THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

By Arthur Ransome

 TO WILLIAM PETERS OF ABERDEEN

INTRODUCTION

THE characteristic of a revolutionary country is that change is aquicker process there than elsewhere. As the revolution recedes intothe past the process of change slackens speed. Russia is no longer thedizzying kaleidoscope that it was in 1917. No longer does it changevisibly from week to week as it changed in 19l8. Already, to get a clearvision of the direction in which it is changing, it is necessary tovisit it at intervals of six months, and quite useless to tap thepolitical barometer several times a day as once upon a time one used todo. .. . But it is still changing very fast. My journal of "Russia in1919, " while giving as I believe a fairly accurate picture of the stateof affairs in February and March of 1919, pictures a very differentstage in the development of the revolution from that which would befound by observers today. 

The prolonged state of crisis in which the country has been kept byexternal war, while strengthening the ruling party by rallying eventheir enemies to their support, has had the other effects that anational crisis always has on the internal politics of a country. Methods of government which in normal times would no doubt be softenedor disguised by ceremonial usage are used nakedly and justifiedby necessity. We have seen the same thing in belligerent andnon-revolutionary countries, and, for the impartial student, it has beeninteresting to observe that, when this test of crisis is applied, theactual governmental machine in every country looks very much like thatin every other. They wave different flags to stimulate enthusiasm andto justify submission. But that is all. Under the stress of war, "constitutional safeguards" go by the board "for the public good, " inMoscow as elsewhere. Under that stress it becomes clear that, in spiteof its novel constitution, Russia is governed much as other countriesare governed, the real directive power lying in the hands of acomparatively small body which is able by hook or crook to infect withits conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A visitorto Moscow to-day would find much of the constitutional machinery thatwas in full working order in the spring of 1919 now falling into rustand disrepair. He would not be able once a week or so to attend All-RussianExecutive and hear discussions in this parliament of the questions ofthe day. No one tries to shirk the fact that the Executive Committee hasfallen into desuetude, from which, when the stress slackens enough topermit ceremonial that has not an immediate agitational value, it maysome day be revived. The bulk of its members have been at the front orhere and there about the country wrestling with the economic problem, and their work is more useful than their chatter. Thus brutally is thething stated. The continued stress has made the muscles, the actualworks, of the revolution more visible than formerly. The working of themachine is not only seen more clearly, but is also more frankly stated(perhaps simply because they too see it now more clearly), by theleaders themselves. 

I want in this book to describe the working of the machine as I now seeit. But it is not only the machine which is more nakedly visible thanit was. The stress to which it is being subjected has also not so muchchanged its character as become easier of analysis. At least, I seem tomyself to see it differently. In the earlier days it seemed quite simplythe struggle between a revolutionary and non-revolutionary countries. Inow think that that struggle is a foolish, unnecessary, lunatic incidentwhich disguised from us the existence of a far more serious struggle, inwhich the revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are fightingon the same side. They fight without cooperation, and throw insultsand bullets at each other in the middle of the struggle, but they arefighting for the same thing. They are fighting the same enemy. Their quarrel with each other is for both parties merely a harassingaccompaniment of the struggle to which all Europe is committed, for thesalvage of what is left of European civilization. 

The threat of a complete collapse of civilization is more imminent inRussia than elsewhere. But it is clear enough in Poland, it cannot bedisregarded in Germany, there is no doubt of its existence in Italy, France is conscious of it; it is only in England and America that thisthreat is not among the waking nightmares of everybody. Unless thestruggle, which has hitherto been going against us, takes a turn for thebetter, we shall presently be quite unable to ignore it ourselves. 

I have tried to state the position in Russia today: on the one hand todescribe the crisis itself, the threat which is forcing these people toan extreme of effort, and on the other hand to describe the organizationthat is facing that threat; on the one hand to set down what are themain characteristics of the crisis, on the other hand to show how thecomparatively small body of persons actually supplying the Russianpeople with its directives set about the stupendous task of moving thatvast inert mass, not along the path of least resistance, but along apath which, while alike unpleasant and extremely difficult, does seem tothem to promise some sort of eventual escape. 

No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind stating myown reason for writing this one (which has taken time that I should haveliked to spend on other and very different things). Knowledge of thisreason will permit the reader to make allowances for such bias I havebeen unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my bookperhaps nearly as objective as I should myself wish it to be. 

It has been said that when two armies face each other across a battlefront and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be considered as a singlearmy engaged in suicide. Now it seems to me that when countries, eachone severally doing its best to arrest its private economic ruin, dotheir utmost to accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we arewitnessing something very like the suicide of civilization itself. Thereare people in both camps who believe that armed and economic conflictbetween revolutionary and non-revolutionary Europe, or if you likebetween Capitalism and Communism, is inevitable. These people, in bothcamps, are doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy pessimists, inMoscow no less than in London and Paris, they go so far as to say "thesooner the better, " and by all means in their power try to precipitatea conflict. Now the main effort in Russia to-day, the struggle whichabsorbs the chief attention of all but the few Communist Churchills andCommunist Millerands who, blind to all else, demand an immediate pitchedbattle over the prostrate body of civilization, is directed to findinga way for Russia herself out of the crisis, the severity of which canhardly be realized by people who have not visited the country again andagain, and to bringing her as quickly as possible into a state in whichshe can export her raw materials and import the manufactured goods ofwhich she stands in need. I believe that this struggle is ours as wellas Russia's, though we to whom the threat is less imminent, are lessdesperately engaged. Victory or defeat in this struggle in Russia, oranywhere else on the world's surface, is victory or defeat for everyone. The purpose of my book is to make that clear. For, bearing that inmind, I cannot but think that every honest man, of whatever parity, who cares more for humanity than for politics, must do his utmostto postpone the conflict which a few extremists on each side of thebarricades so fanatically desire. If that conflict is indeed inevitable, its consequences will be less devastating to a Europe cured of herwounds than to a Europe scarcely, even by the most hopeful, to bedescribed as convalescent. But the conflict may not be inevitable afterall. No man not purblind but sees that Communist Europe is changing noless than Capitalist Europe. If we succeed in postponing the strugglelong enough, we may well succeed in postponing it until the war-like onboth sides look in vain for the reasons of their bellicosity. 

CONTENTS

 Introduction The Shortage of Things The Shortage of Men The Communist Dictatorship A Conference at Jaroslavl The Trade Unions The Propaganda Trains Saturdayings Industrial Conscription What the Communists Are Trying to do in Russia Rykov on Economic plans and on the Transformation of the Communist Party Non-Partyism Possibilities

 ***I am indebted to the editor of the "Manchester Guardian" for permission to make use in some of the chapters of this book of material which has appeared in his paper. 

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

THE SHORTAGE OF THINGS

Nothing can be more futile than to describe conditions in Russia as asort of divine punishment for revolution, or indeed to describe them atall without emphasizing the fact that the crisis in Russia is part ofthe crisis in Europe, and has been in the main brought about like therevolution itself, by the same forces that have caused, for example, thecrisis in Germany or the crisis in Austria. 

No country in Europe is capable of complete economic independence. Inspite of her huge variety of natural resources, the Russian organismseemed in 1914 to have been built up on the generous assumption thatwith Europe at least the country was to be permanently at peace, orat the lost to engage in military squabbles which could be reckonedin months, and would keep up the prestige of the autocracy withoutseriously hampering imports and exports. Almost every country in Europe, with the exception of England, was better fitted to stand alone, wasless completely specialized in a single branch of production. England, fortunately for herself, was not isolated during the war, and will notbecome isolated unless the development of the crisis abroad deprivesher of her markets. England produces practically no food, butgreat quantities of coal, steel and manufactured goods. Isolate herabsolutely, and she will not only starve, but will stop producingmanufactured goods, steel and coal, because those who usually producethese things will be getting nothing for their labor except money whichthey will be unable to use to buy dinners, because there will be nodinners to buy. That supposititious case is a precise parallel to whathas happened in Russia. Russia produced practically no manufacturedgoods (70 per cent. Of her machinery she received from abroad), butgreat quantities of food. The blockade isolated her. By the blockade Ido not mean merely the childish stupidity committed by ourselves, butthe blockade, steadily increasing in strictness, which began in August, 1914, and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our stupidity. The war, even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade, was so actually. The use of tonnage was perforce restricted to the transport of thenecessaries of war, and these were narrowly defined as shells, guns andso on, things which do not tend to improve a country economically, butrather the reverse. The imports from Sweden through Finland were no sortof make-weight for the loss of Poland and Germany. 

The war meant that Russia's ordinary imports practically ceased. Itmeant a strain on Russia, comparable to that which would have been puton England if the German submarine campaign had succeeded in puttingan end to our imports of food from the Americas. From the moment of theDeclaration of War, Russia was in the position of one "holding out, " ofa city standing a siege without a water supply, for her imports were sonecessary to her economy that they may justly be considered as essentialirrigation. There could be no question for her of improvement, ofstrengthening. She was faced with the fact until the war should endshe had to do with what she had, and that the things she had formerlycounted on importing would be replaced by guns and shells, to be used, as it turned out, in battering Russian property that happened to be inenemy hands. She even learned that she had to develop gun-making andshell-making at home, at the expense of those other industries which tosome small extent might have helped her to keep going. And, just as inEngland such a state of affairs would lead to a cessation of the outputof iron and coal in which England is rich, so in Russia, in spite of hercorn lands, it led to a shortage of food. 

The Russian peasant formerly produced food, for which he was paid inmoney. With that money, formerly, he was able to clothe himself, to buythe tools of his labor, and further, though no doubt he never observedthe fact, to pay for the engines and wagons that took his food tomarket. A huge percentage of the clothes and the tools and the enginesand the wagons and the rails came from abroad, and even those factoriesin Russia which were capable of producing such things were, in manyessentials, themselves dependent upon imports. Russian towns began tobe hungry in 1915. In October of that year the Empress reported tothe Emperor that the shrewd Rasputin had seen in a vision that it wasnecessary to bring wagons with flour, butter and sugar from Siberia, and proposed that for three days nothing else should be done. Thenthere would be no strikes. "He blesses you for the arrangement ofthese trains. " In 1916 the peasants were burying their bread instead ofbringing it to market. In the autumn of 1916 I remember telling certainmost incredulous members of the English Government that there would bea most serious food shortage in Russia in the near future. In 1917 camethe upheaval of the revolution, in 1918 peace, but for Russia, civilwar and the continuance of the blockade. By July, 1919, the rarity ofmanufactured goods was such that it was possible two hundred miles southof Moscow to obtain ten eggs for a box of matches, and the rarity ofgoods requiring distant transport became such that in November, 1919, inWestern Russia, the peasants would sell me nothing for money, whereasmy neighbor in the train bought all he wanted in exchange for smallquantities of salt. 

It was not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the war in asatisfactory condition. The most vital of all questions in a countryof huge distances must necessarily be that of transport. It is noexaggeration to say that only by fantastic efforts was Russian transportable to save its face and cover its worst deficiencies even before thewar began. The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troopsand the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and with eachsucceeding week of war, although in 1916 and 1917 Russia did receive775 locomotives from abroad, Russian transport went from bad to worse, making inevitable a creeping paralysis of Russian economic life, duringthe latter already acute stages of which the revolutionaries succeededto the disease that had crippled their precursors. 

In 1914 Russia had in all 20, 057 locomotives, of which 15, 047 burntcoal, 4, 072 burnt oil and 938 wood. But that figure of twenty thousandwas more impressive for a Government official, who had his own reasonsfor desiring to be impressed, than for a practical railway engineer, since of that number over five thousand engines were more than twentyyears old, over two thousand were more than thirty years old, fifteenhundred were more than forty years old, and 147 patriarchs had passedtheir fiftieth birthday. Of the whole twenty thousand only 7, 108 wereunder ten years of age. That was six years ago. In the meantime Russiahas been able to make in quantities decreasing during the last fiveyears by 40 and 50 per cent. Annually, 2, 990 new locomotives. In 1914 ofthe locomotives then in Russia about 17, 000 were in working condition. In 1915 there were, in spite of 800 new ones, only 16, 500. In 1916 thenumber of healthy locomotives was slightly higher, owing partly tothe manufacture of 903 at home in the preceding year and partly to thearrival of 400 from abroad. In 1917 in spite of the arrival of a furthersmall contingent the number sank to between 15, 000 and 16, 000. Earlyin 1918 the Germans in the Ukraine and elsewhere captured 3, 000. Others were lost in the early stages of the civil war. The number oflocomotives fell from 14, 519 in January to 8, 457 in April, after whichthe artificially instigated revolt of the Czecho-Slovaks made possiblethe fostering of civil war on a large scale, and the number fell swiftlyto 4, 679 in December. In 1919 the numbers varied less markedly, butthe decline continued, and in December last year 4, 141 engines werein working order. In January this year the number was 3, 969, risingslightly in February, when the number was 4, 019. A calculation was madebefore the war that in the best possible conditions the maximum Russianoutput of engines could be not more than 1, 800 annually. At this ratein ten years the Russians could restore their collection of enginesto something like adequate numbers. Today, thirty years would be aninadequate estimate, for some factories, like the Votkinsky, have beenpurposely ruined by the Whites, in others the lathes and other machineryfor building and repairing locomotives are worn out, many of the skilledengineers were killed in the war with Germany, many others in defendingthe revolution, and it will be long before it will be possible torestore to the workmen or to the factories the favorable materialconditions of 1912-13. Thus the main fact in the present crisis is thatRussia possesses one-fifth of the number of locomotives which in1914 was just sufficient to maintain her railway system in a state ofefficiency which to English observers at that time was a joke. For sixyears she has been unable to import the necessary machinery for makingengines or repairing them. Further, coal and oil have been, untilrecently, cut off by the civil war. The coal mines are left, afterthe civil war, in such a condition that no considerable output may beexpected from them in the near future. Thus, even those engines whichexist have had their efficiency lessened by being adapted in a rough andready manner for burning wood fuel instead of that for which they weredesigned. 

Let us now examine the combined effect of ruined transport and the sixyears' blockade on Russian life in town and country. First of all wascut off the import of manufactured goods from abroad. That has hada cumulative effect completed, as it were, and rounded off by thebreakdown of transport. By making it impossible to bring food, fueland raw material to the factories, the wreck of transport makes itimpossible for Russian industry to produce even that modicum whichit contributed to the general supply of manufactured goods which theRussian peasant was accustomed to receive in exchange for his productionof food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather more than he didbefore the war. But he has no matches, no salt, no clothes, no boots, notools. The Communists are trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages the most frequent excuse for keeping children fromschool is a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as Ihave seen them myself, playing naked about the stove, without bootsor anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go and learn to read andwrite. Clothes and such things as matches are, however, of less vitalimportance than tools, the lack of which is steadily reducing Russia'sactual power of food production. Before the war Russia needed fromabroad huge quantities of agricultural implements, not only machines, but simple things like axes, sickles, scythes. In 1915 her ownproduction of these things had fallen to 15. 1 per cent. Of her alreadyinadequate peacetime output. In 1917 it had fallen to 2. 1 per cent. TheSoviet Government is making efforts to raise it, and is planningnew factories exclusively for the making of these things. But, withtransport in such a condition, a new factory means merely a new demandfor material and fuel which there are neither engines nor wagons tobring. Meanwhile, all over Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowingwith burnt staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface ofthe ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked harrow ofsome weight, are brushing the ground with light constructions of woodenspikes bound together with wattles. 

The actual agricultural productive powers of Russia are consequentlysinking. But things are no better if we turn from the rye and corn landsto the forests. Saws are worn out. Axes are worn out. Even apart fromthat, the shortage of transport affects the production of wood fuel, lack of which reacts on transport and on the factories and so on in acircle from which nothing but a large import of engines and wagons willprovide an outlet. Timber can be floated down the rivers. Yes, but itmust be brought to the rivers. Surely horses can do that. Yes, but, horses must be fed, and oats do not grow in the forests. For example, this spring (1920) the best organized timber production was in PermGovernment. There sixteen thousand horses have been mobilized forthe work, but further development is impossible for lack of forage. Atelegram bitterly reports, "Two trains of oats from Ekaterinburg areexpected day by day. If the oats arrive in time a considerable successwill be possible. " And if the oats do not arrive in time? Besides, nothorses alone require to be fed. The men who cut the wood cannot do iton empty stomachs. And again rises a cry for trains, that do not arrive, for food that exists somewhere, but not in the forest where men work. The general effect of the wreck of transport on food is stated asfollows: Less than 12 per cent. Of the oats required, less than 5 percent. Of the bread and salt required for really efficient working, werebrought to the forests. Nonetheless three times as much wood has beenprepared as the available transport has removed. 

The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the combined effecton the country of their productive weakness and of the loss of their oldposition as centres through which the country received its imports fromabroad. Townsfolk and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials andmuch else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life. Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but there wereno means of bringing them from the fisheries to the great industrialcentres where they were most needed. Townsfolk are starving, and inwinter, cold. People living in rooms in a flat, complete strangers toeach other, by general agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen. In the kitchen soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth therebeside the natural warmth of several human beings in a small room. Thereit is possible to sleep. During the whole of last winter, in the case Ihave in mind, there were no means of heating the other rooms, where thetemperature was almost always far below freezing point. It is difficultto make the conditions real except by individual examples. The lack ofmedicines, due directly to the blockade, seems to have small effect onthe imagination when simply stated as such. Perhaps people willrealize what it means when instead of talking of the wounded undergoingoperations without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, aBolshevik, working in a Government office, who suffered last summerfrom a slight derangement of the stomach due to improper and inadequatefeeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen differentapothecaries were unable to make up the prescription for lack of one orseveral of the simple ingredients required. Soap has become an articleso rare (in Russia as in Germany during the blockade and the war thereis a terrible absence of fats) that for the present it is to be treatedas a means of safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washingafter and during their work, and in preference to miners, chemical, medical and sanitary workers, for whose efficiency and health it isessential. The proper washing of underclothes is impossible. To inducethe population of Moscow to go to the baths during the typhus epidemic, it was sufficient bribe to promise to each person beside the free batha free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into disrepair for want ofplaster, paint and tools. Nor is it possible to substitute one thing foranother, for Russia's industries all suffer alike from their dependenceon the West, as well as from the inadequacy of the transport to bring tofactories the material they need. People remind each other that duringthe war the Germans, when similarly hard put to it for clothes, made paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In Russia the nets used inpaper-making are worn out. At last, in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me), there seemed to be a hope of getting new ones from abroad. But thecondition of the paper industry is typical of all, in a country which, it should not be forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulpfor other countries besides itself. The factories are able to produceonly sixty per cent. Of demands that have previously, by the strictestscrutiny, been reduced to a minimum before they are made. The reasons, apart from the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence offood, forage and finally labor. Even when wood is brought by river thetrouble is not yet overcome. The horses are dead and eaten or starvedand weak. Factories have to cease working so that the workmen, themselves underfed, can drag the wood from the barges to the mills. It may well be imagined what the effect of hunger, cold, and thedisheartenment consequent on such conditions of work and the seeminghopelessness of the position have on the productivity of labor, thefall in which reacts on all the industries, on transport, on the generalsituation and so again on itself. 

Mr. J. M. Keynes, writing with Central Europe in his mind (he is, Ithink, as ignorant of Russia as I am of Germany), says: "What then isour picture of Europe? A country population able to support life on thefruits of its own agricultural production, but without the accustomedsurplus for the towns, and also (as a result of the lack of importedmaterials, and so of variety and amount in the salable manufactures ofthe towns) without the usual incentives to market food in exchange forother wares; an industrial population unable to keep its strength forlack of food, unable to earn a livelihood for lack of materials, and sounable to make good by imports from abroad the failure of productivityat home. "

Russia is an emphasized engraving, in which every line of that pictureis bitten in with repeated washes of acid. Several new lines, however, are added to the drawing, for in Russia the processes at work elsewherehave gone further than in the rest of Europe, and it is possible to seedimly, in faint outline, the new stage of decay which is threatened. The struggle to arrest decay is the real crisis of the revolution, ofRussia, and, not impossibly, of Europe. For each country that developsto the end in this direction is a country lost to the economic comity ofEurope. And, as one country follows another over the brink, so willthe remaining countries be faced by conditions of increasingly narrowself-dependence, in fact by the very conditions which in Russia, so far, have received their clearest, most forcible illustration. 

