Part 13

The Socialists who thus consented to co-operate with bourgeois governments in the prosecution of the war were christened by the Bolsheviks “compromisist.” Such Socialists came from almost all the fractions into which this political faith had split in twentieth-century Russia, where the usual doctrinal differences within Marxism were complicated by those which looked back into Russian history for a peculiarly deep-seated Slavic village-communism. In the specific Russian situation, these Social-Revolutionaries, Trudoviks, Narodniks, Mensheviks, must be called moderates. They did not hope to introduce the dictatorship of the proletariat. They wanted to win the war, and they were willing to make use of parliamentary methods to secure social reforms. They had long been distrustful of the Kadets, but under the pressure of events they consented to co-operate with them. The Kadets themselves suffered the fate of the Puritan Episcopalians and the Feuillants; they were pushed out by their collaborators to the Left.

The Bolsheviks refused to take part in any of these governments. They insisted that the bourgeois revolution of February must sooner or later be followed by the proletarian revolution Marx had preached and predicted. Lenin, who returned from a Swiss exile in April to enjoy a few months of bourgeois freedom, decided that the proletarian revolution might be brought off in Russia. His party was by no means unanimously agreed, but his leadership kept the small band together, and the blunders of the compromisists, together with the heritage of defeat and disorganization, played into his hands. In July a premature rising of workers in Petrograd was apparently given local and reluctant leadership by some of the party, and its failure sent Lenin into hiding, and Trotsky and Lunacharsky to prison. The subsequent swing of the pendulum to the Right ended with the abortive attempt of General Kornilov to march on Petrograd, and in this whole process the Bolsheviks gradually acquired new courage and a new following. Lenin from hiding held a guiding hand. Trotsky was released, and elected president of a Petrograd soviet now in Bolshevik control. Lenin, back secretly in Petrograd, presided at a final meeting of the party Central Committee, and an insurrection was decided upon. In a masterly exhibition of revolutionary technique, a military revolution committee made sure of the Petrograd garrison, other groups contrived to hamstring the press and communications, and on the agreed day the Bolsheviks took over Petrograd with astonishingly little difficulty and almost no bloodshed. Even the siege of the Winter Palace, which forms the high point of the uprising, has a comic-opera touch. The October revolution in Petrograd was almost as bloodless as Pride’s Purge or June 2, 1793, the corresponding events in the English and French revolutions. In Moscow there was real fighting, but there, too, the Bolsheviks were successful within a week. Kerensky fled, and the rule of the moderates in Russia was over.

_III. Dual Sovereignty_

The Russian revolution affords the neatest example of a uniformity that lies beyond the somewhat superficial uniformity of sequence of power from conservatives to moderates to extremists, from Right to Center to Left. This is at once an institution and a process; or better, a process that works through a very similar set of institutions. Theorists and historians of the Russian revolution refer to it as the _dvoevlastie_, a word usually translated as dual power, but containing overtones that make it better translated, perhaps, as dual sovereignty. We must go briefly into the general situation to which this word refers.

The problem of sovereignty has long been in itself sufficient to keep hundreds of political philosophers busy and happy. Here once more, having other work to do, we must resign ourselves to abstention from these philosophical delights. In a normal Western society, it may well be difficult or impossible to locate any one person, or group of persons, who possesses the final, authoritative power to decide questions concerning what the society is to do. The pluralists would seem to be, from the point of view of description of social processes, quite right. Even the broader political policies of a modern state seem to be arrived at by so elaborately natural a process of adjusting the desires of conflicting groups, that to say that a single and identifiable “sovereign” determines these policies is nonsense. And yet in a normal society there is at least one co-ordinated chain of institutions through which conflicting groups do finally adjust their conflicts, for the moment at least, in action. That co-ordination may seem inefficient and irrational when academically analyzed, and it may well be so complicated that even the politicians who make it work do not understand it. For men are as often as not unaware of how they do things they do very successfully.

But it does work, and through it questions at issue are decided--or forgotten, which is also a kind of deciding. Those who do not like the decision may try to alter it by a very great variety of action, from agitation to conspiracy or sabotage. Socially powerful or numerous groups may under favoring conditions even go so far as to nullify a given decision: the example of the Eighteenth Amendment in the United States will occur to everyone. On the whole, however, the decisions become law, and overt disobedience becomes criminal.

