Directorate which ruled in
Siberia received its authority and Admiral Kolchak his
command, his proper title being Commander of the Forces
of the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly
members were to have met on January 1st of this year, then
to retake authority from the Directorate and organize a
government on an All-Russian basis. But there was
continual friction between the Directorate and the
Conference of members of the Constituent Assembly, the
Directorate being more reactionary than they. In November
came Kolchak's coup d'=82tat, followed by a declaration
against him and an appeal for his overthrow issued by
members of the Constituent Assembly. Some were arrested
by a group of officers. A few are said to have been killed.
Kolchak, I think, has denied responsibility for this, and
probably was unaware of the intentions of the
reactionaries under his command. Others of the members
escaped to Ufa. On December 5th, 25 days before that
town was taken by the Bolsheviks, they announced their
intention of no longer opposing the Soviet Government in
the field. After the capture of the town by the Soviet
troops, negotiations were begun between the
representatives of the Conference of Members of the
Constituent Assembly, together with other Right Social
Revolutionaries, and representatives of the Soviet
Government, with a view to finding a basis for agreement.
The result of those negotiations was the resolution passed
by the Executive Committee on February 26th (see page
166). A delegation of the members came to Moscow, and
were quaintly housed in a huge room in the Metropole,
where they had put up beds all round the walls and big
tables in the middle of the room for their deliberations. It
was in this room that I saw Volsky first, and afterwards in
my own.


I asked him what exactly had brought him and all that he
represented over from the side of Kolchak and the Allies to
the side of the Soviet Government. He looked me
straight in the face, and said: "I'll tell you. We were
convinced by many facts that the policy of the Allied
representatives in Siberia was directed not to strengthening
the Constituent Assembly against the Bolsheviks and the
Germans, but simply to strengthening the reactionary forces
behind our backs."


He also complained: "All through last summer we were
holding that front with the Czechs, being told that there
were two divisions of Germans advancing to attack us, and
we now know that there were no German troops in Russia
at all."


He criticized the Bolsheviks for being better makers of
programmes than organizers. They offered free electricity,
and presently had to admit that soon there would be no
electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently base
their policy on the study of actual possibilities. "But that
they are really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is
clear to us. We are, therefore, prepared to help them in
every possible way."


He said, further: "Intervention of any kind
will prolong the regime of the Bolsheviks by
compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet Government,
although we do not like it, and to support it because it is
defending the revolution."


With regard to help given to individual groups or
governments fighting against Soviet Russia, Volsky said
that they saw no difference between such intervention and
intervention in the form of sending troops.


I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in
almost the same words as those used by Martov, that life
itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter their policy or
to go. Sooner or later the peasants would make their will
felt, and they were against the bourgeoisie and against the
Bolsheviks. No bourgeois reaction could win permanently
against the Soviet, because it could have nothing to offer,
no idea for which people would fight. If by any chance
Kolchak, Denikin and Co. were to win, they would have to
kill in tens of thousands where the Bolsheviks have had to
kill in hundreds, and the result would be the complete ruin
and the collapse of Russia in anarchy. "Has not the
Ukraine been enough to teach the Allies that even six
months' occupation of non-Bolshevik territory
by half a million troops has merely the effect of
turning the population into Bolsheviks?"




THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL



March 3rd.


One day near the end of February, Bucharin, hearing that I
meant to leave quite soon, said rather mysteriously, "Wait a
few days longer, because something of international
importance is going to happen which will certainly be of
interest for your history." That was the only hint I got of
the preparation of the Third International. Bucharin refused
to say more. On March 3rd Reinstein looked in about nine
in the morning and said he had got me a guest's ticket for
the conference in the Kremlin, and wondered why I had not
been there the day before, when it had opened. I told him I
knew nothing whatever about it; Litvinov and Karakhan,
whom I had seen quite recently, had never mentioned it,
and guessing that this must be the secret at which Bucharin
had hinted, I supposed that they had purposely kept
silence. I therefore rang up Litvinov, and asked if they
had had any reason against my going. He said that he had
thought it would not interest me. So I went. The
Conference was still a secret. There was nothing about it in
the morning papers.