THE SHORTAGE OF MEN

In the preceding chapter I wrote of Russia's many wants, and of theprocesses visibly at work, tending to make her condition worse and notbetter. But I wrote of things, not of people. I wrote of the shortage ofthis and of that, but not of the most serious of all shortages, which, while itself largely due to those already discussed, daily intensifiesthem, and points the way to that further stage of decay which isthreatened in the near future in Russia, and, in the more distant futurein Europe. I did not write of the shortage deterioration of labor. 

Shortage of labor is not peculiar to Russia. It is among the postwarphenomena common to all countries. The war and its accompanying easeshave cost Europe, including Russia, an enormous number of able-bodiedmen. Many millions of others have lost the habit of regular work. Germanindustrialists complain that they cannot get labor, and that when theyget it, it is not productive. I heard complaints on the same subject inEngland. But just as the economic crisis, due in the first instance tothe war and the isolation it imposed, has gone further in Russia thanelsewhere, so the shortage of labor, at present a handicap, an annoyancein more fortunate countries, is in Russia perhaps the greatest of thenational dangers. Shortage of labor cannot be measured simply by thedecreasing numbers of the workmen. If it takes two workmen as long to doa particular job in 1920 as it took one man to do it in 1914, then, evenif the number of workman has remained the same, the actual supply oflabor has been halved. And in Russia the situation is worse than that. For example, in the group of State metal-working factories, those, infact which may be considered as the weapon with which Russia is tryingto cut her way out of her transport difficulties, apart from the factthat there were in 1916 81, 600 workmen, whereas in 1920 there are only42, 500, labor has deteriorated in the most appalling manner. In 1916 inthese factories 92 per cent. Of the nominal working hours were actuallykept; in 1920 work goes on during only 60 per cent. Of the nominalhours. It is estimated that the labor of a single workman produces nowonly one quarter of what it produced in 1916. To take another example, also from workmen engaged in transport, that is to say, in the mostimportant of all work at the present time: in the Moscow junction of theMoscow Kazan Railway, between November 1st and February 29th (1920), 292 workmen and clerks missed 12, 048 working days, being absent, onin average, forty days per man in the four months. In Moscowpassenger-station on this line, 22 workmen missed in November 106 days, in December 273, in January 338, and in February 380; in an appallingcrescendo further illustrated by the wagon department, where 28 workmenmissed in November 104 days and in February 500. In November workmenabsented themselves for single days. In February the same workmen wereabsent for the greater part of the month. The invariable excuse wasillness. Many cases of illness there undoubtedly were, since this periodwas the worst of the typhus epidemic, but besides illness, and besidesmere obvious idleness which no doubt accounts for a certain proportionof illegitimate holidays, there is another explanation which goes nearerthe root of the matter. Much of the time filched from the State was inall probability spent in expeditions in search of food. In Petrograd, the Council of Public Economy complain that there is a tendency to turnthe eight-hour day into a four-hour day. Attempts are being made toarrest this tendency by making an additional food allowance conditionalon the actual fulfilment of working days. In the Donetz coal basin, themonthly output per man was in 1914 750 poods, in 1916 615 poods, in 1919240 poods (figures taken from Ekaterinoslav Government), and in 1920the output per man is estimated at being something near 220 poods. In theshale mines on the Volga, where food conditions are comparatively good, productivity is comparatively high. Thus in a small mine near Simbirskthere are 230 workmen, of' whom 50 to 60 are skilled. The output for theunskilled is 28. 9 poods in a shift, for the skilled 68. 3. But even there25 per cent. Of the workmen are regular absentees, and actually the mineworks only 17 or 18 days in a month, that is, 70 per cent. Of the normalnumber of working days. The remaining 30 per cent. Of normal workingtime is spent by the workmen in getting food. Another small mine in thesame district is worked entirely by unskilled labor, the workers beingpeasants from the neighboring villages. In this mine the productivityper man is less, but all the men work full time. They do not have towaste time in securing food, because, being local peasants, they aresupplied by their own villages and families. In Moscow and Petrogradfood is far more difficult to secure, more time is wasted on thathopeless task; even with that waste of time, the workman is not properlyfed, and it cannot be wondered at that his productivity is low. 

Something, no doubt, is due to the natural character of the Russians, which led Trotsky to define man as an animal distinguished by laziness. Russians are certainly lazy, and probably owe to their climate theirremarkable incapacity for prolonged effort. The Russian climate is suchthat over large areas of Russia the Russian peasant is accustomed, andhas been accustomed for hundreds of years, to perform prodigies oflabor during two short periods of sowing and harvest, and to spend theimmensely long and monotonous winter in a hibernation like that of thesnake or the dormouse. There is a much greater difference between aRussian workman's normal output and that of which he is capable for ashort time if he sets himself to it, than there is between the normaland exceptional output of an Englishman, whose temperate climate hasnot taught him to regard a great part of the year as a period of merewaiting for and resting from the extraordinary effort of a few weeks. [*]

 * Given any particular motive, any particular enthusiasm, or visible, desirable object, even the hungry Russian workmen of to-day are capable of sudden and temporary increase of output. The "Saturdayings" (see p. 119) provide endless illustrations of this. They had something in the character of a picnic, they were novel, they were out of the routine, and the productivity of labor during a "Saturdaying" was invariably higher than on a weekday. For example, there is a shortage of paper for cigarettes. People roll cigarettes in old newspapers. It occurred to the Central Committee of the Papermakers' Union to organize a "Sundaying" with the object of sending cigarette paper to the soldiers in the Red Army. Six factories took part. Here is a table showing the output of these factories during the "Sundaying" and the average weekday output. The figures are in poods. 

 Made on Average week Factory the Sunday Day Output

 Krasnogorodskaya. .. .. .. .. 615. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 450 Griaznovskaya. .. .. .. .. .. .. 65. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 45 Medianskaya. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 105. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 90 Dobruzhskaya. .. .. .. .. .. .. 186. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 250 Belgiiskaya. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 127. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 85 Ropshinskaya. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 85. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 55]

But this uneven working temperament was characteristic of the Russianbefore the war as well as now. It has been said that the revolutionremoved the stimulus to labor, and left the Russian laziness to have itsway. In the first period of the revolution that may have been true. It is becoming day by day less true. The fundamental reasons of lowproductivity will not be found in any sudden or unusual efflorescenceof idleness, but in economic conditions which cannot but reduce theproductivity of idle and industrious alike. Insufficient feeding isone such reason. The proportion of working time consumed in foragingis another. But the whole of my first chapter may be taken as a compactmass of reasons why the Russians at the present time should not workwith anything like a normal productivity. It is said that bad workmencomplain of their tools, but even good ones become disheartened ifcompelled to work with makeshifts, mended tools, on a stock of materialsthat runs out from one day to the next, in factories where the machinerymay come at any moment to a standstill from lack of fuel. There wouldthus be a shortage of labor in Russia, even if the numbers of workmenwere the same today as they were before the war. Unfortunately that isnot so. Turning from the question of low productivity per man to thatof absolute shortage of men: the example given at the beginning ofthis chapter, showing that in the most important group of factories thenumber of workmen has fallen 50 per cent. Is by no means exceptional. Walking through the passages of what used to be the Club of the Nobles, and is now the house of the Trades Unions during the recent Trades UnionCongress in Moscow, I observed among a number of pictorial diagramson the walls, one in particular illustrating the rise and fall of theworking population of Moscow during a number of years. Each year wasrepresented by the picture of a factory with a chimney which rose andfell with the population. From that diagram I took the figures for 1913, 1918 and 1919. These figures should be constantly borne in mind by anyone who wishes to realize how catastrophic the shortage of labor inRussia actually is, and to judge how sweeping may be the changes in thesocial configuration of the country if that shortage continues toincrease. Here are the figures:

 Workmen in Moscow in 1913. .. .. .. .. .. . 159, 344 Workmen in Moscow in 1918. .. .. .. .. .. 157, 282 Workmen in Moscow in 1919. .. .. .. .. .. . 105, 210

That is to say, that one-third of the workmen of Moscow ceased tolive there, or ceased to be workmen, in the course of a single year. A similar phenomenon is observable in each one of the big industrialdistricts. 

What has become of those workmen?

A partial explanation is obvious. The main impulse of the revolutioncame from the town workers. Of these, the metal workers were the mostdecided, and those who most freely joined the Red Guard in the early andthe Red Army in the later days of the revolution. Many, in those earlydays, when there was more enthusiasm than discipline, when there werehardly any experienced officers, and those without much authority, wereslaughtered during the German advance of 1918. The first mobilizations, when conscription was introduced, were among the workers in the greatindustrial districts. The troops from Petrograd and Moscow, exclusivelyworkmen's regiments, have suffered more than any other during the civilwar, being the most dependable and being thrown, like the guards of oldtime, into the worst place at any serious crisis. Many thousands of themhave died for the sake of the revolution which, were they living, they would be hard put to it to save. (The special shortage of skilledworkers is also partially to be explained by the indiscriminatemobilizations of 1914-15, when great numbers of the most valuableengineers and other skilled workers were thrown into the front line, andit was not until their loss was already felt that the Tsar's Governmentin this matter came belatedly to its senses. )

But these explanations are only partial. The more general answer tothe question, What has become of the workmen? lies in the very economiccrisis which their absence accentuates. Russia is unlike England, wherestarvation of the towns would be practically starvation of the wholeisland. In Russia, if a man is hungry, he has only to walk far enoughand he will come to a place where there is plenty to eat. Almost everyRussian worker retains in some form or other connection with a village, where, if he returns, he will not be an entire stranger, but at worst apoor relation, and quite possibly an honored guest. It is not surprisingthat many thousands have "returned to the land" in this way. 

Further, if a workman retains his connection, both with a distantvillage and with a town, he can keep himself and his family fat andprosperous by ceasing to be a workman, and, instead, traveling on thebuffers or the roof of a railway wagon, and bringing back with him sacksof flour and potatoes for sale in the town at fantastic prices. Therebyhe is lost to productive labor, and his uncomfortable but adventurouslife becomes directly harmful, tending to increase the strain ontransport, since it is obviously more economical to transport a thousandsacks than to transport a thousand sacks with an idle workman attachedto each sack. Further, his activities actually make it more difficultfor the town population to get food. By keeping open for the village thepossibility of selling at fantastic prices, he lessens the readinessof the peasants to part with their flour at the lower prices of theGovernment. Nor is it as if his activities benefited the workingpopulation. The food he brings in goes for the most part to those whohave plenty of money or have things to exchange for it. And honestmen in Russia to-day have not much money, and those who have things toexchange are not as a rule workmen. The theory of this man's harmfulnessis, I know, open to argument, but the practice at least is exactly asI have stated it, and is obviously attractive to the individual whoprefers adventure on a full stomach to useful work on an empty. Settingaside the theory with its latent quarrel between Free Trade and Statecontrol, we can still recognize that each workman engaged in thesepursuits has become an unproductive middleman, one of that veryparasitic species which the revolutionaries had hoped to makeunnecessary. It is bad from the revolutionary point of view if a workmanis so employed, but it is no less bad from the point of view of peoplewho do not care twopence about the revolution one way or the other, butdo care about getting Russia on her feet again and out of her economiccrisis. It is bad enough if an unskilled workman is so employed. It isfar worse if a skilled workman finds he can do better for himself asa "food speculator" than by the exercise of his legitimate craft. Frommines, from every kind of factory come complaints of the decreasingproportion of skilled to unskilled workmen. The superior intelligenceof the skilled worker offers him definite advantages should he engage inthese pursuits, and his actual skill gives him other advantages in thevillages. He can leave his factory and go to the village, there onthe spot to ply his trade or variations of it, when as a handy man, repairing tools, etc. , he will make an easy living and by lesseningthe dependence of the village on the town do as much as the "foodspeculator" in worsening the conditions of the workman he has leftbehind. 

And with that we come to the general changes in the social geographyof Russia which are threatened if the processes now at work continueunchecked. The relations between town and village are the fundamentalproblem of the revolution. Town and countryside are in sharpcontradiction daily intensified by the inability of the towns to supplythe country's needs. The town may be considered as a single productiveorganism, with feelers stretching into the country, and actual outpoststhere in the form of agricultural enterprises taking their directivesfrom the centre and working as definite parts of the State organism. All round this town organism, in all its interstices, it too, with itsfeelers in the form of "food speculators, " is the anarchic chaos of thecountry, consisting of a myriad independent units, regulated by no plan, without a brain centre of any kind. Either the organized town willhold its own against and gradually dominate and systematize the countrychaos, or that chaos little by little will engulf the town organism. Every workman who leaves the town automatically places himself on theside of the country in that struggle. And when a town like Moscow losesa third of its working population in a year, it is impossible not tosee that, so far, the struggle is going in favor of that huge chaotic, unconscious but immensely powerful countryside. There is even a dangerthat the town may become divided against itself. Just as scarcity offood leads to food speculation, so the shortage of labor is makingpossible a sort of speculation in labor. The urgent need of labor hasled to a resurrection of the methods of the direct recruiting ofworkmen in the villages by the agents of particular factories, who byexceptional terms succeed in getting workmen where the Government organsfail. And, of course, this recruiting is not confined to the villages. Those enterprises which are situated in the corn districts are naturallyable to offer better conditions, for the sake of which workmen are readyto leave their jobs and skilled workmen to do unskilled work, and theresult can only be a drainage of good workmen away from the hungrycentral industrial districts where they are most of all needed. 

Summing up the facts collected in this chapter and in the first onthe lack of things and the lack of men, I think the economic crisis inRussia may be fairly stated as follows: Owing to the appalling conditionof Russian transport, and owing to the fact that since 1914 Russia hasbeen practically in a state of blockade, the towns have lost their powerof supplying, either as middlemen or as producers, the simplest needsof the villages. Partly owing to this, partly again because of thecondition of transport, the towns are not receiving the necessaries oflife in sufficient quantities. The result of this is a serious fall inthe productivity of labor, and a steady flow of skilled and unskilledworkmen from the towns towards the villages, and from employments theexercise of which tends to assist the towns in recovering their oldposition as essential sources of supply to employments that tend tohave the opposite effect. If this continues unchecked, it will makeimpossible the regeneration of Russian industry, and will result inthe increasing independence of the villages, which will tend to becomeentirely self-supporting communities, tilling the ground in a less andless efficient manner, with ruder tools, with less and less incentive toproduce more than is wanted for the needs of the village itself. Russia, in these circumstances, may sink into something very like barbarism, forwith the decay of the economic importance of the towns would decayalso their authority, and free-booting on a small and large scale wouldbecome profitable and not very dangerous. It would be possible, nodoubt, for foreigners to trade with the Russians as with the natives ofthe cannibal islands, bartering looking-glasses and cheap tools, but, should such a state of things come to be, it would mean long years ofcolonization, with all the new possibilities and risks involved in thesubjugation of a free people, before Western Europe could count oncemore on getting a considerable portion of its food from Russian cornlands. 

That is the position, those the natural tendencies at work. But opposedto these tendencies are the united efforts of the Communists and ofthose who, leaving the question of Communism discreetly aside, work withthem for the sake of preventing such collapse of Russian civilization. They recognize the existence of every one of the tendencies I havedescribed, but they are convinced that every one of these tendencieswill be arrested. They believe that the country will not conquer thetown but the reverse. So far from expecting the unproductive stagnationdescribed in the last paragraph, they think of Russia as of the naturalfood supply of Europe, which the Communists among them believe will, incourse of time, be made up for "Working Men's Republics" (though, forthe sake of their own Republic, they are not inclined to postpone tradewith Europe until that epoch arrives). At the very time when spades andsickles are wearing out or worn out, these men are determined thatthe food output of Russia shall sooner or later be increased by theintroduction of better methods of agriculture and farming on a largerscale. We are witnessing in Russia the first stages of a titanicstruggle, with on one side all the forces of nature leading apparentlyto an inevitable collapse of civilization, and on the other side nothingbut the incalculable force of human will. 

THE COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP

How is that will expressed? What is the organization welded by adversitywhich, in this crisis, supersedes even the Soviet Constitution, andstands between this people and chaos?

It is a commonplace to say that Russia is ruled, driven if you like, cold, starving as she is, to effort after effort by the dictatorship ofa party. It is a commonplace alike in the mouths of those who wish tomake the continued existence of that organization impossible and in themouths of the Communists themselves. At the second congress of the ThirdInternational, Trotsky remarked. "A party as such, in the course of thedevelopment of a revolution, becomes identical with the revolution. "Lenin, on the same occasion, replying to a critic who said that hediffered from, the Communists in his understanding of what was meant bythe Dictatorship of the Proletariat, said, "He says that we understandby the words 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' what is actually thedictatorship of its determined and conscious minority. And that is thefact. " Later he asked, "What is this minority? It may be called a party. If this minority is actually conscious, if it is able to draw the massesafter it, if it shows itself capable of replying to every question onthe agenda list of the political day, it actually constitutes a party. "And Trotsky again, on the same occasion, illustrated the relativepositions of the Soviet Constitution and the Communist Party when hesaid, "And today, now that we have received an offer of peace from thePolish Government, who decides the question? Whither are the workers toturn? We have our Council of People's Commissaries, of course, but that, too, must be under a certain control. Whose control? The control of theworking class as a formless chaotic mass? No. The Central Committee ofthe party is called together to discuss and decide the question. Andwhen we have to wage war, to form new divisions, to find the bestelements for them-to whom do we turn? To the party, to the CentralCommittee. And it gives directives to the local committees, 'SendCommunists to the front. ' The case is precisely the same with theAgrarian question, with that of supply, and with all other questionswhatsoever. "

No one denies these facts, but their mere statement is quite inadequateto explain what is being done in Russia and how it is being done. Ido not think it would be a waste of time to set down as brieflyas possible, without the comments of praise or blame that would beinevitable from one primarily interested in the problem from theCapitalist or Communist point of view what, from observation andinquiry, I believe to be the main framework of the organization wherebythat dictatorship of the party works. 

The Soviet Constitution is not so much moribund as in abeyance. TheExecutive Committee, for example, which used to meet once a week or evenoftener, now meets on the rarest occasions. Criticism on this accountwas met with the reply that the members of the Executive Committee, forexample, which used to meet once a week or even oftener, now meets onthe rarest occasions. Criticism on this account was met with the replythat the members of the Executive Committee were busy on the front andin various parts of Russia. As a matter of fact, the work which thatCommittee used to do is now done by Central Committee of the BolshevikParty, so that the bulk of the 150 members of the Central Executive areactually free for other work, a saving of something like 130 men. Thisdoes not involve any very great change, but merely an economy in the useof men. In the old days, as I well remember, the opening of a session ofthe Executive Committee was invariably late, the reason being that thevarious parties composing it had not yet finished their preliminary andprivate discussions. There is now an overwhelming Communist majorityin the Executive Committee, as elsewhere. I think it may be regardedas proved that these majorities are not always legitimately obtained. Non-Communist delegates do undoubtedly find every kind of difficulty putin their way by the rather Jesuitical adherents of the faith. But, nomatter how these majorities are obtained, the result is that when theCommunist Party has made up its mind on any subject, it is so certainof being able to carry its point that the calling together of theAll-Russian Executive Committee is merely a theatrical demonstration ofthe fact that it can do what it likes. When it does meet, the Communistsallow the microscopical opposition great liberty of speech, listenquietly, cheer ironically, and vote like one man, proving on everyoccasion that the meeting of the Executive Committee was the idlestof forms, intended rather to satisfy purists than for purposes ofdiscussion, since the real discussion has all taken place beforehandamong the Communists themselves. Something like this must happen withevery representative assembly at which a single party has a greatpreponderance and a rigid internal discipline. The real interest is inthe discussion inside the Party Committees. 