When another and conflicting chain of institutions provides another and conflicting set of decisions, then you have a dual sovereignty. Within the same society, two sets of institutions, leaders, and laws demand obedience, not in one single respect, but in the whole interwoven series of actions which make up life for the average man. Thus the nullification of the Prohibition Amendment by many citizens over large areas of the United States did not in itself mean that there was in this country a revolutionary situation of dual sovereignty. Were a similar nullification extended by, let us say, a strengthened amalgamation of the American Federation of Labor and the Committee for Industrial Organization from the Fourteenth Amendment on through to the common law of property; were this amalgamation to enforce laws of its own on workers in factories; were it to take over many of the functions of local government in relation to markets, sanitation, police, and so on--we should clearly have dual sovereignty. We should, as a matter of fact, have a state of affairs something like that in Russia in the summer of 1917.

In _all_ our revolutions, however, the legal government finds opposed to it, once the first steps in actual revolution have been taken, not merely hostile individuals and parties--this any government finds--but a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed. This rival government is of course illegal, but not all of its leaders and followers are from the beginning consciously aiming to supplant the legal government. Very often they think of themselves as merely supplementing it, perhaps also as preserving it in a revolutionary course. Yet a rival government they are, and no mere critics or opponents. At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and easily into the place of the defeated government.

This process does indeed work itself out in the old regimes before the first steps in revolution are taken. Puritans in England, Whigs in America, Third Estate in France, the Kadets and compromisist Socialists in Russia, all had organizations that demanded their allegiance and that enabled them to fight the old regime with revolution at least in the back of their minds. But the process is much more clear, more sharply edged--except perhaps in America--at the stage we have now reached.

Once the first stage in revolution is over, the struggle that arises between moderates and extremists comes to be a struggle between two rival governmental machines. That of the moderates, the legal government, bar inherited some of the prestige that goes with being established, some of the financial resources--actual or potential--of the old government, most of its liabilities, all of its institutions. Try to alter these latter as it may, it finds them annoyingly persistent, extremely difficult to blot out. The legal government is unpopular with many just because it is an obvious and responsible government, because it has to shoulder some of the unpopularity of the government of the old regime.

The illegal government of the extremists, however, has to face no such difficulties. It has the prestige which recent events have given to attackers, to those who can claim to be in the forefront of the revolution. It has, as governments go, relatively few responsibilities. It does not have to try to use, if only temporarily, the worn-out machinery, the institutions of the old regime. It has, on the contrary, for the moment the great advantage of using the efficient machinery gradually constructed by the revolutionists, both moderates and extremists, from the time when they began under the old regime to emerge as a pressure group. Indeed, the final capture of this machinery--or this organization, if you prefer--seems to be what really determines the final victory of the extremists over the moderates, long before that final victory is apparent in events. Why the moderates do not keep control of the organization they have done so much to initiate and to mold is a question that permits of no simple answer. We may hope that some answer will emerge from a more detailed study of the fate of the moderates. We must first, however, see how well the foregoing analysis fits the facts in our four revolutions.

Charles and the Long Parliament were clearly dual sovereigns from the actual outbreak of hostilities in 1642 if not from the very first session of 1640. Once the Civil War was decided against Charles, Parliament, under the control of the moderates, found itself the legal government. But almost immediately it was confronted by the radical New Model Army, which very soon began to take the kind of action that in this world only a government can take. The fact that Charles was still on the scene and the existence of the Scotch Army complicated the situation in the three or four years before the execution of Charles in 1649, but the broad lines of the duel between the newly legal government of the Presbyterian moderates in Parliament and the illegal government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army are clear.

In America this dual sovereignty is most obvious in the years before the final break in 1776. The lines between the legal and the illegal government were obscured, especially in a colony like Massachusetts, by the fact that town meetings and colonial legislatures were part of the legal government, but were often controlled by men active in the illegal government. None the less, the machinery which culminated in the continental congresses--in themselves illegal bodies--was clearly used by revolutionists against constituted authority.

While the moderates in France, the Feuillants, or constitutional monarchists, still controlled the legislative body and the formal machinery of the centralized state, their increasingly republican opponents controlled the network of Jacobin societies which made up the frame of the other, or illegal, government. Through their control of these societies they worked into the control of many of the units of local government, and from this position of vantage were able to expel the Feuillant moderates and destroy the monarchy. The process was then repeated with the Girondin moderates controlling the legislative body and the Montagnard extremists controlling the important units of the Jacobin network and at least one exceedingly important local governmental unit--the Paris Commune. In the crisis of June 2, 1793, the illegal government again won out over the legal.