The meeting was in a smallish room, with a dais at one end,
in the old Courts of Justice built in the time of Catherine the
Second, who would certainly have turned in her grave if
she had known the use to which it was being put. Two
very smart soldiers of the Red Army were guarding the
doors. The whole room, including the floor, was decorated
in red. There were banners with "Long Live the Third
International" inscribed upon them in many languages. The
Presidium was on the raised dais at the end of the room,
Lenin sitting in the middle behind a long red-covered table
with Albrecht, a young German Spartacist, on the right and
Platten, the Swiss, on the left. The auditorium sloped down
to the foot of the dais. Chairs were arranged on each side
of an alleyway down the middle, and the four or five front
rows had little tables for convenience in writing.
Everybody of importance was there; Trotzky,
Zinoviev, Kamenev, Chichern, Bucharin, Karakhan,
Litvinov, Vorovsky, Steklov, Rakovsky, representing here
the Balkan Socialist Party, Skripnik, representing the
Ukraine. Then there were Stang (Norwegian Left
Socialists), Grimlund (Swedish Left), Sadoul (France),
Finberg (British Socialist Party), Reinstein (American
Socialist Labour Party), a Turk, a German-Austrian,
a Chinese, and so on. Business was conducted and
speeches were made in all languages, though
where possible German was used, because more of the
foreigners knew German than knew French. This was
unlucky for me.


When I got there people were making reports about the
situation in the different countries. Finberg spoke in
English, Rakovsky in French, Sadoul also. Skripnik, who,
being asked, refused to talk German and said he would
speak in either Ukrainian or Russia, and to most people's
relief chose the latter, made several interesting points about
the new revolution in the Ukraine. The killing of the
leaders under the Skoropadsky regime had made no
difference to the movement, and town after town was
falling after internal revolt. (This was before they had
Kiev and, of course, long before they had taken Odessa,
both of which gains they confidently prophesied.) The
sharp lesson of German occupation had taught the
Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries what their experiences
during the last fifteen months had taught the Russian, and
all parties were working together.

But the real interest of the gathering was in its attitude
towards the Berne conference. Many letters had been
received from members of that conference, Longuet for
example, wishing that the Communists had been
represented there, and the view taken at Moscow was that
the left wing at Berne was feeling uncomfortable at sitting
down with Scheidemann and Company; let them definitely
break with them, finish with the Second International and
join the Third. It was clear that this gathering in the
Kremlin was meant as the nucleus of a new International
opposed to that which had split into national groups, each
supporting its own government in the prosecution of the
war. That was the leit motif of the whole affair.


Trotsky, in a leather coat, military breeches and
gaiters, with a fur hat with the sign of the Red Army in
front, was looking very well, but a strange figure for those
who had known him as one of the greatest
anti-militarists in Europe. Lenin sat quietly listening,
speaking when necessary in almost every European
language with astonishing ease. Balabanova talked about
Italy and seemed happy at last, even in Soviet Russia, to be
once more in a "secret meeting." It was really an
extraordinary affair and, in spite of some childishness, I
could not help realizing that I was present at something that
will go down in the histories of socialism, much like that
other strange meeting convened in London in 1848.


The vital figures of the conference, not counting Platten,
whom I do not know and on whom I can express no
opinion, were Lenin and the young German, Albrecht, who,
fired no doubt by the events actually taking place in his
country, spoke with brain and character. The German
Austrian also seemed a real man. Rakovsky, Skripnik, and
Sirola the Finn really represented something. But there was
a make-believe side to the whole affair, in which the
English Left Socialists were represented by Finberg, and
the Americans by Reinstein, neither of whom had or was
likely to have any means of communicating with his
constituents.


March 4th.


In the Kremlin they were discussing the programme on
which the new International was to stand. This is, of
course, dictatorship of the proletariat and all that that
implies. I heard, Lenin make a long speech, the main point
of which was to show that Kautsky and his supporters at
Berne were now condemning the very tactics which they
had praised in 1906. When I was leaving the Kremlin I met
Sirola walking in the square outside the building without a
hat, without a coat, in a cold so intense that I was putting
snow on my nose to prevent frostbite. I exclaimed. Sirola
smiled his ingenuous smile. "It is March," he said, "Spring
is coming."


March 5th.


Today all secrecy was dropped, a little prematurely, I
fancy, for when I got to the Kremlin I found that the first
note of opposition had been struck by the man who least of
all was expected to strike it. Albrecht, the young German,
had opposed the immediate founding of the Third
International, on the double ground that not all nations were
properly represented and that it might make difficulties for
the political parties concerned in their own countries.
Every one was against him. Rakovsky pointed out that the
same objections could have been raised against the
founding of the First International by Marx in London. The
German-Austrian combated Albrecht's second point.
Other people said that the different parties concerned had
long ago definitely broken with the Second International.
Albrecht was in a minority of one. It was decided therefore
that this conference was actually the Third International.
Platten announced the decision, and the "International" was
sung in a dozen languages at once. Then Albrecht stood
up, a little red in the face, and said that he, of course,
recognized the decision and would announce it in Germany.

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