This state of affairs would probably be more actively resented if thepeople were capable of resenting anything but their own hunger, or offearing anything but a general collapse which would turn that hungerinto starvation. It must be remembered that the urgency of theeconomic crisis has driven political questions into the background. TheCommunists (compare Rykov's remarks on this subject, p. 175) believethat this is the natural result of social revolution. They think thatpolitical parties will disappear altogether and that people will bandtogether, not for the victory of one of several contending politicalparties, but solely for economic cooperation or joint enterprise inart or science. In support of this they point to the number of theiropponents who have become Communists, and to the still greater numberof non-Communists who are loyally working with them for the economicreconstruction of the country. I do not agree with the Communists inthis, nor yet with their opponents, who attribute the death of politicaldiscussion to fear of the Extraordinary Commission. I think that boththe Communists and their opponents underestimate the influence of theeconomic ruin that affects everybody. The latter particularly, feelingthat in some way they must justify themselves to politically mindedforeign visitors, seek an excuse for their apathy in the one institutionthat is almost universally unpopular. I have many non-Communist friendsin Russia, but have never detected the least restraint that could beattributed to fear of anybody in their criticisms of the Communistregime. The fear existed alike among Communists and non-Communists, but it was like the fear of people walking about in a particularly badthunderstorm. The activities and arrests of the Extraordinary Commissionare so haphazard, often so utterly illogical, that it is quite idle forany one to say to himself that by following any given line of conducthe will avoid molestation. Also, there is something in the Russiancharacter which makes any prohibition of discussion almost an invitationto discuss. I have never met a Russian who could be prevented fromsaying whatever he liked whenever he liked, by any threats or dangerswhatsoever. The only way to prevent a Russian from talking is to cut outhis tongue. The real reason for the apathy is that, for the moment, foralmost everybody political questions are of infinitesimal importance incomparison with questions of food and warmth. The ferment of politicaldiscussion that filled the first years of the revolution has died away, and people talk about little but what they are able to get for dinner, or what somebody else his been able to get. I, like other foreignvisitors coming to Russia after feeding up in other countries, am allagog to make people talk. But the sort of questions which interest me, with my full-fed stomach, are brushed aside almost fretfully by men whohave been more or less hungry for two or three years on end. 

I find, instead of an urgent desire to alter this or that at once, to-morrow, in the political complexion of the country, a general desireto do the best that can be done with things as they are, a general fearof further upheaval of any kind, in fact a general acquiescence inthe present state of affairs politically, in the hope of altering thepresent state of affairs economically. And this is entirely natural. Everybody, Communists included, rails bitterly at the inefficiencies ofthe present system, but everybody, Anti-Communists included, admits thatthere is nothing whatever capable of taking its place. Its failure ishighly undesirable, not because it itself is good, but because suchfailure would be preceded or followed by a breakdown of all existingorganizations. Food distribution, inadequate as it now is, would come toan end. The innumerable non-political committees, which are rather likeBoards of Directors controlling the Timber, Fur, Fishery, Steel, Matchesor other Trusts (since the nationalized industries can be so considered)would collapse, and with them would collapse not only yet one more hopeof keeping a breath of life in Russian industry, but also theactual livelihoods of a great number of people, both Communists andnon-Communists. I do not think it is realized out-side Russia how largea proportion of the educated classes have become civil servants of onekind or another. It is a rare thing when a whole family has leftRussia, and many of the most embittered partisans of war on Russia haverelations inside Russia who have long ago found places under the newsystem, and consequently fear its collapse as much as any one. One caseoccurs to me in which a father was an important minister in one of thevarious White Governments which have received Allied support, while hisson inside Russia was doing pretty well as a responsible official underthe Communists. Now in the event of a violent change, the Communistswould be outlaws with a price on every head, and those who have workedwith them, being Russians, know their fellow countrymen well enough tobe pretty well convinced that the mere fact that they are without cardsof the membership of the Communist Party, would not save them in theorgy of slaughter that would follow any such collapse. 

People may think that I underestimate the importance of, theExtraordinary Commission. I am perfectly aware that without this policeforce with its spies, its prisons and its troops, the difficulties ofthe Dictatorship would be increased by every kind of disorder, and thechaos, which I fear may come, would have begun long ago. I believe, too, that the overgrown power of the Extraordinary Commission, and thecure that must sooner or later be applied to it, may, as in the FrenchRevolution, bring about the collapse of the whole system. The Commissiondepends for its strength on the fear of something else. I have seen itweaken when there was a hope of general peace. I have seen it tightenits grip in the presence of attacks from without and attemptedassassination within. It is dreaded by everybody; not even Communistsare safe from it; but it does not suffice to explain the Dictatorship, and is actually entirely irrelevant to the most important process ofthat Dictatorship, namely, the adoption of a single idea, a singleargument, by the whole of a very large body of men. The whole power ofthe Extraordinary Commission does not affect in the slightest degreediscussions inside the Communist Party, and those discussions are thesimple fact distinguishing the Communist Dictatorship from any of theother dictatorships by which it may be supplanted. 

There are 600, 000 members of the Communist Party (611, 978 on April2, 1920). There are nineteen members of the Central Committee of thatparty. There are, I believe, five who, when they agree, can usually swaythe remaining fourteen. There is no need to wonder how these fourteencan be argued into acceptance of the views of the still smaller innerring, but the process of persuading the six hundred thousand of thedesirability of, for example, such measures as those involved inindustrial conscription which, at first sight, was certainly repugnantto most of them, is the main secret of the Dictatorship, and is not inany way affected by the existence of the Extraordinary Commission. 

Thus the actual government of Russia at the present time may be notunfairly considered as a small group inside the Central Committee of theCommunist Party. This small group is able to persuade the majority ofthe remaining members of that Committee. The Committee then sets aboutpersuading the majority of the party. In the case of important measuresthe process is elaborate. The Committee issues a statement of itscase, and the party newspapers the Pravda and its affiliated organs aredeluged with its discussion. When this discussion has had time to spreadthrough the country, congresses of Communists meet in the provincialcentres, and members of the Central Committee go down to theseconferences to defend the "theses" which the Committee has issued. Theseprovincial congresses, exclusively Communist, send their delegates ofan All-Russian Congress. There the "theses" of the Central Committeeget altered, confirmed, or, in the case of an obviously unpersuadedand large opposition in the party, are referred back or in other waysshelved. Then the delegates, even those who have been in opposition atthe congress, go back to the country pledged to defend the position ofthe majority. This sometimes has curious results. For example, I heardCommunist Trades Unionists fiercely arguing against certain clauses inthe theses on industrial conscription at a Communist Congress at theKremlin; less than a week afterwards I heard these same men defendingprecisely these clauses at a Trades Union Congress over the way, theyloyally abiding by the collective opinion of their fellow Communistsand subject to particularly uncomfortable heckling from people whovociferously reminded them (since the Communist debates had beenpublished) that they were now defending what, a few days before, theyhad vehemently attacked. 

The great strength of the Communist Party is comparable to the strengthof the Jesuits, who, similarly, put themselves and their opinions at thedisposal of the body politic of their fellow members. Until a decisionhad been made, a Communist is perfectly free to do his best to preventit being made, to urge alterations in it, or to supply a rival decision, but once it has been made he will support it without changing hisprivate opinion. In all mixed congresses, rather than break the partydiscipline, he will give his vote for it, speak in favor of it, and useagainst its adversaries the very arguments that have been used againsthimself. He has his share in electing the local Communist Committee, and, indirectly, in electing the all-powerful Central Committee of theparty, and he binds himself to do at any moment in his life exactly whatthese Committees decide for him. These Committees decide the use that isto be made of the lives, not only of the rank and file of the party, butalso of their own members. Even a member of the Central Committee doesnot escape. He may be voted by his fellow members into leaving a jobhe likes and taking up another he detests in which they think hisparticular talents will better serve the party aims. To become a memberof the Communist Party involves a kind of intellectual abdication, or, to put it differently, a readiness at any moment to place the collectivewisdom of the party's Committee above one's individual instincts orideas. You may influence its decisions, you may even get it to endorseyour own, but Lenin himself, if he were to fail on any occasion toobtain the agreement of a majority in the Central Committee, would haveto do precisely what the Committee should tell him. Lenin's opinioncarries great weight because he is Lenin, but it carries less weightthan that of the Central Committee, of which he forms a nineteenthpart. On the other hand, the opinion of Lenin and a very small group ofoutstanding figures is supported by great prestige inside the Committee, and that of the Committee is supported by overwhelming prestige amongthe rank and file. The result is that this small group is nearly alwayssure of being able to use the whole vote of 600, 000 Communists, in therealization of its decisions. 

Now 600, 000 men and women acting on the instructions of a highlycentralized directive, all the important decisions of which have beenthrashed out and re-thrashed until they have general support within theparty; 600, 000 men and women prepared, not only to vote in support ofthese decisions, but with a carefully fostered readiness to sacrificetheir lives for them if necessary; 600, 000 men and women who arepersuaded that by their way alone is humanity to be saved; who arepersuaded (to put it as cynically and unsympathetically as possible)that the noblest death one can die is in carrying out a decision of theCentral Committee; such a body, even in a country such as Russia, is anenormously strong embodiment of human will, an instrument of strugglecapable of working something very like miracles. It can be and iscontrolled like an army in battle. It can mobilize its members, 10 percent. Of them, 50 per cent. , the local Committees choosing them, andsend them to the front when the front is in danger, or to the railwaysand repair shops when it is decided that the weakest point is that oftransport. If its only task were to fight those organizations of looselyknit and only momentarily united interests which are opposed toit, those jerry-built alliances of Reactionaries with Liberals, United-Indivisible-Russians with Ukrainians, Agrarians withSugar-Refiners, Monarchists with Republicans, that task would long agohave been finished. But it has to fight something infinitely strongerthan these in fighting the economic ruin of Russia, which, if it is toostrong, too powerful to be arrested by the Communists, would makeshort work of those who are without any such fanatic single-minded andperfectly disciplined organization. 

A CONFERENCE AT JAROSLAVL

I have already suggested that although the small Central Committee ofthe Communist Party does invariably get its own way, there are essentialdifferences between this Dictatorship and the dictatorship of, forexample, a General. The main difference is that whereas the Generalmerely writes an order about which most people hear for the first timeonly when it is promulgated, the Central Committee prepares the wayfor its dictation by a most elaborate series of discussions and counterdiscussions throughout the country, whereby it wins the bulk of theCommunist Party to its opinion, after which it proceeds through localand general congresses to do the same with the Trades Unions. This done, a further series of propaganda meetings among the people actually to beaffected smooths the way for the introduction of whatever new measureis being carried through at the moment. All this talk, besides lesseningthe amount of physical force necessary in carrying out a decision, mustalso avoid, at least in part, the deadening effect that would be causedby mere compulsory obedience to the unexplained orders of a militarydictator. Of the reality of the Communist Dictatorship I have no sortof doubt. But its methods are such as tend towards the awakening of apolitical consciousness which, if and when normal conditions-of feedingand peace, for example-are attained, will make dictatorship of any kindalmost impossible. 

To illustrate these methods of the Dictatorship, I cannot do better thancopy into this book some pages of my diary written in March of this yearwhen I was present at one of the provincial conferences which were heldin preparation of the All-Russian Communist Conference at the end of themonth. 

At seven in the evening Radek called for me and took me to the Jaroslavlstation, where we met Larin, whom I had known in 1918. An old Menshevik, he was the originator and most urgent supporter of the decree annullingthe foreign debts. He is a very ill man, partially paralyzed, having touse both hands even to get food to his mouth or to turn over the leavesof a book. In spite of this he is one of the hardest workers in Russia, and although his obstinacy, his hatred of compromise, and a sort ofmixed originality and perverseness keep him almost permanently atloggerheads with the Central Committee, he retains everybody's respectbecause of the real heroism with which he conquers physical disabilitieswhich long ago would have overwhelmed a less unbreakable spirit. BothRadek and Larin were going to the Communist Conference at Jaroslavlwhich was to consider the new theses of the Central Committee of theparty with regard to Industrial Conscription. Radek was going to defendthe position of the Central Committee, Larin to defend his own. Bothare old friends. As Radek said to me, he intended to destroy Larin'sposition, but not, if he could help it, prevent Larin being nominatedamong the Jaroslavl delegates to All-Russian Conference which was inpreparation. Larin, whose work keeps him continually traveling, has hisown car, specially arranged so that his uninterrupted labor shall haveas little effect as possible on his dangerously frail body. Radek and Itraveled in one of the special cars of the Central Executive Committee, of which he is a member. 

The car seemed very clean, but, as an additional precaution, we beganby rubbing turpentine on our necks and wrists and angles for thediscouragement of lice, now generally known as "Semashki" from the nameof Semashko, the Commissar of Public Health, who wages unceasing warfor their destruction as the carriers of typhus germs. I rubbed theturpentine so energetically into my neck that it burnt like a collar offire, and for a long time I was unable to get to sleep. 

In the morning Radek, the two conductors who had charge of the wagonsand I sat down together to breakfast and had a very merry meal, theyproviding cheese and bread and I a tin of corned beef providently sentout from home by the Manchester Guardian. We cooked up some coffee ona little spirit stove, which, in a neat basket together with plates, knives, forks, etc. (now almost unobtainable in Russia) had beena parting present from the German Spartacists to Radek when he wasreleased from prison in Berlin and allowed to leave Germany. 

The morning was bright and clear, and we had an excellent view ofJaroslavl when we drove from the station to the town, which is a mile orso off the line of the railway. The sun poured down on the white snow, on the barges still frozen into the Volga River, and on the gilt andpainted domes and cupolas of the town. Many of the buildings had beendestroyed during the rising artificially provoked in July, 1918, and itssubsequent suppression. More damage was done then than was necessary, because the town was recaptured by troops which had been deserted bymost of their officers, and therefore hammered away with artillerywithout any very definite plan of attack. The more important of thedamaged buildings, such as the waterworks and the power station, havebeen repaired, the tramway was working, and, after Moscow, the townseemed clean, but plenty of ruins remained as memorials of that wantonand unjustifiable piece of folly which, it was supposed, would be thesignal for a general rising. 

We drove to the Hotel Bristol, now the headquarters of the JaroslavlExecutive Committee, where Rostopchin, the president, discussed withLarin and Radek the programme arranged for the conference. It was thenproposed that we should have something to eat, when a very curious stateof affairs (and one extremely Russian) was revealed. Rostopchin admittedthat the commissariat arrangements of the Soviet and its ExecutiveCommittee were very bad. But in the center of the town there is anunnery which was very badly damaged during the bombardment and is nowused as a sort of prison or concentration camp for a Labor Regiment. Peasants from the surrounding country who have refused to give up theirproper contribution of corn, or leave otherwise disobeyed the laws, are, for punishment, lodged here, and made to expiate their sins by work. It so happens, Rostopchin explained, that the officer in charge of theprison feeding arrangements is a very energetic fellow, who had servedin the old army in a similar capacity, and the meals served out tothe prisoners are so much better than those produced in the Sovietheadquarters, that the members of the Executive Committee make apractice of walking over to the prison to dine. They invited us todo the same. Larin did not feel up to the walk, so he remained in theSoviet House to eat an inferior meal, while Radek and I, with Rostopchinand three other members of the local committee walked round to theprison. The bell tower of the old nunnery had been half shot away byartillery, and is in such a precarious condition that it is proposedto pull it down. But on passing under it we came into a wide courtyardsurrounded by two-story whitewashed buildings that seemed scarcely tohave suffered at all. We found the refectory in one of these buildings. It was astonishingly clean. There were wooden tables, of course withoutcloths, and each man had a wooden spoon and a hunk of bread. A greatbowl of really excellent soup was put down in the middle of table, andwe fell to hungrily enough. I made more mess on the table than any oneelse, because it requires considerable practice to convey almost boilingsoup from a distant bowl to one's mouth without spilling it in a shallowwooden spoon four inches in diameter, and, having got it to one's mouth, to get any of it in without slopping over on either side. The regulardiners there seemed to find no difficulty in it at all. One of theprisoners who mopped up after my disasters said I had better join themfor a week, when I should find it quite easy. The soup bowl was followedby a fry of potatoes, quantities of which are grown in the district. Fordealing with these I found the wooden spoon quite efficient. After thatwe had glasses of some sort of substitute for tea. 

The Conference was held in the town theatre. There was a hint of comedyin the fact that the orchestra was playing the prelude to some verycheerful opera before the curtain rang up. Radek characteristicallyremarked that such music should be followed by something moresensational than a conference, proposed to me that we should form atableau to illustrate the new peaceful policy of England with regard toRussia. As it was a party conference, I had really no right to bethere, but Radek had arranged with Rostopchin that I should come in withhimself, and be allowed to sit in the wings at the side of the stage. On the stage were Rostopchin, Radek, Larin and various members of theCommunist Party Committee in the district. Everything was ready, but theorchestra went on with its jig music on the other side of the curtain. A message was sent to them. The music stopped with a jerk. The curtainrose, disclosing a crowded auditorium. Everybody stood up, both on thestage and in the theater, and sang, accompanied by the orchestra, firstthe "Internationale" and then the song for those who had died for therevolution. Then except for two or three politically minded musicians, the orchestra vanished away and the Conference began. 

Unlike many of the meetings and conferences at which I have been presentin Russia, this Jaroslavl Conference seemed to me to include practicallynone but men and women who either were or had been actual manualworkers. I looked over row after row of faces in the theatre, and couldonly find two faces which I thought might be Jewish, and none thatobviously belonged to the "intelligentsia. " I found on inquiry that onlythree of the Communists present, excluding Radek and Larin, were oldexiled and imprisoned revolutionaries of the educated class. Of these, two were on the platform. All the rest were from the working class. Thegreat majority of them, of course, had joined the Communists in 1917, but a dozen or so had been in the party as long as the first Russianrevolution of 1905. 

Radek, who was tremendously cheered (his long imprisonment in Germany, during which time few in Russia thought that they would see himalive again, has made him something of a popular hero) made a long, interesting and pugnacious speech setting out the grounds on which theCentral Committee base their ideas about Industrial Conscription. These ideas are embodied in the series of theses issued by the CentralCommittee in January (see p. 134). Larin, who was very tired after thejourney and patently conscious that Radek was a formidable opponent, made a speech setting out his reasons for differing with the CentralCommittee, and proposed an ingenious resolution, which, while expressingapproval of the general position of the Committee, included foursupplementary modifications which, as a matter of fact, nullified thatposition altogether. It was then about ten at night, and the Conferenceadjourned. We drove round to the prison in sledges, and by way of supperhad some more soup and potatoes, and so back to the railway station tosleep in the cars. 

Next day the Conference opened about noon, when there was a longdiscussion of the points at issue. Workman after workman came to theplatform and gave his view. Some of the speeches were a little naive, aswhen one soldier said that Comrades Lenin and Trotsky had often beforepointed out difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followedthey had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there wasmuch in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to digest, he wasfor giving them complete support, confident that, as Comrades Lenin andTrotsky were in favor of them, they were likely to be right this time, as so often heretofore. But for the most part the speeches were directlyconcerned with the problem under discussion, and showed a politicalconsciousness which would have been almost incredible three years ago. The Red Army served as a text for many, who said that the methods whichhad produced that army and its victories over the Whites had been provedsuccessful and should be used to produce a Red Army of Labor and similarvictories on the bloodless front against economic disaster. Nobodyseemed to question the main idea of compulsory labor. The contestthat aroused real bitterness was between the methods of individual andcollegiate command. The new proposals lead eventually towards individualcommand, and fears were expressed lest this should mean puttingsummary powers into the hands of bourgeois specialists, thus nullifying"workers' control". In reply, it was pointed out that individual commandhad proved necessary in the army and had resulted in victory for therevolution. The question was not between specialists and no specialists. Everybody knew that specialists were necessary. The question was how toget the most out of them. Effective political control had secured thatbourgeois specialists, old officers, led to victory the army of the RedRepublic. The same result could be secured in the factories in the sameway. It was pointed out that in one year they had succeeded in training32, 000 Red Commanders, that is to say, officers from the working classitself, and that it was not Utopian to hope and work for a similaroutput of workmen specialists, technically trained, and thereforethemselves qualified for individual command in the factories. Meanwhilethere was nothing against the employment of Political Commissars inthe factories as formerly in the regiments, to control in other thantechnical matters the doings of the specialists. On the other hand, it was said that the appointment of Commissars would tend to makeCommunists unpopular, since inevitably in many cases they would haveto support the specialists against the workmen, and that the collegiatesystem made the workmen feel that they were actually the masters, and sogave possibilities of enthusiastic work not otherwise obtainable. Thislast point was hotly challenged. It was said that collegiate controlmeant little in effect, except waste of time and efficiency, because atworst work was delayed by disputes and at best the workmen membersof the college merely countersigned the orders decided upon by thespecialists. The enthusiastic work was said to be a fairy story. If itwere really to be found then there would be no need for a conference todiscover how to get it. 