In Russia the _dvoevlastie_ is plain. The provisional government which emerged from the February revolution had through its connection with the Duma some claim to legitimacy. Though it absorbed more and more Socialists of various stripes in the next six months, thus exhibiting the leftward movement we have found in all our societies, it remained moderate and quite conscious of its legality. On the other side the Bolsheviks and a few allied radical groups had by late summer obtained control of the network of soviets and stood as an illegal government facing the legal one. Soviet means no more than “council” and had originally in Russia no more connotations than its English equivalent has for us. The soviets were local councils of trade-unionists, soldiers, sailors, peasants, and suitable intellectuals. They sprang up naturally enough with the dissolution of the Czarist power in 1917, all the more since memories of the abortive revolution of 1905, which had also made use of the soviet form, were fresh in the minds of everyone. The Bolsheviks, wisely concentrating on the soviets while the attention of the compromisists was increasingly taken by participation in the legal government, were able to wrest control of key soviets in Petrograd, Moscow, and major industrial towns from the compromisists. There is here a curious detailed parallel with the French revolution. The final insurrectionary victory of the Bolsheviks was achieved without complete control of the general network of soviets, just as that of the Montagnards was achieved without control of the whole network of Jacobin clubs. In each case control of the most important units of the illegal government was sufficient.

_IV. Weaknesses of the Moderates_

At this stage in revolution, then, the moderates in control of the formal machinery of government are confronted by the extremists in control of machinery devised for propaganda, pressure-group work, even insurrection, but now increasingly used as machinery of government. This stage ends with the triumph of the extremists and the merging of the dual sovereignty into a single one. We must now inquire into the reasons for the failure of the moderates in these revolutions to hold power.

There is first the paradox we have previously noted, that in the early stages of revolution the control of the machinery of government is in itself a source of weakness for those who hold such control. Little by little the moderates find themselves losing the credit they had gained as opponents of the old regime, and taking on more and more of the discredit innocently associated by the hopeful many with the status of heir to the old regime. Forced on the defensive, they make mistake after mistake, partly because they are so little used to being on the defensive. They are in a position from which only a superhuman wisdom could extricate them; and the moderates are among the most human of revolutionaries.

Faced with the opposition of more radical groups organized in the network we have called the illegal government, the moderates have broadly but three choices: they may try to suppress the illegal government; they may try to get control of it themselves; or they may let it alone. Actually their policy shifts around among these three policies, combining one with another; in these circumstances, the net effect is to produce a fourth policy, which amounts to a positive encouragement of their enemies in the illegal government.

In the revolutions we are studying the moderates are particularly handicapped in their efforts to suppress these enemy organizations. The revolutions were all made in the name of freedom, were all associated with what the Marxists call a bourgeois individualistic ideology. The moderates found themselves obliged to observe certain “rights” of their enemies--notably those of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly. What is more, many if not most of the moderates sincerely believed in such rights, held that truth is great and will prevail. Had it not just prevailed against the tyranny of the old regime? Even when under pressure the moderate begins to try to suppress an extremist newspaper, forbid an extremist meeting, jail a few extremist leaders, his conscience troubles him. More important, any unsuppressed extremists raise a mighty howl. The moderates are betraying the revolution; they are using exactly the same methods the villainous tyrants of the old regime had used.

The Russian revolution is here an excellent example. The Kadets and compromisists between February and October could not conveniently suppress Bolshevik propaganda, nor indeed any form of Bolshevik political activity. When they tried to do so after a premature Bolshevik rising, the street troubles in Petrograd known as the “July Days,” they were met by protests from all sorts of people, including notably the Bolsheviks. This was despotism, this was Czarism of the worst sort. Had not the February revolution brought political freedom, freedom of the press and association, to Russia forever? Kerensky mustn’t make use of the kind of weapons the Czars had used. In 1938 Stalin of course can use methods worthy of Peter the Great or Ivan the Terrible, but that is only to say that the Russian revolution is over. In 1917, however, even had Kerensky been the sort of man who could successfully organize repressive measures--and he plainly was not that sort of man--what we are bound to call public opinion would not in those days have permitted the execution of such measures. Much the same situation is to be found in France, where the Jacobins were permitted free speech and free association, and firmly and publicly insisted on their rights as free men to get ready for a dictatorship.