The most serious opposition, or at least the most serious argument putforward, for there was less opposition than actual discussion, came fromsome of the representatives of the Trade Unionists. A good deal was saidabout the position of the Trades Unions in a Socialist State. There wasgeneral recognition that since the Trade Unions themselves controlledthe conditions of labor and wages, the whole of their old work oforganizing strikes against capitalists had ceased to have any meaning, since to strike now would be to strike against their own decisions. At the same time, certain tendencies to Syndicalism were still inexistence, tendencies which might well lead to conflict betweendifferent unions, so that, for example, the match makers or the metalworker, might wish to strike a bargain with the State, as of one countrywith another, and this might easily lead to a complete collapse of thesocialist system. 

The one thing on which the speakers were in complete agreement was theabsolute need of an effort in industry equal to, if not greater than, the effort made in the army. I thought it significant that in manyof the speeches the importance of this effort was urged as the onlypossible means of retaining the support of the peasants. There was atacit recognition that the Conference represented town workers only. Larin, who had belonged to the old school which had grown up withits eyes on the industrial countries of the West and believed thatrevolution could be brought about by the town workers alone, that itwas exclusively their affair, and that all else was of minor importance, unguardedly spoke of the peasant as "our neighbor. " In Javoslavl, country and town are too near to allow the main problem of therevolution to be thus easily dismissed. It was instantly pointed outthat the relation was much more intimate, and that, even if it were only"neighborly, " peace could not long be preserved if it were continuallynecessary for one neighbor to steal the chickens of the other. Thesetown workers of a district for the most part agricultural were very surethat the most urgent of all tasks was to raise industry to the pointat which the town would really be able to supply the village with itsneeds. 

Larin and Radek severally summed up and made final attacks on eachother's positions, after which Radek's resolution approving the thesesof the Central Committee was passed almost unanimously. Larin's fouramendments received 1, 3, 7 and 1 vote apiece. This result was receivedwith cheering throughout the theater, and showed the importance of suchConferences in smoothing the way of the Dictatorship, since it hadbeen quite obvious when the discussion began that a very much largerproportion of the delegates than finally voted for his resolutionhad been more or less in sympathy with Larin in his opposition to theCentral Committee. 

There followed elections to the Party Conference in Moscow. Rostopchin, the president, read a list which had been submitted by the variousouyezds in the Jaroslavl Government. They were to send to Moscow fifteendelegates with the right to vote, together with another fifteen withthe right to speak but not to vote. Larin, who had done much work in thedistrict, was mentioned as one of the fifteen voting delegates, but hestood up and said that as the Conference had so clearly expressedits disagreement with his views, he thought it better to withdraw hiscandidature. Rostopchin put it to the Conference that although theydisagreed with Larin, yet it would be as well that he should have theopportunity of stating his views at the All-Russian Conference, so thatdiscussion there should be as final and as many-sided as possible. The Conference expressed its agreement with this. Larin withdrewhis withdrawal, and was presently elected. The main object of theseconferences in unifying opinion and in arming Communists with argumentfor the defence of this unified opinion a mong the masses was againillustrated when the Conference, in leaving it to the ouyezds to choosefor themselves the non-voting delegates urged them to select whereverpossible people who would have the widest opportunities of explainingon their return to the district whatever results might be reached inMoscow. 

It was now pretty late in the evening, and after another verysatisfactory visit to the prison we drove back to the station. Larin, who was very disheartened, realizing that he had lost much support inthe course of the discussion, settled down to work, and buried himselfin a mass of statistics. I prepared to go to bed, but we had hardly gotinto the car when there was a tap at the door and a couple of railwaymencame in. They explained that a few hundred yards away along the line aconcert and entertainment arranged by the Jaroslavl railwaymen was goingon, and that their committee, hearing that Radek was at the station, hadsent them to ask him to come over and say a few words to them if he werenot too tired. 

"Come along, " said Radek, and we walked in the dark along the railwaylines to a big one-story wooden shanty, where an electric lamp lit agreat placard, "Railwaymen's Reading Room. " We went into a packed hall. Every seat was occupied by railway workers and their wives and children. The gangways on either side were full of those who had not found room onthe benches. We wriggled and pushed our way through this crowd, who werewatching a play staged and acted by the railwaymen themselves, to a sidedoor, through which we climbed up into the wings, and slid across thestage behind the scenery into a tiny dressing-room. Here Radek was laidhold of by the Master of the Ceremonies, who, it seemed, was also parteditor of a railwaymen's newspaper, and made to give a long account ofthe present situation of Soviet Russia's Foreign Affairs. The little boxof a room filled to a solid mass as policemen, generals and ladies ofthe old regime threw off their costumes, and, in their working clothes, plain signalmen and engine-drivers, pressed round to listen. When theact ended, one of the railwaymen went to the front of the stage andannounced that Radek, who had lately come back after imprisonment inGermany for the cause of revolution, was going to talk to them aboutthe general state of affairs. I saw Radek grin at this forecast of hisspeech. I understood why, when he began to speak. He led off by a directand furious onslaught on the railway workers in general, demandingwork, work and more work, telling them that as the Red Army had beenthe vanguard of the revolution hitherto, and had starved and fought andgiven lives to save those at home from Denikin and Kolchak, so now itwas the turn of the railway workers on whose efforts not only the RedArmy but also the whole future of Russia depended. He addressed himselfto the women, telling them in very bad Russian that unless their menworked superhumanly they would see their babies die from starvation nextwinter. I saw women nudge their husbands as they listened. Insteadof giving them a pleasant, interesting sketch of the internationalposition, which, no doubt, was what they had expected, he took theopportunity to tell them exactly how things stood at home. And theamazing thing was that they seemed to be pleased. They listened withextreme attention, wanted to turn out some one who had a sneezing fitat the far end of the hall, and nearly lifted the roof off with cheeringwhen Radek had done. I wondered what sort of reception a man would havewho in another country interrupted a play to hammer home truths aboutthe need of work into an audience of working men who had gathered solelyfor the purpose of legitimate recreation. It was not as if he sugaredthe medicine he gave them. His speech was nothing but demands fordiscipline and work, coupled with prophecy of disaster in case work anddiscipline failed. It was delivered like all his speeches, with a strongPolish accent and a steady succession of mistakes in grammar. 

As we walked home along the railway lines, half a dozen of therailwaymen pressed around Radek, and almost fought with each other as towho should walk next to him. And Radek entirely happy, delighted at hissuccess in giving them a bombshell instead of a bouquet, with one stoutfellow on one arm, another on the other, two or three more listening infront and behind, continued rubbing it into them until we reached ourwagon, when, after a general handshaking, they disappeared into thenight. 

THE TRADE UNIONS

Trade Unions in Russia are in a different position from that which iscommon to all other Trades Unions in the world. In other countries theTrades Unions are a force with whose opposition the Government mustreckon. In Russia the Government reckons not on the possible oppositionof the Trades Unions, but on their help for realizing its most difficultmeasures, and for undermining and overwhelming any opposition whichthose measures may encounter. The Trades Unions in Russia, instead ofbeing an organization outside the State protecting the interests ofa class against the governing class, have become a part of the Stateorganization. Since, during the present period of the revolution thebackbone of the State organization is the Communist Party, theTrade Unions have come to be practically an extension of the partyorganization. This, of course, would be indignantly denied both byTrade Unionists and Communists. Still, in the preface to the All-RussianTrades Union Reports for 1919, Glebov, one of the best-known Trade Unionleaders whom I remember in the spring of last year objecting to the useof bourgeois specialists in their proper places, admits as much in thefollowing muddleheaded statement:--

"The base of the proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, whichin general directs all the political and economic work of the State, leaning, first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary formof dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions, as organizations which economically unite the proletariat of factory andworkshop as the vanguard of the revolution, and as organizations of thenew socialistic construction of the State. Thus the Trade Unions mustbe considered as a base of the Soviet State, as an organic formcomplementary to the other forms of the Proletariat Dictatorship. " Thesetwo elaborate sentences constitute an admission of what I have justsaid. 

Trades Unionists of other countries must regard the fate of theirRussian colleagues with horror or with satisfaction, according to theirviews of events in Russia taken as a whole. If they do not believethat there has been a social revolution in Russia, they must regardthe present position of the Russian Trades Unions as the reward of acomplete defeat of Trade Unionism, in which a Capitalist government hasbeen able to lay violent hands on the organization which was protectingthe workers against it. If, on the other hand, they believe that therehas been a social revolution, so that the class organized in TradesUnions is now, identical with the governing, class (of employers, etc. )against which the unions once struggled, then they must regard thepresent position as a natural and satisfactory result of victory. 

When I was in Moscow in the spring of this year the Russian TradesUnions received a telegram from the Trades Union Congress at Amsterdam, a telegram which admirably illustrated the impossibility of separatingjudgment of the present position of the Unions from judgments of theRussian revolution as a whole. It encouraged the Unions "in theirstruggle" and promised support in that struggle. The Communistsimmediately asked "What struggle? Against the capitalist system inRussia which does not exist? Or against capitalist systems outsideRussia?" They said that either the telegram meant this latter only, orit meant that its writers did not believe that there had been a socialrevolution in Russia. The point is arguable. If one believes thatrevolution is an impossibility, one can reason from that belief and saythat in spite of certain upheavals in Russia the fundamental arrangementof society is the same there as in other countries, so that the positionof the Trade Unions there must be the same, and, as in other countriesthey must be still engaged in augmenting the dinners of their members atthe expense of the dinners of the capitalists which, in the long run(if that were possible) they would abolish. If, on the other hand, one believes that social revolution has actually occurred, to speak ofTrades Unions continuing the struggle in which they conquered somethinglike three years ago, is to urge them to a sterile fanaticism which hasbeen neatly described by Professor Santayana as a redoubling of youreffort when you have forgotten your aim. 

It 's probably true that the "aim" of the Trades Unions was more clearlydefined in Russia than elsewhere. In England during the greater part oftheir history the Trades Unions have not been in conscious oppositionto the State. In Russia this position was forced on the Trades Unionsalmost before they had time to get to work. They were born, so to speak, with red flags in their hands. They grew up under circumstances ofextreme difficulty and persecution. From 1905 on they were in decidedopposition to the existing system, and were revolutionary rather thanmerely mitigatory organizations. 

Before 1905 they were little more than associations for mutual help, very weak, spending most of their energies in self-preservation from thepolice, and hiding their character as class organizations by electingmore or less Liberal managers and employers as "honorary members. " 1905, however, settled their revolutionary character. In September of thatyear there was a Conference at Moscow, where it was decided to callan All-Russian Trades Union Congress. Reaction in Russia made thisimpossible, and the most they could do was to have another smallConference in February, 1906, which, however, defined their object asthat of creating a general Trade Union Movement organized on All-Russianlines. The temper of the Trades Unions then, and the condition of thecountry at that time, may be judged from the fact that although theywere merely working for the right to form Unions, the right to strike, etc. , they passed the following significant resolution: "Neither fromthe present Government nor from the future State Duma can be expectedrealization of freedom of coalition. This Conference considers thelegalization of the Trades Unions under present conditions absolutelyimpossible. " The Conference was right. For twelve years after that therewere no Trades Unions Conferences in Russia. Not until June, 1917, threemonths after the March Revolution, was the third Trade Union Conferenceable to meet. This Conference reaffirmed the revolutionary character ofthe Russian Trades Unions. 

At that time the dominant party in the Soviets was that of theMensheviks, who were opposed to the formation of a Soviet Government, and were supporting the provisional Cabinet of Kerensky. The TradesUnions were actually at that time more revolutionary than the Soviets. This third Conference passed several resolutions, which show clearlyenough that the present position of the Unions has not been broughtabout by any violence of the Communists from without, but was definitelypromised by tendencies inside the Unions at a time when the Communistswere probably the least authoritative party in Russia. This Conferenceof June, 1917, resolved that the Trades Unions should not only "remainmilitant class organizations. .. But. .. Should support the activities ofthe Soviets of soldiers and deputies. " They thus clearly showed on whichside they stood in the struggle then proceeding. Nor was this all. Theyalso, though the Mensheviks were still the dominant party, resolvedon that system of internal organizations and grouping, which hasbeen actually realized under the Communists. I quote again from theresolution of this Conference:

"The evolution of the economic struggle demands from the workerssuch forms of professional organization as, basing themselves onthe connection between various groups of workers in the process ofproduction, should unite within a general organization, and undergeneral leadership, as large masses of workers as possible occupiedin enterprises of the same kind, or in similar professions. With thisobject the workers should organize themselves professionally, not byshops or trades, but by productions, so that all the workers of a givenenterprise should belong to one Union, even if they belong to differentprofessions and even different productions. " That which was then nomore than a design is now an accurate description of Trades Unionorganization in Russia. Further, much that at present surprises theforeign inquirer was planned and considered desirable then, before theCommunists had won a majority either in the Unions or in the Soviet. Thus this same third Conference resolved that "in the interests ofgreater efficiency and success in the economic struggle, a professionalorganization should be built on the principle of democratic centralism, assuring to every member a share in the affairs of the organization and, at the same time, obtaining unity in the leadership of the struggle. "Finally "Unity in the direction (leadership) of the economic struggledemands unity in the exchequer of the Trades Unions. "

The point that I wish to make in thus illustrating the pre-Communisttendencies of the Russian Trades Unions is not simply that if theirpresent position is undesirable they have only themselves to thank forit, but that in Russia the Trades Union movement before the OctoberRevolution was working in the direction of such a revolution, that theevents of October represented something like a Trade Union victory, so that the present position of the Unions as part of the organizationdefending that victory, as part of the system of government set up bythat revolution, is logical and was to be expected. I have illustratedthis from resolutions, because these give statements in words easilycomparable with what has come to pass. It would be equally easy to pointto deeds instead of words if we need more forcible though less accurateillustrations. 

Thus, at the time of the Moscow Congress the Soviets, then Mensheviks, who were represented at the Congress (the object of the Congress was towhip up support for the Coalition Government) were against strikesof protest. The Trades Unions took a point of view nearer that ofthe Bolsheviks, and the strikes in Moscow took place in spite of theSoviets. After the Kornilov affair, when the Mensheviks were stillstruggling for coalition with the bourgeois parties, the Trades Unionsquite definitely took the Bolshevik standpoint. At the so-calledDemocratic Conference, intended as a sort of life belt for the sinkingProvisional Government, only eight of the Trades Union delegates votedfor a continuance of the coalition, whereas seventy three voted against. 

This consciously revolutionary character throughout their much shorterexistence has distinguished Russian from, for example, English TradesUnions. It has set their course for them. 

In October, 1917, they got the revolution for which they had been askingsince March. Since then, one Congress after another has illustratedthe natural and inevitable development of Trades Unions inside arevolutionary State which, like most if not all revolutionary States, isattacked simultaneously by hostile armies from without and by economicparalysis from within. The excited and lighthearted Trades Unionistsof three years ago, who believed that the mere decreeing of "workers'control" would bring all difficulties automatically to an end, are nowunrecognizable. We have seen illusion after illusion scraped from themby the pumice-stone of experience, while the appalling state of theindustries which they now largely control, and the ruin of the countryin which they attained that control, have forced them to alter theirimmediate aims to meet immediate dangers, and have accelerated theprocess of adaptation made inevitable by their victory. 

The process of adaptation has had the natural result of producing newinternal cleavages. Change after change in their programme and theoryof the Russian Trades Unionists has been due to the pressure of lifeitself, to the urgency of struggling against the worsening of conditionsalready almost unbearable. It is perfectly natural that those Unionswhich hold back from adaptation and resent the changes are preciselythose which, like that of the printers, are not intimately concerned inany productive process, are consequently outside the central struggle, and, while feeling the discomforts of change, do not feel its need. 

The opposition inside the productive Trades Unions is of two kinds. There is the opposition, which is of merely psychological interest, ofold Trades Union leaders who have always thought of themselves as inopposition to the Government, and feel themselves like watches withoutmainsprings in their new role of Government supporters. These are menin whom a natural intellectual stiffness makes difficult the completechange of front which was the logical result of the revolution for whichthey had been working. But beside that there is a much more interestingopposition based on political considerations. The Menshevik standpointis one of disbelief in the permanence of the revolution, or rather inthe permanence of the victory of the town workers. They point to thedivergence in interests between the town and country populations, and are convinced that sooner or later the peasants will alter thegovernment to suit themselves, when, once more, it will be a governmentagainst which the town workers will have to defend their interests. TheMensheviks object to the identification of the Trades Unions with theGovernment apparatus on the ground that when this change, which theyexpect comes about, the Trade Union movement will be so far emasculatedas to be incapable of defending the town workers against the peasantswho will then be the ruling class. Thus they attack the present TradesUnion leaders for being directly influenced by the Government in fixingthe rate of wages, on the ground that this establishes a precedent fromwhich, when the change comes, it will be difficult to break away. TheCommunists answer them by insisting that it is to everybody's interestto pull Russia through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions werefor such academic reasons to insist on their complete independenceinstead of in every possible way collaborating with the Government, theywould be not only increasing the difficulties of the revolution inits economic crisis, but actually hastening that change which theMensheviks, though they regard it as inevitable, cannot be supposedto desire. This Menshevik opposition is strongest in the Ukraine. Itsstrength may be judged from the figures of the Congress in Moscowthis spring when, of 1, 300 delegates, over 1, 000 were Communists orsympathizers with them; 63 were Mensheviks and 200 were non-party, thebulk of whom, I fancy, on this point would agree with the Mensheviks. 

But apart from opposition to the "stratification" of the Trades Unions, there is a cleavage cutting across the Communist Party itself anduniting in opinion, though not in voting, the Mensheviks and a sectionof their Communist opponents. This cleavage is over the question of"workers' control. " Most of those who, before the revolution, lookedforward to the "workers' control", thought of it as meaning that theactual workers in a given factory would themselves control that factory, just as a board of directors controls a factory under the ordinarycapitalist system. The Communists, I think, even today admit theultimate desirability of this, but insist that the important question isnot who shall give the orders, but in whose interest the orders shallbe given. I have nowhere found this matter properly thrashed out, thoughfeeling upon it is extremely strong. Everybody whom I asked about itbegan at once to address me as if I were a public meeting, so that Ifound it extremely difficult to get from either side a statement notfree from electioneering bias. I think, however, that it may be fairlysaid that all but a few lunatics have abandoned the ideas of 1917, whichresulted in the workmen in a factory deposing any technical expert ormanager whose orders were in the least irksome to them. These ideasand the miseries and unfairness they caused, the stoppages of work, themanagers sewn up in sacks, ducked in ponds and trundled in wheelbarrows, have taken their places as curiosities of history. The change in theseideas has been gradual. The first step was the recognition that theState as a whole was interested in the efficiency of each factory, and, therefore, that the workmen of each factory had no right to arrangethings with no thought except for themselves. The Committee idea wasstill strong, and the difficulty was got over by assuring that thetechnical staff should be represented on the Committee, and that thecasting vote between workers and technical experts or managers shouldbelong to the central economic organ of the State. The next stage waswhen the management of a workshop was given a so called "collegiate"character, the workmen appointing representatives to share theresponsibility of the "bourgeois specialist. " The bitter controversy nowgoing on concerns the seemingly inevitable transition to a later stagein which, for all practical purposes, the bourgeois specialist will beresponsible solely to the State. Many Communists, including some ofthe best known, while recognizing the need of greater efficiency ifthe revolution is to survive at all, regard this step as definitelyretrograde and likely in the long run to make the revolution not worthpreserving. [*]

 * Thus Rykov, President of the Supreme Council of Public Economy: "There is a possibility of so constructing a State that in it there will be a ruling caste consisting chiefly of administrative engineers, technicians, etc. ; that is, we should get a form of State economy based on a small group of a ruling caste whose privilege in this case would be the management of the workers and peasants. " That criticism of individual control, from a communist, goes a good deal further than most of the criticism from people avowedly in opposition. ] The enormous importance attached by everybody to this question of individual or collegiate control, may be judged from the fact that at every conference I attended, and every discussion to which I listened, this point, which might seem of minor importance, completely overshadowed the question of industrial conscription which, at least inside the Communist Party, seemed generally taken for granted. It may be taken now as certain that the majority of the Communists are in favor of individual control. They say that the object of "workers' control" before the revolution was to ensure that factories should be run in the interests of workers as well of employers. In Russia now there are no employers other than the State as a whole, which is exclusively made up of employees. (I am stating now the view of the majority at the last Trades Union Congress at which I was present, April, 1920. ) They say that "workers' control" exists in a larger and more efficient manner than was suggested by the old pre-revolutionary statements on that question. Further, they say that if workers' control ought to be identified with Trade Union control, the Trades Unions are certainly supreme in all those matters with which they have chiefly concerned themselves, since they dominate the Commissariat of Labor, are very largely represented on the Supreme Council of Public Economy, and fix the rates of pay for their own members. [*]

 * The wages of workmen are decided by the Trades Unions, who draw up "tariffs" for the whole country, basing their calculations on three criteria: (I) The price of food in the open market in the district where a workman is employed, (2)the price of food supplied by the State on the card system, (3)the quality of the workman. This last is decided by a special section of the Factory Committee, which in each factory is an organ of the Trades Union. ]

The enormous Communist majority, together with the fact that howevermuch they may quarrel with each other inside the party, the Communistswill go to almost any length to avoid breaking the party discipline, means that at present the resolutions of Trades Union Congresseswill not be different from those of Communists Congresses on the samesubjects. Consequently, the questions which really agitate the members, the actual cleavages inside that Communist majority, are comparativelyinvisible at a Trades Union Congress. They are fought over with greatbitterness, but they are not fought over in the Hall of the Unions-oncethe Club of the Nobility, with on its walls on Congress days the hammerand spanner of the engineers, the pestle and trowel of the builders, andso on-but in the Communist Congresses in the Kremlin and throughoutthe country. And, in the problem with which in this book we are mainlyconcerned, neither the regular business of the Unions nor their internalsquabbles affects the cardinal fact that in the present crisis theTrades Unions are chiefly important as part of that organization ofhuman will with which the Communists are attempting to arrest the steadyprogress of Russia's economic ruin. Putting it brutally, so as to offendTrades Unionists and Communists alike, they are an important part of theCommunist system of internal propaganda, and their whole organizationacts as a gigantic megaphone through which the Communist Party makesknown its fears, its hopes and its decisions to the great masses of theindustrial workers. 

THE PROPAGANDA TRAINS

When I crossed the Russian front in October, 1919, the first thing Inoticed in peasants' cottages, in the villages, in the little town whereI took the railway to Moscow, in every railway station along the line, was the elaborate pictorial propaganda concerned with the war. Therewere posters showing Denizen standing straddle over Russia's coal, whilethe factory chimneys were smokeless and the engines idle in the yards, with the simplest wording to show why it was necessary to beat Denizenin order to get coal; there were posters illustrating the treatmentof the peasants by the Whites; posters against desertion, postersillustrating the Russian struggle against the rest of the world, showinga workman, a peasant, a sailor and a soldier fighting in self-defenceagainst an enormous Capitalistic Hydra. There were also-and this I tookas a sign of what might be-posters encouraging the sowing of corn, andposters explaining in simple pictures improved methods of agriculture. Our own recruiting propaganda during the war, good as that was, wasnever developed to such a point of excellence, and knowing the generalslowness with which the Russian centre reacts on its periphery, Iwas amazed not only at the actual posters, but at their efficientdistribution thus far from Moscow. 

I have had an opportunity of seeing two of the propaganda trains, theobject of which is to reduce the size of Russia politically by bringingMoscow to the front and to the out of the way districts, and so tolessen the difficulty of obtaining that general unity of purpose whichit is the object of propaganda to produce. The fact that there is somehope that in the near future the whole of this apparatus may be turnedover to the propaganda of industry makes it perhaps worth while todescribe these trains in detail. 

Russia, for purposes of this internal propaganda, is divided intofive sections, and each section has its own train, prepared for theparticular political needs of the section it serves, bearing its ownname, carrying its regular crew-a propaganda unit, as corporate as thecrew of a ship. The five trains at present in existence are the "Lenin, "the "Sverdlov, " the "October Revolution, " the "Red East, " which is nowin Turkestan, and the "Red Cossack, " which, ready to start for Rostovand the Don, was standing, in the sidings at the Kursk station, togetherwith the "Lenin, " returned for refitting and painting. 

Burov, the organizer of these trains, a ruddy, enthusiastic littleman in patched leather coat and breeches, took a party of foreigners-aSwede, a Norwegian, two Czechs, a German and myself to visit his trains, together with Radek, in the hope that Radek would induce Lenin to visitthem, in which case Lenin would be kinematographed for the delight ofthe villagers, and possibly the Central Committee would, if Lenin wereinterested, lend them more lively support. 

We walked along the "Lenin" first, at Burov's special request. Burov, it seems, has only recently escaped from what he considered a bitteraffliction due to the Department of Proletarian Culture, who, in thebeginning, for the decoration of his trains, had delivered him boundhand and foot to a number of Futurists. For that reason he wanted us tosee the "Lenin" first, in order that we might compare it with the resultof his emancipation, the "Red Cossack, " painted when the artists "hadbeen brought under proper control. " The "Lenin" had been painted a yearand a half ago, when, as fading hoarding in the streets of Moscow stilltestify, revolutionary art was dominated by the Futurist movement. Everycarriage is decorated with most striking but not very comprehensiblepictures in the brightest colors, and the proletariat was called upon toenjoy what the pre-revolutionary artistic public had for the most partfailed to understand. Its pictures are "art for art's sake, " and cannothave done more than astonish, and perhaps terrify, the peasants andthe workmen of the country towns who had the luck to see them. The "RedCossack" is quite different. As Burov put it with deep satisfaction, "At first we were in the artists' hands, and now the artists are inour hands, " a sentence suggesting the most horrible possibilities ofofficial art under socialism, although, of course, bad art flourishespretty well even under other systems. 

I inquired exactly how Burov and his friends kept the artists in theright way, and received the fullest explanation. The political sectionof the organization works out the main idea and aim for each picture, which covers the whole side of a wagon. This idea is then submitted to a"collective" of artists, who are jointly responsible for its realizationin paint. The artists compete with each other for a prize which isawarded for the best design, the judges being the artists themselves. Itis the art of the poster, art with a purpose of the most definite kind. The result is sometimes amusing, interesting, startling, but, whateverelse it does, hammers home a plain idea. 

Thus the picture on the side of one wagon is divided into two sections. On the left is a representation of the peasants and workmen of theSoviet Republic. Under it are the words, "Let us not find ourselvesagain. .. " and then, in gigantic lettering under the right-hand sectionof the picture, ". .. In the HEAVEN OF THE WHITES. " This heaven is shownby an epauletted officer hitting a soldier in the face, as was done inthe Tsar's army and in at least one army of the counter revolutionaries, and workmen tied to stakes, as was done by the Whites in certain townsin the south. Then another wagon illustrating the methods of Tsardom, with a State vodka shop selling its wares to wretched folk, who, whendrunk on the State vodka, are flogged by the State police. Then thereis a wagon showing the different Cossacks-of the Don, Terek, Kuban, Ural-riding in pairs. The Cossack infantry is represented on the otherside of this wagon. On another wagon is a very jolly picture of StenkaRazin in his boat with little old-fashioned brass cannon, rowing up theriver. Underneath is written the words: "I attack only the rich, withthe poor I divide everything. " On one side are the poor folk runningfrom their huts to join him, on the other the rich folk firing at himfrom their castle. One wagon is treated purely decoratively, with abroad effective characteristically South Russian design, framing ahuge inscription to the effect that the Cossacks need not fear thatthe Soviet Republic will interfere with their religion, since under itsregime every man is to be free to believe exactly what he likes. Thenthere is an entertaining wagon, showing Kolchak sitting inside a fencein Siberia with a Red soldier on guard, Judenitch sitting in a littlecircle with a sign-post to show it is Esthonia, and Denikin running atfull speed to the asylum indicated by another sign-post on which is thecrescent of the Turkish Empire. Another lively picture shows the youngCossack girls learning to read, with a most realistic old Cossack womantelling them they had better not. But there is no point in describingevery wagon. There are sixteen wagons in the "Red Cossack, " and everyone is painted all over on both sides. 

The internal arrangements of the train are a sufficient proof thatRussians are capable of organization if they set their minds to it. We went through it, wagon by wagon. One wagon contains a wirelesstelegraphy station capable of receiving news from such distant stationsas those of Carnarvon or Lyons. Another is fitted up as a newspaperoffice, with a mechanical press capable of printing an edition offifteen thousand daily, so that the district served by the train, however out of the way, gets its news simultaneously with Moscow, manydays sometimes before the belated Izvestia or Pravda finds its way tothem. And with its latest news it gets its latest propaganda, and inorder to get the one it cannot help getting the other. Next door to thatthere is a kinematograph wagon, with benches to seat about one hundredand fifty persons. But indoor performances are only given to children, who must come during the daytime, or in summer when the evenings are toolight to permit an open air performance. In the ordinary way, at night, a great screen is fixed up in the open. There is a special hole cut inthe side of the wagon, and through this the kinematograph throws itspicture on the great screen outside, so that several thousands can seeit at once. The enthusiastic Burov insisted on working through a coupleof films for us, showing the Communists boy scouts in their countrycamps, children's meetings in Petrograd, and the big demonstrationsof last year in honor of the Third International. He was extremelydisappointed that Radek, being in a hurry, refused to wait for aperformance of "The Father and his Son, " a drama which, he assured uswith tears in his eyes, was so thrilling that we should not regret beinglate for our appointments if we stayed to witness it. Another wagon isfitted up as an electric power-station, lighting the train, working thekinematograph and the printing machine, etc. Then there is a clean littlekitchen and dining-room, where, before being kinematographed-a horribleexperience when one is first quite seriously begged (of course by Burov)to assume an expression of intelligent interest--we had soup, a plate ofmeat and cabbage, and tea. Then there is a wagon bookshop, where, whilecustomers buy books, a gramophone sings the revolutionary songs ofDemian Bledny, or speaks with the eloquence of Trotsky or the logic ofLenin. Other wagons are the living-rooms of the personnel, divided upaccording to their duties-political, military, instructional, and soforth. For the train has not merely an agitational purpose. It carrieswith it a staff to give advice to local authorities, to explain whathas not been understood, and so in every way to bring the ideas of theCentre quickly to the backwoods of the Republic. It works also in theopposite direction, helping to make the voice of the backwoods heardat Moscow. This is illustrated by a painted pillar-box on one of thewagons, with a slot for letters, labelled, "For Complaints of EveryKind. " Anybody anywhere who has grievance, thinks he is being unfairlytreated, or has a suggestion to make, can speak with the Centre inthis way. When the train is on a voyage telegrams announce itsarrival beforehand, so that the local Soviets can make full use ofits advantages, arranging meetings, kinematograph shows, lectures. It arrives, this amazing picture train, and proceeds to publish anddistribute its newspapers, sell its books (the bookshop, they tell me, is literally stormed at every stopping place), send books and postersfor forty versts on either side of the line with the motor-cars which itcarries with it, and enliven the population with its kinematograph. 

I doubt if a more effective instrument of propaganda has ever beendevised. And in considering the question whether or no the Russians willbe able after organizing their military defence to tackle with similarcomparative success the much more difficult problem of industrialrebirth, the existence of such instruments, the use of such propagandais a factor not to be neglected. In the spring of this year, when thecivil war seemed to be ending, when there was a general belief thatthe Poles would accept the peace that Russia offered (they ignored thisoffer, advanced, took Kiev, were driven back to Warsaw, advanced again, and finally agreed to terms which they could have had in March withoutbloodshed any kind), two of these propaganda trains were already beingrepainted with a new purpose. It was hoped that in the near future allfive trains would be explaining not the need to fight but the need towork. Undoubtedly, at the first possible moment, the whole machinery ofagitation, of posters, of broadsheets and of trains, will be turned overto the task of explaining the Government's plans for reconstruction, and the need for extraordinary concentration, now on transport, now onsomething else, that these plans involve. 

SATURDAYINGS

So much for the organization, with its Communist Party, its system ofmeetings and counter-meetings, its adapted Trades Unions, its infinitelyvarious propaganda, which is doing its best to make headway againstruin. I want now to describe however briefly, the methods it has adoptedin tackling the worst of all Russia's problems-the non-productivity andabsolute shortage of labor. 

I find a sort of analogy between these methods and those which we usedin England in tackling the similar cumulative problem of finding men forwar. Just as we did not proceed at once to conscription, but began bya great propaganda of voluntary effort, so the Communists, faced witha need at least equally vital, did not turn at once to industrialconscription. It was understood from the beginning that the Communiststhemselves were to set an example of hard work, and I dare say aconsiderable proportion of them did so. Every factory had its littleCommunist Committee, which was supposed to leaven the factory withenthusiasm, just as similar groups of Communists drafted into the armiesin moments of extreme danger did, on more than one occasion, as thenon-Communist Commander-in-Chief admits, turn a rout into a stand andsnatch victory from what looked perilously like defeat. But this wasnot enough, arrears of work accumulated, enthusiasm waned, productivitydecreased, and some new move was obviously necessary. This first move inthe direction of industrial conscription, although no one perceived itstendency at the time, was the inauguration of what have become known as"Saturdayings". 

Early in 1919 the Central Committee of the Communist Party put out acircular letter, calling upon the Communists "to work revolutionally, "to emulate in the rear the heroism of their brothers on the front, pointing out that nothing but the most determined efforts and anincrease in the productivity of labor would enable Russia to win throughher difficulties of transport, etc. Kolchak, to quote from Englishnewspapers, was it "sweeping on to Moscow, " and the situation was prettythreatening. As a direct result of this letter, on May 7th, a meetingof Communists in the sub-district of the Moscow-Kazan railway passeda resolution that, in view of the imminent danger to the Republic, Communists and their sympathizers should give up an hour a day of theirleisure, and, lumping these hours together, do every Saturday six hoursof manual labor; and, further, that these Communist "Saturdayings"should be continued "until complete victory over Kolchak should beassured. " That decision of a local committee was the actual beginning ofa movement which spread all over Russia, and though the complete victoryover Kolchak was long ago obtained, is likely to continue so long asSoviet Russia is threatened by any one else. 

The decision was put into effect on May 10th, when the first Communist"Saturdaying" in Russia took place on the Moscow-Kazan railway. TheCommissar of the railway, Communist clerks from the offices, and everyone else who wished to help, marched to work, 182 in all, and put in1, 012 hours of manual labor, in which they finished the repairs of fourlocomotives and sixteen wagons and loaded and unloaded 9, 300 poods ofengine and wagon parts and material. It was found that the productivityof labor in loading and unloading shown on this occasion was about 270per cent. Of the normal, and a similar superiority of effort was shownin the other kinds of work. This example was immediately copied on otherrailways. The Alexandrovsk railway had its first "Saturdaying" on May17th. Ninety-eight persons worked for five hours, and here also didtwo or three times as much is the usual amount of work done in thesame number of working hours under ordinary circumstances. One of theworkmen, in giving an account of the performance, wrote: "The Comradesexplain this by saying that in ordinary times the work was dull and theywere sick of it, whereas this occasion they were working willingly andwith excitement. But now it will be shameful in ordinary hours to doless than in the Communist 'Saturdaying. '" The hope implied in this lastsentence has not been realized. 

In Pravda of June 7th there is an article describing one of these early"Saturdayings, " which gives a clear picture of the infectious characterof the proceedings, telling how people who came out of curiosity tolook on found themselves joining in the work, and how a soldier with anaccordion after staring for a long time open-mouthed at theselunatics working on a Saturday afternoon put up a tune for them on hisinstrument, and, delighted by their delight, played on while the workersall sang together. 

The idea of the "Saturdayings" spread quickly from railways tofactories, and by the middle of the summer reports of similar effortswere coming from all over Russia. Then Lenin became interested, seeingin these "Saturdayings" not only a special effort in the face of commondanger, but an actual beginning of Communism and a sign that Socialismcould bring about a greater productivity of labor than could be obtainedunder Capitalism. He wrote: "This is a work of great difficulty andrequiring much time, but it has begun, and that is the main thing. Ifin hungry Moscow in the summer of 1919 hungry workmen who have livedthrough the difficult four years of the Imperialistic war, and then theyear and a half of the still more difficult civil war, have been able tobegin this great work, what will not be its further development when weconquer in the civil war and win peace. " He sees in it a promise ofwork being done not for the sake of individual gain, but because of arecognition that such work is necessary for the general good, and in allhe wrote and spoke about it he emphasized the fact that people workedbetter and harder when working thus than under any of the conditions(piece-work, premiums for good work, etc. ) imposed by the revolutionin its desperate attempts to raise the productivity of labor. For thisreason alone, he wrote, the first "Saturdaying" on the Moscow-Kazanrailway was an event of historical significance, and not for Russiaalone. 

Whether Lenin was right or wrong in so thinking, "Saturdayings" became aregular institution, like Dorcas meetings in Victorian England, like thethousands of collective working parties instituted in England during thewar with Germany. It remains to be seen how long they will continue, and if they will survive peace when that comes. At present the mostinteresting point about them is the large proportion of non-Communistswho take an enthusiastic part in them. In many cases not more than tenper cent. Of Communists are concerned, though they take the initiative inorganizing the parties and in finding the work to be done. The movementspread like fire in dry grass, like the craze for roller-skating sweptover England some years ago, and efforts were made to control it, sothat the fullest use might be made of it. In Moscow it was foundworth while to set up a special Bureau for "Saturdayings. " Hospitals, railways, factories, or any other concerns working for the public good, notify this bureau that they need the sort of work a "Saturdaying"provides. The bureau informs the local Communists where their servicesare required, and thus there is a minimum of wasted energy. The localCommunists arrange the "Saturdayings, " and any one else joins in whowants. These "Saturdayings" are a hardship to none because they arevoluntary, except for members of the Communist Party, who are consideredto have broken the party discipline if they refrain. But they can avoidthe "Saturdayings" if they wish to by leaving the party. Indeed, Leninpoints, out that the "Saturdayings" are likely to assist in clearing outof the party those elements which joined it with the hope of personalgain. He points out that the privileges of a Communists now consist indoing more work than other people in the rear, and, on the front, inhaving the certainty of being killed when other folk are merely takenprisoners. 

The following are a few examples of the sort of work done in the"Saturdayings. " Briansk hospitals were improperly heated because oflack of the local transport necessary to bring them wood. The Communistsorganized a "Saturdaying, " in which 900 persons took part, includingmilitary specialists (officers of the old army serving in the new), soldiers, a chief of staff, workmen and women. Having no horses, theyharnessed themselves to sledges in groups of ten, and brought in thewood required. At Nijni 800 persons spent their Saturday afternoon inunloading barges. In the Basman district of Moscow there was a gigantic"Saturdaying" and "Sundaying" in which 2, 000 persons (in this case allbut a little over 500 being Communists) worked in the heavy artilleryshops, shifting materials, cleaning tramlines for bringing in fuel, etc. Then there was a "Saturdaying" the main object of which was ageneral autumn cleaning of the hospitals for the wounded. One form of"Saturdaying" for women is going to the hospitals, talking with thewounded and writing letters for them, mending their clothes, washingsheets, etc. The majority of "Saturdayings" at present are concernedwith transport work and with getting and shifting wood, because atthe moment these are the chief difficulties. I have talked to many"Saturdayers, " Communist and non-Communist, and all alike spoke of theseSaturday afternoons of as kind of picnic. On the other hand, I have metCommunists who were accustomed to use every kind off ingenuity to findexcuses not to take part in them and yet to preserve the good opinion oftheir local committee. 