Nor are the moderates more successful in their attempts to get--or rather to retain--control of the machinery which they and the extremists had jointly built up as a means of overthrowing the old regime. For this there seems to be no single preponderant reason. The moderates are, of course, occupied with a good deal of the work of actual governing, and they have less time for army committees or Jacobin clubs or soviet meetings. They feel themselves perhaps a trifle superior to such activity. They are temperamentally unfitted for the rougher and dirtier work of the politics of direct action. They have moral scruples. They are not quite the noble souls historical legend makes out the Girondin moderates in the French revolution to have been; indeed many of them, like Brissot and Kerensky, have a good many of the gifts of the political manipulator. But they are in power, and they seem to set about quite naturally cultivating the sober virtues that go with power. Such virtues, however, make them inadequate leaders of militant revolutionary societies.

Whatever the explanation, the fact of the uniformity is clear. This particular failure of the moderates is well shown in the French revolution. The Jacobin network of societies of “Friends of the Constitution” was in its inception hardly to the Left of Lafayette and his friends. When, however, it began to move further to the Left the Fayettists made a few feeble efforts to retain control, and then went off and founded their own society, the Feuillants. The Feuillants, however, could not spread beyond narrow upper-class and intellectual Parisian circles. Later groups founded here and there throughout the country as “Friends of the Monarchy,” or “Friends of Peace,” tried to compete with the Jacobins, but with very little luck. If they gave bread to the poor, the Jacobins cried out that they were attempting bribery. If they did nothing, the Jacobins complained that they lacked social conscience. Finally the Jacobins worked out a fairly systematic procedure. They would hire a few hoodlums--sometimes it was not necessary to hire them--to break up a meeting of the rival Friends of Peace, and would then send a deputation to the municipal authorities asking that the Friends of Peace be closed as a public nuisance. The authorities were either Jacobins themselves, or more afraid of the Jacobins than of the Friends of Peace, so that the matter received a suitable revolutionary solution.

Similarly the Presbyterians found themselves powerless to control the spread of Independency, not only in the army, but in local parishes. And in Russia the compromisists found the Bolsheviks formidable in all the important soviets. A detailed study of the Petrograd soviet from February to October will show how cleverly the party of Lenin took advantage of every mistake of its opponents, how successfully it burrowed from within, spreading its control from factory soviets on up until finally the city soviet was captured. Such a study will also show the compromisists gradually losing ground, in spite of the great oratorical gifts of leaders like Tseretelli, Chkheidze and Kerensky.

There is, indeed, an almost organic weakness in the position of the moderates. They are placed between two groups, the disgruntled but not yet silenced conservatives and the confident, aggressive extremists. There are still freedom of speech and the other political rights, so that even conservatives have a voice. Now the moderates seem in all these revolutions to be following the slogan used so conspicuously for French politics of the _Cartel des Gauches_ in 1924: no enemies to the Left. They still distrust the conservatives, against whom they have so recently risen; and they are reluctant to admit that the extremists, with whom they so recently stood united, can actually be their enemies. All the force of the ideas and sentiments with which the moderates entered the revolution give them a sort of twist toward the Left. Emotionally they cannot bear to think of themselves as falling behind in the revolutionary process. Moreover, many of them hope to outbid the extremists for popular support, to beat them at their own game. But only in normal times can you trust in the nice smooth clichés of politics like “beat them at their own game.” The moderates fail by this policy of “no enemies to the Left” to reconcile these enemies to the Left; and they make it quite impossible to rally to their support any of the not yet quite negligible conservatives. Then, after the moderates get thoroughly frightened about the threatening attitude of the extremists, they turn for help to the conservatives, and find there just aren’t any. They have emigrated, or retired to the country, hopeless and martyred in spirit. Needless to say, a martyred conservative is no longer a conservative, but only another maladjusted soul. This last turn of theirs towards the conservatives, however, finishes the moderates. Alone, unsupported in control of a government as yet by no means in assured and habitual control of a personnel, civil or military, they succumb easily to insurrection. It is significant that Pride’s Purge, the French crisis of June 2, 1793, and the Petrograd October revolution were all hardly more than _coups d’état_.

In the English, French, and Russian revolutions it is possible to distinguish one critical measure around which all these currents converge, a measure which, espoused by the moderates, cuts them off from support on the Right and leaves the radicals in a position to use this very measure against its authors. Such are the Root-and-Branch Bill in the English, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in the French, and Order Number One in the Russian, revolutions.