But even if the whole of the Communist Party did actually indulge ina working picnic once a week, it would not suffice to meet Russia'stremendous needs. And, as I pointed out in the chapter specially devotedto the shortage of labor, the most serious need at present is to keepskilled workers at their jobs instead of letting them drift away intonon-productive labor. No amount of Saturday picnics could do that, andit was obvious long ago that some other means, would have to be devised. 

INDUSTRIAL CONSCRIPTION

The general principle of industrial conscription recognized by theRussian Constitution, section ii, chapter v, paragraph 18, which reads:"The Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic recognizes that work isan obligation on every citizen of the Republic, " and proclaims, "He whodoes not work shall not eat. " It is, however, one thing to proclaim sucha principle and quite another to put it into action. 

On December 17, 1919, the moment it became clear that there was a realpossibility that the civil war was drawing to an end, Trotsky allowedthe Pravda to print a memorandum of his, consisting of "theses" orreasoned notes about industrial conscription and the militia system. He points out that a Socialist State demands a general plan for theutilization of all the resources of a country, including its humanenergy. At the same time, "in the present economic chaos in which aremingled the broken fragments of the past and the beginnings of thefuture, " a sudden jump to a complete centralized economy of the countryas a whole is impossible. Local initiative, local effort must notbe sacrificed for the sake of a plan. At the same time industrialconscription is necessary for complete socialization. It cannot beregardless of individuality like military conscription. He suggests asubdivision of the State into territorial productive districts whichshould coincide with the territorial districts of the militia systemwhich shall replace the regular army. Registration of labor necessary. Necessary also to coordinate military and industrial registration. Atdemobilization the cadres of regiments, divisions, etc. , should formthe fundamental cadres of the militia. Instruction to this end shouldbe included in the courses for workers and peasants who are training tobecome officers in every district. Transition to the militia system mustbe carefully and gradually accomplished so as not for a moment to leavethe Republic defenseless. While not losing sight of these ultimate aims, it is necessary to decide on immediate needs and to ascertain exactlywhat amount of labor is necessary for their limited realization. Hesuggests the registration of skilled labor in the army. He suggests thata Commission under general direction of the Council of Public Economyshould work out a preliminary plan and then hand it over to the WarDepartment, so that means should be worked out for using the militaryapparatus for this new industrial purpose. 

Trotsky's twenty-four theses or notes must have been written in oddmoments, now here now there, on the way from one front to another. Theydo not form a connected whole. Contradictions jostle each other, andit is quite clear that Trotsky himself had no very definite plan in hishead. But his notes annoyed and stimulated so many other people thatthey did perhaps precisely the work they were intended to do. Pravadaprinted them with a note from the editor inviting discussion. TheEkonomitcheskaya Jizn printed letter after letter from workmen, officials and others, attacking, approving and bringing new suggestions. Larin, Semashko, Pyatakov, Bucharin all took a hand in the discussion. Larin saw in the proposals the beginning of the end of the revolution, being convinced that authority would pass from the democracy of theworkers into the hands of the specialists. Rykov fell upon them withsturdy blows on behalf of the Trades Unions. All, however, agreed on theone point--that something of the sort was necessary. On December 27tha Commission for studying the question of industrial conscription wasformed under the presidency of Trotsky. This Commission included thePeople's Commissars, or Ministers, of Labor, Ways of Communication, Supply, Agriculture, War, and the Presidents of the Central Council ofthe Trades Unions and of the Supreme Council of Public Economy. Theycompiled a list of the principal questions before them, and invitedanybody interested to bring them suggestions and material fordiscussion. 

But the discussion was not limited to the newspapers or to thisCommission. The question was discussed in Soviets and Conferences ofevery kind all over the country. Thus, on January 1st an All-RussianConference of local "departments for the registration and distributionof labor, " after prolonged argument, contributed their views. Theypointed out (1) the need of bringing to work numbers of persons whoinstead of doing the skilled labor for which they were qualified wereengaged in petty profiteering, etc. ; (2) that there evaporation ofskilled labor into unproductive speculation could at least be checkedby the introduction of labor books, which would give some sort ofregistration of each citizen's work; (3) that workmen can be broughtback from the villages only for enterprises which are supplied withprovisions or are situated in districts where there is plenty. ("Theopinion that, in the absence of these preliminary conditions, it will bepossible to draw workmen from the villages by measures of compulsion ormobilization is profoundly mistaken. ") (4) that there should be a censusof labor and that the Trades Unions should be invited to protect theinterests of the conscripted. Finally, this Conference approved the ideaof using the already existing military organization for carrying out alabor census of the Red Army, and for the turning over to labor of partsof the army during demobilization, but opposed the idea of giving themilitary organization the work of labor registration and industrialconscription in general. 

On January 22, 1920, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, afterprolonged discussion of Trotsky's rough memorandum, finally adoptedand published a new edition of the "theses, " expanded, altered, almostunrecognizable, a reasoned body of theory entirely different fromthe bundle of arrows loosed at a venture by Trotsky. They definitelyaccepted the principle of industrial conscription, pointing out theimmediate reasons for it in the fact that Russia cannot look for muchhelp from without and must somehow or other help herself. 

Long before the All-Russian Congress of the Communist Party approved thetheses of the Committee, one form of industrial conscription was alreadybeing tested at work. Very early in January, when the discussion on thesubject was at its height, the Soviet of the Third Army addressed itselfto the Council of Defense of the Republic with an invitation to make useof this army (which at least for the moment had finished its militarytask) and to experiment with it as a labor army. The Council of Defenseagreed. Representatives of the Commissariats of Supply, Agriculture, Ways and Communications, Labor and the Supreme Council of Public Economywere sent to assist the Army Soviet. The army was proudly re-named "TheFirst Revolutionary Army of Labor, " and began to issue communiques"from the Labor front, " precisely like the communiques of an army in thefield. I translate as a curiosity the first communique issued by a LaborArmy's Soviet:

"Wood prepared in the districts of Ishim, Karatulskaya, Omutinskaya, Zavodoutovskaya, Yalutorovska, Iushaly, Kamuishlovo, Turinsk, Altynai, Oshtchenkovo, Shadrinsk, 10, 180 cubic sazhins. Working days, 52, 651. Taken to the railway stations, 5, 334 cubic sazhins. Working days ontransport, 22, 840. One hundred carpenters detailed for the Kizelovskmines. One hundred carpenters detailed for the bridge at Ufa. Oneengineer specialist detailed to the Government Council of Public Economyfor repairing the mills of Chelyabinsk Government. One instructoraccountant detailed for auditing the accounts of the economicorganizations of Kamuishlov. Repair of locomotives proceeding in theworks at Ekaterinburg. January 20, 1920, midnight. "

The Labor Army's Soviet received a report on the state of the districtcovered by the army with regard to supply and needed work. By the end ofJanuary it had already carried out a labor census of the army, and foundthat it included over 50, 000 laborers, of whom a considerable numberwere skilled. It decided on a general plan of work in reestablishingindustry in the Urals, which suffered severely during the Kolchak regimeand the ebb and flow of the civil war, and was considering a suggestionof one of its members that if the scheme worked well the army should beincreased to 300, 000 men by way of mobilization. 

On January 23rd the Council of Defense of the Republic, encouragedto proceed further, decided to make use of the Reserve Army for theimprovement of railway transport on the Moscow-Kazan railway, one ofthe chief arteries between eastern food districts and Moscow. The mainobject is to be the reestablishment of through traffic between Moscowand Ekaterinburg and the repair of the Kazan-Ekaterinburg line, whichparticularly suffered during the war. An attempt was to be made torebuild the bridge over the Kama River before the ice melts. TheCommander of the Reserve Army was appointed Commissar of the easternpart of the Moscow-Kazan railway, retaining his position as Commanderof the Army. With a view of coordination between the Army Soviet and therailway authorities, a member of the Soviet was also appointed Commissarof the railway. On January 25th it was announced that a similarexperiment was being made in the Ukraine. A month before the ice brokethe first train actually crossed the Kama River by the rebuilt bridge. 

By April of this year the organization of industrial conscription hadgone far beyond the original labor armies. A decree of February 5th hadcreated a Chief Labor Committee, consisting of five members, Serebryakovand Danilov, from the Commissariat of War; Vasiliev, from theCommissariat of the Interior; Anikst, from the Commissariat of Labor;Dzerzhinsky, from the Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Dzerzhinsky wasPresident, and his appointment was possibly made in the hope that thereputation he had won as President of the Extraordinary Committee forFighting Counter-Revolution would frighten people into taking thisCommittee seriously. Throughout the country in each government orprovince similar committees, called "Troikas, " were created, each ofthree members, one from the Commissariat of War, one from the Departmentof Labor, one from the Department of Management, in each case fromthe local Commissariats and Departments attached to the local Soviet. Representatives of the Central Statistical Office and its local organshad a right to be present at the meeting of these committees of three, or "Troikas, " but had not the right to vote. An organization or afactory requiring labor, was to apply to the Labor Department of thelocal Soviet. This Department was supposed to do its best to satisfydemands upon it by voluntary methods first. If these proved insufficientthey were to apply to the local "Troika, " or Labor ConscriptionCommittee. If this found that its resources also were insufficient, itwas to refer back the request to the Labor Department of the Soviet, which was then to apply to its corresponding Department in theGovernment Soviet, which again, first voluntarily and then through theGovernment Committee of Labor Conscription, was to try to satisfy thedemands. I fancy the object of this arrangement was to prevent local"Troikas" from referring to Government "Troikas, " and so directly toDzerzhinsky's Central Committee. If they had been able to do this therewould obviously have been danger lest a new network of independent andpowerful organizations should be formed. Experience with the overgrownand insuppressible Committees for Fighting Counter-Revolution had taughtpeople how serious such a development might be. 

Such was the main outline of the scheme for conscripting labor. Asimilar scheme was prepared for superintending and safeguarding laborwhen conscripted. In every factory of over 1, 000 workmen, clerks, etc. , there was formed a Commission (to distinguish it from the Committee) ofIndustrial Conscription. Smaller factories shared such Commissionsor were joined for the purpose to larger factories near by. TheseCommissions were to be under the direct control of a Factory Committee, thereby preventing squabbles between conscripted and non-conscriptedlabor. They were to be elected for six months, but their members couldbe withdrawn and replaced by the Factory Committee with the approval ofthe local "Troika. " These Commissions, like the "Troikas, " consistedof three members: (1) from the management of the factory, (2) from theFactory Committee, (3) from the Executive Committee of the workers. (Itwas suggested in the directions that one of these should be from thegroup which "has been organizing 'Saturdayings, ' that is to say that heor she should be a Communist. ) The payment of conscripted workers wasto be by production, with prizes for specially good work. Specially badwork was also foreseen in the detailed scheme of possible punishments. Offenders were to be brought before the "People's Court" (equivalentto the ordinary Civil Court), or, in the case of repeated or very badoffenses, were to be brought before the far more dreaded RevolutionaryTribunals. Six categories of possible offenses were placed upon the newcode:

 (1)Avoiding registration, absenteeism, or desertion. (2)The preparation of false documents or the use of such. (3)Officials giving false information to facilitate these crimes. (4)Purposeful damage of instruments or material. (5)Uneconomical or careless work. (6)(Probably the most serious of all: Instigation to any of these actions. 

The "Troikas" have the right to deal administratively with the lessimportant crimes by deprival of freedom for not more than two weeks. No one can be brought to trial except by the Committee for IndustrialConscription on the initiative of the responsible director of work, andwith the approval either of the local labor inspection authorities orwith that of the local Executive Committee. 

No one with the slightest knowledge of Russia will suppose for a momentthat this elaborate mechanism sprang suddenly into existence whenthe decree was signed. On the contrary, all stages of industrialconscription exist simultaneously even today, and it would be possibleby going from one part of Russia to another to collect a series ofspecimens of industrial conscription at every stage of evolution, justas one can collect all stages of man from a baboon to a company directoror a Communist. Some of the more primitive kinds of conscription werenot among the least successful. For example, at the time (in the springof the year) when the Russians still hoped that the Poles would becontent with the huge area of non-Polish territory they had alreadyseized, the army on the western front was without any elaborate systemof decrees being turned into a labor army. The work done was at firstordinary country work, mainly woodcutting. They tried to collaboratewith the local "Troikas, " sending help when these Committees askedfor it. This, however, proved unsatisfactory, so, disregarding the"Troikas, " they organized things for themselves in the whole areaimmediately behind the front. They divided up the forests into definitedistricts, and they worked these with soldiers and with deserters. Gradually their work developed, and they built themselves narrow-gaugerailways for the transport of the wood. Then they needed wagons andlocomotives, and of course immediately found themselves at loggerheadswith the railway authorities. Finally, they struck a bargain withthe railwaymen, and were allowed to take broken-down wagons which therailway people were not in a position to mend. Using such skilled laboras they had, they mended such wagons as were given them, and later madea practice of going to the railway yards and in inspecting "sick" wagonsfor themselves, taking out any that they thought had a chance evenof temporary convalescence. Incidentally they caused great scandalby finding in the Smolensk sidings among the locomotives and wagonssupposed to be sick six good locomotives and seventy perfectly healthywagons. Then they began to improve the feeding of their army by sendingthe wood they had cut, in the trains they had mended, to people whowanted wood and could give them provisions. One such train went toTurkestan and back from the army near Smolensk. Their work continuallyincreased, and since they had to remember that they were an army andnot merely a sort of nomadic factory, they began themselves to mobilize, exclusively for purposes of work, sections of the civil population. I asked Unshlicht, who had much to do with this organization, if thepeasants came willingly. He said, "Not very, " but added that they didnot mind when they found that they got well fed and were given packetsof salt as prizes for good work. "The peasants, " he said, "do notgrumble against the Government when it shows the sort of commonsense that they themselves can understand. We found that when we saiddefinitely how many carts and men a village must provide, and used themwithout delay for a definite purpose, they were perfectly satisfied andconsidered it right and proper. In every case, however, when they sawpeople being mobilized and sent thither without obvious purpose orresult, they became hostile at once. " I asked Unshlicht how it was thattheir army still contained skilled workmen when one of the objects ofindustrial conscription was to get the skilled workmen back into thefactories. He said: "We have an accurate census of the army, and when weget asked for skilled workmen for such and such a factory, they go thereknowing that they still belong to the army. "

That, of course, is the army point of view, and indicates one of themain squabbles which industrial conscription has produced. Trotsky wouldlike the various armies to turn into units of a territorial militia, andat the same time to be an important part of the labor organizationof each district. His opponents do not regard the labor armies as apermanent manifestation, and many have gone so far as to say thatthe productivity of labor in one of these armies is lower than amongordinary workmen. Both sides produce figures on this point, and Trotskygoes so far as to say that if his opponents are right, then not onlyare labor armies damned, but also the whole principle of industrialconscription. "If compulsory labor-independently of social condition-isunproductive, that is a condemnation not of the labor armies, but ofindustrial conscription in general, and with it of the whole Sovietsystem, the further development of which is unthinkable except on abasis of universal industrial conscription. "

But, of course, the question of the permanence of the labor armies isnot so important as the question of getting the skilled workers backto the factories. The comparative success or failure of soldiers ormobilized peasants in cutting wood is quite irrelevant to this recoveryof the vanished workmen. And that recovery will take time, and will beentirely useless unless it is possible to feed these workers when theyhave been collected. There have already been several attempts, notwholly successful, to collect the straying workers of particularindustries. Thus, after the freeing of the oil-wells from the Whites, there was a general mobilization of naphtha workers. Many of these hadbolted on or after the arrival of Krasnov or Denikin and gone far intoCentral Russia, settling where they could. So months passed before theRed Army definitely pushed the area of civil war beyond the oil-wells, that many of these refugees had taken new root and were unwilling toreturn. I believe, that in spite of the mobilization, the oil-wellsare still short of men. In the coal districts also, which have passedthrough similar experiences, the proportion of skilled to unskilledlabor is very much smaller than it was before the war. There have alsobeen two mobilizations of railway workers, and these, I think, may bepartly responsible for the undoubted improvement noticeable duringthe year, although this is partly at least due to other things besideconscription. In the first place Trotsky carried with him into theCommissariat of Transport the same ferocious energy that he has shown inthe Commissariat of War, together with the prestige that he had gainedthere. Further, he was well able in the councils of the Republic todefend the needs of his particular Commissariat against those of allothers. He was, for example able to persuade the Communist Party totreat the transport crisis precisely as they had treated each crisison the front-that is to say, to mobilize great numbers of professedCommunists to meet it, giving them in this case the especial task ofgetting engines mended and, somehow or other, of keeping trains on themove. 

But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the labor armies, nor the improvement in transport, are any final proof of the success ofindustrial conscription. Industrial conscription in the proper senseof the words is impossible until a Government knows what it has toconscript. A beginning was made early this year by the introduction oflabor books, showing what work people were doing and where, and servingas a kind of industrial passports. But in April this year these had notyet become general in Moscow although the less unwieldy population ofPetrograd was already supplied with them. It will be long even if it ispossible at all, before any considerable proportion of the people notliving in these two cities are registered in this way. A more usefulstep was taken at the end of August, in a general census throughoutRussia. There has been no Russian census since 1897. There was to havebeen another about the time the war began. It was postponed for obviousreasons. If the Communists carry through the census with even moderatesuccess (they will of course have to meet every kind of evasion), theywill at least get some of the information without which industrialconscription on a national scale must be little more than a farce. The census should show them where the skilled workers are. Industrialconscription should enable them to collect them and put them at theirown skilled work. Then if, besides transplanting them, they are able tofeed them, it will be possible to judge of the success or failure of ascheme which in most countries would bring a Government toppling to theground. 

"In most countries"; yes, but then the economic crisis has gonefurther in Russia than in most countries. There is talk of introducingindustrial conscription (one year's service) in Germany, where thingshave not gone nearly so far. And perhaps industrial conscription, likeCommunism itself, becomes a thing of desperate hope only in a countryactually face to face with ruin. I remember saying to Trotsky, whentalking of possible opposition, that I, as an Englishman, with thetendencies to practical anarchism belonging to my race, should certainlyobject most strongly if I were mobilized and set to work in a particularfactory, and might even want to work in some other factory just for thesake of not doing what I was forced to do. Trotsky replied: "You wouldnow. But you would not if you had been through a revolution, and seenyour country in such a state that only the united, concentrated effortof everybody could possibly reestablish it. That is the position here. Everybody knows the position and that there is no other way. "

WHAT THE COMMUNISTS ARE TRYING TO DO IN RUSSIA

We come now to the Communist plans for reconstruction. We have seen, inthe first two chapters, something of the appalling paralysis which isthe most striking factor in the economic problem to-day. We have seenhow Russia is suffering from a lack of things and from a lack of labor, how these two shortages react on each other, and how nothing but a vastimprovement in transport can again set in motion what was one of thegreat food-producing machines of the world. We have also seen somethingof the political organization which, with far wider ambitions beforeit, is at present struggling to prevent temporary paralysis from turninginto permanent atrophy. We have seen that it consists of a politicalparty so far dominant that the Trades Unions and all that is articulatein the country may be considered as part of a machinery of propaganda, for getting those things done which that political party considersshould be done. In a country fighting, literally, for its life, no mancan call his soul his own, and we have seen how this fact-a fact thathas become obvious again and again in the history of the world, whenevera nation has had its back to the wall-is expressed in Russia in termsof industrial conscription; in measures, that is to say, which would beimpossible in any country not reduced to such extremities; in measureswhich may prove to be the inevitable accompaniment of national crisis, when such crisis is economic rather than military. Let us now see whatthe Russians, with that machinery at their disposal are trying to do. 

It is obvious that since this machinery is dominated by a politicalparty, it will be impossible to understand the Russian plans, withoutunderstanding that particular political party's estimate of thesituation in general. It is obvious that the Communist plans for Russiamust be largely affected by their view of Europe as a whole. This viewis gloomy in the extreme. The Communists believe that Europe is steadilyshaking itself to pieces. They believe that this process has alreadygone so far that, even given good will on the part of EuropeanGovernments, the manufacturers of Western countries are alreadyincapable of supplying them with all the things which Russia wasimporting before the war, still less make up the enormous arrears whichhave resulted from six years of blockade. They do not agree with M. Clemenceau that "revolution is a disease attacking defeated countriesonly. " Or, to put it as I have heard it stated in Moscow, they believethat President Wilson's aspiration towards a peace in which should beneither conqueror nor conquered has been at least partially realized inthe sense that every country ended the struggle economically defeated, with the possible exception of America, whose signature, after all, isstill to be ratified. They believe that even in seemingly prosperouscountries the seeds of economic disaster are already fertilized. Theythink that the demands of labor will become greater and more difficultto fulfill until at last they become incompatible with a continuance ofthe capitalist system. They think that strike after strike, irrespectiveof whether it is successful or not, will gradually widen the cracksand flaws already apparent in the damaged economic structure of WesternEurope. They believe that conflicting interests will involve our nationsin new national wars, and that each of these will deepen the cleavagebetween capital and labor. They think that even if exhaustion makesmutual warfare on a large scale impossible, these conflicting interestswill produce such economic conflicts, such refusals of cooperation, aswill turn exhaustion to despair. They believe, to put it briefly, thatRussia has passed through the worst stages of a process to whichevery country in Europe will be submitted in turn by its desperate andembittered inhabitants. We may disagree with them, but we shall notunderstand them if we refuse to take that belief into account. If, asthey imagine, the next five years are to be years of disturbance andgrowing resolution, Russia will get very little from abroad. If, forexample, there is to be a serious struggle in England, Russia will getpractically nothing. They not only believe that these things aregoing to be, but make the logical deductions as to the effect of suchdisturbances on their own chances of importing what they need. Forexample, Lenin said to me that "the shock of revolution in England wouldensure the final defeat of capitalism, " but he said at the same timethat it would be felt at once throughout the world and cause suchreverberations as would paralyze industry everywhere. And that is why, although Russia is an agricultural country, the Communist plans for herreconstruction are concerned first of all not with agriculture, but withindustry. In their schemes for the future of the world, Russia's part isthat of a gigantic farm, but in their schemes for the immediate futureof Russia, their eyes are fixed continually on the nearer object ofmaking her so far self-supporting that, even if Western Europe isunable to help them, they may be able to crawl out of their economicdifficulties, as Krassin put it to me before he left Moscow, "ifnecessary on all fours, but somehow or other, crawl out. "

Some idea of the larger ambitions of the Communists with regard to thedevelopment of Russia are given in a conversation with Rykov, whichfollows this chapter. The most important characteristic of them is thatthey are ambitions which cannot but find an echo in Russians of anykind, quite regardless of their political convictions. The old anomaliesof Russian industry, for example, the distances of the industrialdistricts from their sources of fuel and raw material are to be doneaway with. These anomalies were largely due to historical accidents, such as the caprice of Peter the Great, and not to any economic reasons. The revolution, destructive as it has been, has at least cleaned theslate and made it possible, if it is possible to rebuild at all, torebuild Russia on foundations laid by common sense. It may be saidthat the Communists are merely doing flamboyantly and with a lot offlag-waving, what any other Russian Government would be doing in theirplace. And without the flamboyance and the flag-waving, it is doubtfulwhether in an exhausted country, it would be possible to get anythingdone at all. The result of this is that in their work of economicreconstruction the Communists get the support of most of the bestengineers and other technicians in the country, men who take no interestwhatsoever in the ideas of Karl Marx, but have a professional interestin doing the best they can with their knowledge, and a patrioticsatisfaction in using that knowledge for Russia. These men, caring notat all about Communism, want to make Russia once more a comfortablyhabitable place, no matter under what Government. Their attitude isprecisely comparable to that of the officers of the old army who havecontributed so much to the success of the new. These officers were notCommunists, but they disliked civil war, and fought to put an end of it. As Sergei Kamenev, the Commander-in-Chief, and not a Communist, saidto me, "I have not looked on the civil war as on a struggle between twopolitical ideas, for the Whites have no definite idea. I have consideredit simply as a struggle between the Russian Government and a number ofmutineers. " Precisely so do these "bourgeois" technicians now workingthroughout Russia regard the task before them. It will be smallsatisfaction to them if famine makes the position of any Governmentimpossible. For them the struggle is quite simply a struggle betweenRussia and the economic forces tending towards a complete collapse ofcivilization. 

The Communists have thus practically the whole intelligence of thecountry to help them in their task of reconstruction, or of salvage. But the educated classes alone cannot save a nation. Muscle is wantedbesides brain, and the great bulk of those who can provide muscleare difficult to move to enthusiasm by any broad schemes of economicrearrangement that do not promise immediate improvement in their ownmaterial conditions. Industrial conscription cannot be enforcedin Russia unless there is among the conscripted themselves anunderstanding, although a resentful understanding, of its necessity. TheRussians have not got an army of Martians to enforce effort on an alienpeople. The army and the people are one. "We are bound to admit, " saysTrotsky, "that no wide industrial mobilization will succeed, if we donot capture all that is honorable, spiritual in the peasant workingmasses in explaining our plan. " And the plan that he referred to wasnot the grandiose (but obviously sensible) plan for the eventualelectrification of all Russia, but a programme of the struggle beforethem in actually getting their feet clear of the morass of industrialdecay in which they are at present involved. Such a programme hasactually been decided upon-a programme the definite object of whichis to reconcile the workers to work not simply hand to mouth, each forhimself, but to concentrate first on those labors which will eventuallybring their reward in making other labors easier and improving theposition as a whole. 

Early this year a comparatively unknown Bolshevik called Gusev, to whomnobody had attributed any particular intelligence, wrote, while busy onthe staff of an army on the southeast front, which was at the time beingused partly as a labor army, a pamphlet which has had an extraordinaryinfluence in getting such a programme drawn up. The pamphlet is basedon Gusev's personal observation both of a labor army at work and ofthe attitude of the peasant towards industrial conscription. It wasextremely frank, and contained so much that might have been used byhostile critics, that it was not published in the ordinary way butprinted at the army press on the Caucasian front and issued exclusivelyto members of the Communist Party. I got hold of a copy of thispamphlet through a friend. It is called "Urgent Questions of EconomicConstruction. " Gusev sets out in detail the sort of opposition he hadmet, and says: "The Anarchists, Social Revolutionaries and Menshevikshave a clear, simple economic plan which the great masses canunderstand: 'Go about your own business and work freely for yourself inyour own place. ' They have a criticism of labor mobilizations equallyclear for the masses. They say to them, 'They are putting Simeon inPeter's place, and Peter in Simeon's. They are sending the men ofSaratov to dig the ground in the Government of Stavropol, and theStavropol men to the Saratov Government for the same purpose. ' Thenbesides that there is 'nonparty' criticism:

"'When it is time to sow they will be shifting muck, and when it is timeto reap they will be told to cut timber. ' That is a particularly clearexpression of the peasants' disbelief in our ability to draw up a propereconomic plan. This belief is clearly at the bottom of such questionsas, 'Comrade Gusev, have you ever done any plowing?' or 'Comrade Orator, do you know anything about peasant work?' Disbelief in the townsman whounderstands nothing about peasants is natural to the peasant, and weshall have to conquer it, to get through it, to get rid of it by showingthe peasant, with a clear plan in our hands that he can understand, thatwe are not altogether fools in this matter and that we understand morethan he does. " He then sets out the argument which he himself had foundsuccessful in persuading the peasants to do things the reward for whichwould not be obvious the moment they were done. He says, "I compared ourState economy to a colossal building with scores of stories and tens ofthousands of rooms. The whole building has been half smashed; in placesthe roof has tumbled down, the beams have rotted, the ceilings aretumbling, the drains and water pipes are burst; the stoves are fallingto pieces, the partitions are shattered, and, finally, the wallsand foundations are unsafe and the whole building is threatened withcollapse. I asked, how, must one set about the repair of this building?With what kind of economic plan? To this question the inhabitants ofdifferent stories, and even of different rooms on one and the same storywill reply variously. Those who live on the top floor will shout thatthe rafters are rotten and the roof falling; that it is impossible tolive, there any longer, and that it is immediately necessary, first ofall, to put up new beams and to repair the roof. And from their point ofview they will be perfectly right. Certainly it is not possible to liveany longer on that floor. Certainly the repair of the roof is necessary. The inhabitants of one of the lower stories in which the water pipeshave burst will cry out that it is impossible to live without water, andtherefore, first of all, the water pipes must be mended. And they, fromtheir point of view, will be perfectly right, since it certainly isimpossible to live without water. The inhabitants of the floor where thestoves have fallen to pieces will insist on an immediate mending of thestoves, since they and their children are dying of cold because there isnothing on which they can heat up water or boil kasha for the children;and they, too, will be quite right. But in spite of all these justdemands, which arrive in thousands from all sides, it is impossible toforget the most important of all, that the foundation is shattered andthat the building is threatened with a collapse which will bury allthe inhabitants of the house together, and that, therefore, the onlyimmediate task is the strengthening of the foundation and the walls. Extraordinary firmness, extraordinary courage is necessary, not only notto listen to the cries and groans of old men, women, children andsick, coming from every floor, but also to decide on taking from theinhabitants of all floors the instruments and materials necessary forthe strengthening of the foundations and walls, and to force them toleave their corners and hearths, which they are doing the best they canto make habitable, in order to drive them to work on the strengtheningof the walls and foundations. "

Gusev's main idea was that the Communists were asking new sacrificesfrom a weary and exhausted people, that without such sacrifices thesepeople would presently find themselves in even worse conditions, andthat, to persuade them to make the effort necessary to save themselves, it was necessary to have a perfectly clear and easily understandableplan which could be dinned into the whole nation and silence thecriticism of all possible opponents. Copies of his little book came toMoscow. Lenin read it and caused excruciating jealousy in the mindsof several other Communists, who had also been trying to find thephilosopher's stone that should turn discouragement into hope, bysingling out Gusev for his special praise and insisting that his plansshould be fully discussed at the Supreme Council in the Kremlin. Trotskyfollowed Lenin's lead, and in the end a general programme for Russianreconstruction was drawn up, differing only slightly from that whichGusev had proposed. I give this scheme in Trotsky's words, because theyare a little fuller than those of others, and knowledge of this planwill explain not only what the Communists are trying to do in Russia, but what they would like to get from us today and what they will want toget tomorrow. Trotsky says:--

"The fundamental task at this moment is improvement in the condition ofour transport, prevention of its further deterioration and preparationof the most elementary stores of food, raw material and fuel. The wholeof the first period of our reconstruction will be completely occupied inthe concentration of labor on the solution of these problems, which is acondition of further progress. 

"The second period (it will be difficult to say now whether it willbe measured in months or years, since that depends on many factorsbeginning with the international situation and ending with the unanimityor the lack of it in our own party) will be a period occupied in thebuilding of machines in the interest of transport, and the getting ofraw materials and provisions. 

"The third period will be occupied in building machinery, with a view tothe production of articles in general demand, and, finally, the fourthperiod will be that in which we are able to produce these articles. "

Does it not occur, even to the most casual reader, that there is verylittle politics in that program, and that, no matter what kind ofGovernment should be in Russia, it would have to endorse that programmeword for word? I would ask any who doubt this to turn again to my firsttwo chapters describing the nature of the economic crisis in Russia, andto remind themselves how, not only the lack of things but the lack ofmen, is intimately connected with the lack of transport, which keepslaborers ill fed, factories ill supplied with material, and in this waykeeps the towns incapable of supplying the needs of the country, withthe result that the country is most unwilling to supply the needs ofthe town. No Russian Government unwilling to allow Russia to subsidedefinitely to a lower level of civilization can do otherwise than toconcentrate upon the improvement of transport. Labor in Russia must beused first of all for that, in order to increase its own productivity. And, if purchase of help from abroad is to be allowed, Russia must"control" the outflow of her limited assets, so that, by healingtransport first of all, she may increase her power of making new assets. She must spend in such a way as eventually to increase her power ofspending. She must prevent the frittering away of her small purse onthings which, profitable to the vendor and doubtless desirable by thepurchaser, satisfy only individual needs and do not raise the producingpower of the community as a whole. 

RYKOV ON ECONOMIC PLANS AND ON THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

Alexei Rykov, the President of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, isone of the hardest worked men in Russia, and the only time I was able tohave a long talk with him (although more than once he snatched momentsto answer particular questions) was on a holiday, when the old SiberianHotel, now the offices of the Council, was deserted, and I walkedthrough empty corridors until I found the President and his secretary atwork as usual. 

After telling of the building of the new railway from AlexandrovskGai to the Emba, the prospects of developing the oil industry in thatdistrict, the relative values of those deposits and of those at Baku, and the possible decreasing significance of Baku in Russian industrygenerally, we passed to broader perspectives. I asked him what hethought of the relations between agriculture and industry in Russia, andsupposed that he did not imagine that Russia would ever become a greatindustrial country. His answer was characteristic of the tremendoushopes that nerve these people in their almost impossible task, and Iset it down as nearly as I can in his own words. For him, of course, theeconomic problem was the first, and he spoke of it as the director ofa huge trust might have spoken. But, as he passed on to talk of what hethought would result from the Communist method of tackling that problem, and spoke of the eventual disappearance of political parties, I felt Iwas trying to read a kind of palimpsest of the Economist and

News from Nowhere, or listening to a strange compound of William Morrisand, for example, Sir Eric Geddes. He said: "We may have to wait along time before the inevitable arrives and there is a Supreme EconomicCouncil dealing with Europe as with a single economic whole. If thatshould come about we should, of course, from the very nature of ourcountry, be called upon in the first place to provide food for Europe, and we should hope enormously to improve our agriculture, working ona larger and larger scale, using mechanical plows and tractors, whichwould be supplied us by the West. But in the meantime we have to facethe fact that events may cause us to be, for all practical purposes, ina state of blockade for perhaps a score of years, and, so far as wecan, we must be ready to depend on ourselves alone. For example, we wantmechanical plows which could be procured abroad. We have had to startmaking them ourselves. The first electric plow made in Russia and usedin Russia started work last year, and this year we shall have a numberof such plows made in our country, not because it is economic so to makethem, but because we could get them in no other way. In so far as ispossible, we shall have to make ourselves self-supporting, so assomehow or other to get along even if the blockade, formal or perhapswilly-nilly (imposed by the inability of the West to supply us), compelsus to postpone cooperation with the rest of Europe. Every day of suchpostponement is one in which the resources of Europe are not being usedin the most efficient manner to supply the needs not only of our owncountry but of all. "

I referred to what he had told me last year about the intendedelectrification of Moscow by a station using turf fuel. 

"That, " he said, "is one of the plans which, in spite of the war, hasgone a very long way towards completion. We have built the station inthe Ryezan Government, on the Shadul peat mosses, about 110 versts fromMoscow. Before the end of May that station should be actually at work. (It was completed, opened and partially destroyed by a gigantic fire. )Another station at Kashira in the Tula Government (on the Oka), usingthe small coal produced in the Moscow coalfields, will be at workbefore the autumn. This year similar stations are being built atIvano-Voznesensk and at Nijni-Novgorod. Also, with a view to making themost economic use of what we already possess, we have finished bothin Petrograd and in Moscow a general unification of all the privatepower-stations, which now supply their current to a single main cable. Similar unification is nearly finished at Tula and at Kostroma. The bigwater-power station on the rapids of the Volkhov is finished in so faras land construction goes, but we can proceed no further until we haveobtained the turbines, which we hope to get from abroad. As you know, weare basing our plans in general on the assumption that in course of timewe shall supply the whole of Russian industry with electricity, of whichwe also hope to make great use in agriculture. That, of course, willtake a great number of years. "

[Nothing could have been much more artificial than the industrialgeography of old Russia. The caprice of history had planted greatindustrial centers literally at the greatest possible distance from thesources of their raw materials. There was Moscow bringing its coal fromDonetz, and Petrograd, still further away, having to eke out a living byimporting coal from England. The difficulty of transport alone musthave forced the Russians to consider how they could do away with suchanomalies. Their main idea is that the transport of coal in a modernState is an almost inexcusable barbarism. They have set themselves, these ragged engineers, working in rooms which they can hardly keepabove freezing-point and walking home through the snow in boots withoutsoles, no less a task than the electrification of the whole of Russia. There is a State Committee presided over by an extraordinary optimistcalled Krzhizhanovsky, entrusted by the Supreme Council of PublicEconomy and Commissariat of Agriculture with the working out of ageneral plan. This Committee includes, besides a number of well-knownpractical engineers, Professors Latsinsky, Klassen, Dreier, Alexandrov, Tcharnovsky, Dend and Pavlov. They are investigating the water poweravailable in different districts in Russia, the possibilities of usingturf, and a dozen similar questions including, perhaps not the leastimportant, investigation to discover where they can do most with leastdependence on help from abroad. ]

Considering the question of the import of machinery from abroad, I askedhim whether in existing conditions of transport Russia was actually in aposition to export the raw materials with which alone the Russians couldhope to buy what they want. He said:

"Actually we have in hand about two million poods (a pood is a littleover thirty-six English pounds) of flax, and any quantity of lightleather (goat, etc. ), but the main districts where we have raw materialfor ourselves or for export are far away. Hides, for example, we have ingreat quantities in Siberia, in the districts of Orenburg and the UralRiver and in Tashkent. I have myself made the suggestion that we shouldoffer to sell this stuff where it is, that is to say not delivered at aseaport, and that the buyers should provide their own trains, which weshould eventually buy from them with the raw material itself, so thatafter a certain number of journeys the trains should become ours. Inthe same districts we have any quantity of wool, and in some of thesedistricts corn. We cannot, in the present condition of our transport, even get this corn for ourselves. In the same way we have greatquantities of rice in Turkestan, and actually are being offered ricefrom Sweden, because we cannot transport our own. Then we have over amillion poods of copper, ready for export on the same conditions. Butit is clear that if the Western countries are unable to help in thetransport, they cannot expect to get raw materials from us. "

I asked about platinum. He laughed. 

"That is a different matter. In platinum we have a world monopoly, andcan consequently afford to wait. Diamonds and gold, they can have asmuch as they want of such rubbish; but platinum is different, and weare in no hurry to part with it. But diamonds and gold ornaments, thejewelry of the Tsars, we are ready to give to any king in Europe whofancies them, if he can give us some less ornamental but more usefullocomotives instead. "

I asked if Kolchak had damaged the platinum mines. He replied, "Not atall. On the contrary, he was promising platinum to everybody who wantedit, and he set the mines going, so we arrived to find them in goodcondition, with a considerable yield of platinum ready for use. "

(I am inclined to think that in spite of Rykov's rather intransigentattitude on the question, the Russians would none the less be willing toexport platinum, if only on account of the fact in comparison with itsgreat value it requires little transport, and so would make possible forthem an immediate bargain with some of the machinery they most urgentlyneed. )

Finally we talked of the growing importance of the Council of PublicEconomy. Rykov was of opinion that it would eventually become the centreof the whole State organism, "it and Trades Unions organizing the actualproducers in each branch. "

"Then you think that as your further plans develop, with the creationof more and more industrial centres, with special productive populationsconcentrated round them, the Councils of the Trades Unions will tend tobecome identical with the Soviets elected in the same districts by thesame industrial units?"

"Precisely, " said Rykov, "and in that way the Soviets, useful during theperiod of transition as an instrument of struggle and dictatorship, willbe merged with the Unions. " (One

important factor, as Lenin pointed out when considering the samequestion, is here left out of count, namely the political development ofthe enormous agricultural as opposed to industrial population. )

"But if this merging of political Soviets with productive Unions occurs, the questions that concern people will cease to be political questions, but will be purely questions of economics. "

"Certainly. And we shall see the disappearance of political parties. That process is already apparent. In the present huge Trade UnionConference there are only sixty Mensheviks. The Communists areswallowing one party after another. Those who were not drawn over to usduring the period of struggle are now joining us during the process ofconstruction, and we find that our differences now are not political atall, but concerned only with the practical details of construction. " Heillustrated this by pointing out the present constitution of the SupremeCouncil of Public Economy. There are under it fifty-three Departments orCentres (Textile, Soap, Wool, Timber, Flax, etc. ), each controlled bya "College" of three or more persons. There are 232 members of theseColleges or Boards in all, and of them 83 are workmen, 79 areengineers, 1 was an ex-director, 50 were from the clerical staff, and 19unclassified. Politically 115 were Communists, 105 were "non-party, " and12 were of non-Communist parties. He continued, "Further, in swallowingthe other parties, the Communists themselves will cease to exist as apolitical party. Think only that youths coming to their manhood duringthis year in Russia and in the future will not be able to confirm fromtheir own experience the reasoning of Karl Marx, because they will havehad no experience of a capitalist country. What can they make ofthe class struggle? The class struggle here is already over, and thedistinctions of class have already gone altogether. In the old days, members of our party were men who had read, or tried to read, Marx's"Capital, " who knew the "Communist Manifesto" by heart, and wereoccupied in continual criticism of the basis of capitalist society. Lookat the new members of our party. Marx is quite unnecessary to them. Theyjoin us, not for struggle in the interests of an oppressed class, butsimply because they understand our aims in constructive work. And, asthis process continues, we old social democrats shall disappear, and ourplaces will be filled by people of entirely different character grown upunder entirely new conditions. "

NON-PARTYISM

Rykov's prophecies of the disappearance of Political parties may befalsified by a development of that very non-partyism on which he basesthem. It is true that the parties openly hostile to the Communistsin Russia have practically disappeared. Many old-time Mensheviks havejoined the Communist Party. Here and there in the country may be founda Social Revolutionary stronghold. Here and there in the Ukraine theMensheviks retain a footing, but I doubt whether either of these partieshas in it the vitality to make itself once again a serious politicalfactor. There is, however, a movement which, in the long run, may alterRussia's political complexion. More and more delegates to Sovietsor Congresses of all kinds are explicitly described as "Non-party. "Non-partyism is perhaps a sign of revolt against rigid discipline ofany kind. Now and then, of course, a clever Menshevik or SocialRevolutionary, by trimming his sails carefully to the wind, gets himselfelected on a non-party ticket. 'When this happens there is usuallya great hullabaloo as soon as he declares himself. A section of hiselectors agitates for his recall and presently some one else is electedin his stead. But non-partyism is much more than a mere cloak ofinvisibility for enemies or conditional supporters of the Communists. Iknow of considerable country districts which, in the face of every kindof agitation, insist on returning exclusively non-party delegates. Thelocal Soviets in these districts are also non-party, and they electusually a local Bolshevik to some responsible post to act as it were asa buffer between themselves and the central authority. They manage localaffairs in their own way, and, through the use of tact on both sides, avoid falling foul of the more rigid doctrinaires in Moscow. 

Eager reactionaries outside Russia will no doubt point to non-partyismas a symptom of friendship for themselves. It is nothing of the sort. On all questions of the defense of the Republic the non-party voting isinvariably solid with that of the Communists. The non-party men do notwant Denikin. They do not want Baron Wrangel. They have never heard ofProfessor Struhve. They do not particularly like the Communists. They principally want to be left alone, and they principally fear anyenforced continuation of war of any kind. If, in the course of time, they come to have a definite political programme, I think it notimpossible that they may turn into a new kind of constitutionaldemocrat. That does not mean that they will have any use for M. Milukovor for a monarch with whom M. Milukov might be ready to supply them. The Constitution for which they will work will be that very SovietConstitution which is now in abeyance, and the democracy which theyassociate with it will be that form of democracy which were it to beaccurately observed in the present state of Russia, that Constitutionwould provide. The capitalist in Russia has long ago earned the positionin which, according to the Constitution, he has a right to vote, since he has long ago ceased to be a capitalist. Supposing the SovietConstitution were today to be literally applied, it would be foundthat practically no class except the priests would be excluded fromthe franchise. And when this agitation swells in volume, it will bean agitation extremely difficult to resist, supposing Russia to be atpeace, so that there will be no valid excuse with which to meet it. These new constitutional democrats will be in the position of saying tothe Communists, "Give us, without change, that very Constitution whichyou yourselves drew up. " I think they will find many friends inside theCommunist Party, particularly among those Communists who are also TradeUnionists. I heard something very like the arguments of this new varietyof constitutional democrat in the Kremlin itself at an All-RussianConference of the Communist Party. A workman, Sapronov, turned suddenlyaside in a speech on quite another matter, and said with great violencethat the present system was in danger of running to seed and turninginto oligarchy, if not autocracy. Until the moment when he put hislisteners against him by a personal attack on Lenin, there was no doubtthat he had with him the sympathies of quite a considerable section ofan exclusively Communist audience. 

Given peace, given an approximate return to normal conditions, non-partyism may well profoundly modify the activities of theCommunists. It would certainly be strong enough to prevent the rasherspirits among them from jeopardizing peace or from risking Russia'schance of convalescence for the sake of promoting in any way the growthof revolution abroad. Of course, so long as it is perfectly obvious thatSoviet Russia is attacked, no serious growth of non-partyism is to beexpected, but it is obvious that any act of aggression on the part ofthe Soviet Government, once Russia had attained peace-which she has notknown since 1914-would provide just the basis of angry discontent whichmight divide even the disciplined ranks of the Communists and givenon-partyism an active, instead of a comparatively passive, backingthroughout the country. 

Non-partyism is already the peasants' way of expressing their aloofnessfrom the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defendthat revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin, talking to me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: "Hegelwrote 'What is the People? The people is that part of the nation whichdoes not know what it wants. ' That is a good description of the Russianpeasantry at the present time, and it applies equally well to yourArthur Hendersons and Sidney Webbs in England, and to all otherpeople like yourself who want incompatible things. The peasantry areindividualists, but they support us. We have, in some degree, tothank Kolchak and Denikin for that. They are in favor of the SovietGovernment, but hanker after Free Trade, not understanding that thetwo things are self-contradictory. Of course, if they were a unitedpolitical force they could swamp us, but they are disunited both intheir interests and geographically. The interests of the poorer andmiddle class peasants are in contradiction to those of the rich peasantfarmer who employs laborers. The poorer and middle class see that wesupport them against the rich peasant, and also see that he is readyto support what is obviously not in their interests. " I said, "If Stateagriculture in Russia comes to be on a larger scale, will there not bea sort of proletarianization of the peasants so that, in the long run, their interests will come to be more or less identical with those of theworkers in other than agricultural industry!" He replied, "Something inthat direction is being done, but it will have to be done very carefullyand must take a very long time. When we are getting many thousands oftractors from abroad, then something of the sort would become possible. "Finally I asked him point blank, "Did he think they would pull throughfar enough economically to be able to satisfy the needs of the peasantrybefore that same peasantry had organized a real political oppositionthat should overwhelm them!" Lenin laughed. "If I could answer thatquestion, " he said, "I could answer everything, for on the answer tothat question everything depends. I think we can. Yes, I think we can. But I do not know that we can. "

Non-partyism may well be the protoplasmic stage of the future politicalopposition of the peasants. 

POSSIBILITIES

I have done my best to indicate the essential facts in Russia's problemtoday, and to describe the organization and methods with which she isattempting its solution. I can give no opinion as to whether by thesemeans the Russians will succeed in finding their way out of the quagmireof industrial ruin in which they are involved. I can only say that theyare unlikely to find their way out by any other means. I think this isinstinctively felt in Russia. Not otherwise would it have been possiblefor the existing organization, battling with one hand to save the townsfront starvation, to destroy with the other the various forces clothedand armed by Western Europe, which have attempted its undoing. The merefact of continued war has, of course, made progress in the solution ofthe economic problem almost impossible, but the fact that the economicproblem was unsolved, must have made war impossible, if it were not thatthe instinct of the people was definitely against Russian or foreigninvaders. Consider for one moment the military position. 

Although the enthusiasm for the Polish war began to subside (even amongthe Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev totheir own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous areaof non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to concludewith Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of SovietRussia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of theUkraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flatteringletter to the Kaiser. In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov, Vitebsk and Mohilev. We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel. In theeast, the front which became known as that of Kolchak, was on theVolga. Soviet Russia was a little hungry island with every prospect ofsubmersion. A year later the Germans had vanished, the flatterers of theKaiser had joined hands with those who were temporarily flattering theAllies, Yudenitch's troops were within sight of Petrograd, Denikin wasat Orel, almost within striking distance of Moscow; there had been astampede of desertion from the Red Army. There was danger that Finlandmight strike at any moment. Although in the east Kolchak had been sweptover the Urals to his ultimate disaster, the situation of Soviet Russiaseemed even more desperate than in the year before. What is the positiontoday! Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland are at peace withRussia. The Polish peace brings comparative quiet to the western front, although the Poles, keeping the letter rather than the spirit of theiragreement, have given Balahovitch the opportunity of establishinghimself in Minsk, where, it is said, that the pogroms of unlucky Jewsshow that he has learnt nothing since his ejection from Pskov. 

Balahovitch's force is not important in itself, but its existence willmake it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier ofPoland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polishpopulation, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmenmay again choose war as the least of many threatening evils. Still, for the moment, Russia's western frontier is comparatively quiet. Hernorthern frontier is again the Arctic Sea. Her eastern frontier is inthe neighborhood of the Pacific. The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupiedby no enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding isthe small semi-circle north of the Crimea. There Denikin's successor, supported by the French but exultantly described by a Germanconservative newspaper as a "German baron in Cherkass uniform, " isholding the Crimea and a territory slightly larger than the peninsulaon the main land. Only to the immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevikpropaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic toany one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is onthe eve of military collapse. 

In any case it is easy in a revolution to magnify the influence ofmilitary events on internal affairs. In the first place, no one whohas not actually crossed the Russian front during the period of activeoperations can well realize how different are the revolutionary warsfrom that which ended in 1918. Advance on a broad front no longermeans that a belt of men in touch with each other has moved definitelyforward. It means that there have been a series of forward movementsat widely separated, and with the very haziest of mutual, connections. There will be violent fighting for a village or a railway station or thepassage of a river. Small hostile groups will engage in mortal combat todecide the possession of a desirable hut in which to sleep, but, exceptat these rare points of actual contact, the number of prisoners is farin excess of the number of casualties. Parties on each side will beperfectly ignorant of events to right or left of them, ignorant even oftheir gains and losses. Last year I ran into Whites in a village whichthe Reds had assured me was strongly held by themselves, and thesesame Whites refused to believe that the village where I had spent thepreceding night was in the possession of the Reds. It is largely anaffair of scouting parties, of patrols dodging each other through theforest tracks, of swift raids, of sudden conviction (often entirelyerroneous) on the part of one side or the other, that it or the enemyhas been "encircled. " The actual number of combatants to a mile of frontis infinitely less than during the German war. Further, since an immenseproportion of these combatants on both sides have no wish to fight atall, being without patriotic or political convictions and very badly fedand clothed, and since it is more profitable to desert than to betaken prisoner, desertion in bulk is not uncommon, and the deserters, hurriedly enrolled to fight on the other side, indignantly re-desertwhen opportunity offers. In this way the armies of Denikin and Yudenitchswelled like mushrooms and decayed with similar rapidity. Militaryevents of this kind, however spectacular they may seem abroad, do nothave the political effect that might be expected. I was in Moscow at theworst moment of the crisis in 1919 when practically everybody outsidethe Government believed that Petrograd had already fallen, and I couldnot but realize that the Government was stronger then than it had beenin February of the same year, when it had a series of victories andpeace with the Allies seemed for a moment to be in sight. A sort of fateseems to impel the Whites to neutralize with extraordinary rapidity anygood will for themelves which they may find among the population. This is true of both sides, but seems to affect the Whites especially. Although General Baron Wrangel does indeed seem to have striven moresuccessfully than his predecessors not to set the population against himand to preserve the loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolutecertainty that any large success on his part would bring crowding tohis banner the same crowd of stupid reactionary officers who broughtto nothing any mild desire for moderation that may have been felt byGeneral Denikin. If the area he controls increases, his power ofcontrol over his subordinates will decrease, and the forces that led toDenikin's collapse will be set in motion in his case also. [*]

 * On the day on which I send this book to the printers news comes of Wrangel's collapse and flight. I leave standing what I have written concerning him, since it will apply to any successor he may have. Each general who has stepped into Kolchak's shoes has eventually had to run away in them, and always for the same reasons. It may be taken almost as an axiom that the history of great country is that of its centre, not of its periphery. The main course of English history throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was never deflected from London. French history did not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or at Quiberon Bay. And only a fanatic could suppose that Russian history would run away from Moscow, to begin again in a semi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea. Moscow changes continually, and may so change as to make easy the return of the "refugees. " Some have already returned. But the refugees will not return as conquerors. Should a Russian Napoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts) appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of a revolutionary war-cry. He will have to fight some one, or he will not be a Napoleon. And whom will he fight but the very people who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbed Aladdin's ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no means kindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avenge the breaking of his sleep?

And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polishfrontier, should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, nomiracles of diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows. For all thesereasons a military collapse of the Soviet Government at the presenttime, even a concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely. 

It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely tobe worse this winter than it has yet been. Forcible attempts to get foodfrom the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town andcountry. There has been a very bad harvest in Russia. The bringing offood from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make thatimpossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequatetransport. Yet I think internal collapse unlikely. It may be said almostwith certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no oneleft to defend them. That moment had arrived in the case of the Tsar. Ithad arrived in the case of Kerensky. It has not arrived in the caseof the Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons. For one thing, a collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time would bedisconcerting, if not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies. It would, of course, open the way to a practically unopposed militaryadvance, but at the same time it would present its enemies with enormousterritory, which would overwhelm the organizing powers which they haveshown again and again to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Norwould collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into agood one. Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of all existingorganizations, and would intensify the horrors of famine for every towndweller. Consequently, though the desperation of hunger and resentmentagainst inevitable requisitions may breed riots and revolts here andthere throughout the country, the men who, in other circumstances, mightcoordinate such events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort. I do not say that collapse is impossible. I do say that it would beextremely undesirable from the point of view of almost everybodyin Russia. Collapse of the present Government would mean at best areproduction of the circumstances of 1917, with the difference that nointervention from without would be necessary to stimulate indiscriminateslaughter within. I say "at best" because I think it more likely thatcollapse would be followed by a period of actual chaos. Any Governmentthat followed the Communists would be faced by the same economicproblem, and would have to choose between imposing measures very likethose of the Communists and allowing Russia to subside into a new areafor colonization. There are people who look upon this as a natural, evena desirable, result of the revolution. They forget that the Russianshave never been a subject race, that they have immense powers ofpassive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea that theyunderstand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is difficultnot to understand. Any country that takes advantage of the Russianpeople in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later, firstthat it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given allRussians a single and undesirable view of the history of the lastthree years. There will not be a Russian who will not believe that theartificial incubation of civil war within the frontiers of old Russiawas not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of sofar weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy. Those who lookwith equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europeof a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereignnations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuumwill set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce astruggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe willhave done for Russia. 

It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolutionmay prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a strickencivilization. My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russiawill not die without infecting us with its disease. It seems to me thatour own civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, andliable, like a man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravatethe malady. I think that the whole of the Russian war, waged directlyor indirectly by Western Europe, is an example of this sort of dementia, but I cannot help believing that sanity will reassert itself in time. At the present moment, to use a modification of Gusev's metaphor, Europemay be compared to a burning house and the Governments of Europe to firebrigades, each one engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of thebuilding. It seems a pity that these fire brigades should be fightingeach other, and forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact thatsome of them wear red uniforms and some wear blue. Any single room towhich the fire gains complete control increases the danger of the wholebuilding, and I hope that before the roof falls in the firemen will cometo their senses. 

But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculationsas to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to thechanges in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely tohappen supposing it does not collapse. I have already said that I thinkcollapse unlikely. Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carryout their programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrellingof the firemen as to make that task impossible?

I think that there is still a hope. There is as yet no sign of a generalimprovement in Russia, nor is such an improvement possible until theRussians have at least carried out the first stage of their programme. It would even not be surprising if things in general were to continue togo to the bad during the carrying out of that first stage. Shortages offood, of men, of tools, of materials, are so acute that they have hadto choose those factories which are absolutely indispensable for thecarrying out of this stage, and make of them "shock" factories, like the"shock" troops of the war, giving them equipment over and above theirrightful share of the impoverished stock, feeding their workmen even atthe cost of letting others go hungry. That means that other factoriessuffer. No matter, say the Russians, if only that first stage makesprogress. Consequently, the only test that can be fairly applied is thatof transport. Are they or are they not gaining on ruin in the matter ofwagons and engines! Here are the figures of wagon repairs in the sevenchief repairing shops up to the month of June:

 December 1919. .. .. .. .. .. . 475 wagons were repaired. January 1920. .. .. .. .. .. .. 656 February. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 697 March. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1104 April. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1141 May. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 1154 June. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 1161

After elaborate investigation last year, Trotsky, as temporary Commissarof Transport, put out an order explaining that the railways, to keep uptheir present condition, must repair roughly 800 engines every month. During the first six months of 1920 they fulfilled this task in thefollowing percentages:

 January. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 32 per cent February. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 50 March. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 66 April. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 78 May. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 98 June. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 104

I think that is a proof that, supposing normal relations existed betweenRussia and ourselves, the Russian would be able to tackle the firststage of the problem that lies before them, and would lie before themwhatever their Government might be. Unfortunately there is no proof thatthis steady improvement can be continued, except under conditions oftrade with Western Europe. There are Russians who think they can pullthrough without us, and, remembering the miracles of which man iscapable when his back is to the wall, it would be rash to say that thisis impossible. But other Russians point out gloomily that they have beenusing certain parts taken from dead engines (engines past repair) inorder to mend sick engines. They are now coming to the mending, not ofsick engines merely, but of engines on which post-mortems have alreadybeen held. They are actually mending engines, parts of which havealready been taken out and used for the mending of other engines. Thereare consequently abnormal demands for such things as shafts and pistonrings. They are particularly short of Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. Innormal times the average number of new tubes wanted for each engine putthrough the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15 for engines used in the morenortherly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines in the south where thewater is not so good). This number must now be taken as much higher, because during recent years tubes have not been regularly renewed. Further, the railways have been widely making use of tubes taken fromdead engines, that is to say, tubes already worn. Putting things attheir very best, assuming that the average demand for tubes per enginewill be that of normal times, then, if 1, 000 engines are to be repairedmonthly, 150, 000 tubes will be wanted every six months. Now on the15th of June the total stock of tubes ready for use was 58, 000, and therailways could not expect to get more than another 13, 000 in thenear future. Unless the factories are able to do better (and theirimprovement depends on improvement in transport), railway repairs mustagain deteriorate, since the main source of materials for it in Russia, namely the dead engines, will presently be exhausted. 

On this there is only one thing to be said. If, whether because we donot trade with them, or from some other cause, the Russians are unableto proceed even in this first stage of their programme, it means anindefinite postponement of the moment when Russia will be able to exportanything, and, consequently, that when at last we learn that we needRussia as a market, she will be a market willing to receive gifts, butunable to pay for anything at all. And that is a state of affairs agreat deal more serious to ourselves than to the Russians, who can, after all, live by wandering about their country and scratching theground, whereas we depend on the sale of our manufactured goods for thepossibility of buying the food we cannot grow ourselves. If the Russiansfail, their failure will affect not us alone. It will, by depriving herof a market, lessen Germany's power of recuperation, and consequentlyher power of fulfilling her engagements. What, then, is to happen toFrance? And, if we are to lose our market in Russia, and find verymuch weakened markets in Germany and France, we shall be faced with anever-increasing burden of unemployment, with the growth, in fact, of thevery conditions in which alone we shall ourselves be unable to recoverfrom the war. In such conditions, upheaval in England would be possible, and, for the dispassionate observer, there is a strange irony in thefact that the Communists desire that upheaval, and, at the same time, desire a rebirth of the Russian market which would tend to make thatupheaval unlikely, while those who most fear upheaval are preciselythose who urge us, by making recovery in Russia impossible, to improvethe chances of collapse at home. The peasants in Russia are not alone inwanting incompatible things.