Chapter 31

In Russia there are millions of Germans conversant with the language, laws, and customs of the people. Many of them have been settled there for generations. They are passionately attached to their race, and neither unfriendly nor useless to the country of their adoption. The trade, commerce, and industry of the European provinces are largely in their hands and in those of their forerunners and helpers, the Jews. The Russo-German and Jewish middlemen in the country have their faces ever turned toward the Fatherland. They are wont to buy and sell there. They always obtained their credit in Berlin, Dresden, or Frankfurt. They acted as commercial travelers, agents, brokers, bankers, for Russians and Germans. They are constantly going and coming between the two countries. How are these myriads to be fettered permanently and kept from eking out a livelihood in the future on the lines traced by necessity or interest in the past? The Russians, on their side, must live, and therefore buy and sell. Has the Conference or the League the right or power to dictate to them the persons or the people with whom alone they may have dealings? Can it narrow the field of Russia's political activities? Some people flatter themselves that it can. In this case the League of Nations must transform itself into an alliance for the suppression of the German race.

Burning indignation and moral reprobation were the sentiments aroused among the high-minded Allies by the infamous Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. For that mockery of a peace, even coming from an enemy, transcended the bounds of human vengeance. It was justly anathematized by all Entente peoples as the loathsome creation of a frenzied people. But shortly afterward the Entente governments themselves, their turn having come, wrought what Russians of all parties regard as a political patchwork of variegated injustice more odious far, because its authors claimed to be considered as the devoted friends of their victims and the champions of right. Whereas the Brest-Litovsk Treaty provided for a federative Slav state, with provincial diets and a federal parliament, the system substituted by the Allies consisted in carving up Russia into an ever-increasing number of separate states, some of which cannot live by themselves, in debarring the inhabitants from a voice in the matter, in creating a permanent agency for foreign intervention, and ignoring Russia's right to reparation from the common enemy. The Russians were not asked even informally to say what they thought or felt about what was being done. This province and that were successively lopped off in a lordly way by statesmen who aimed at being classed as impartial dispensers of justice and sowers of the seeds of peace, but were unacquainted with the conditions and eschewed investigation. Here, at all events, the usual symptoms of hesitancy and procrastination were absent. Swift resolve and thoroughness marked the disintegrating action by which they unwittingly prepared the battlefields of the future.

Nobody acquainted with Russian psychology imagines that the feelings of a high-souled people can be transformed by gifts of food, money, or munitions made to some of their fellow-countrymen. How little likely Russians are to barter ideal boons for material advantages may be gathered from an incident worth noting that occurred in the months of April and May, when the fall of the capital into the hands of the anti-Bolshevists was confidently expected.

At that time, as it chanced, the one thing necessary for their success against Bolshevism was the capture of Petrograd. If that city, which, despite its cosmopolitan character, still retained its importance as the center of political Russia, could be wrested from the tenacious grasp of Lenin and Trotzky, the fall of the anarchist dictators was, people held, a foregone conclusion. The friends of Kolchak accordingly pressed every lever to set the machinery in motion for the march against Peter's city. And as, of all helpers, the Finns and Esthonians were admittedly the most efficacious, conversations were begun with their leaders. They were ready to drive a bargain, but it must be a hard and lucrative one. They would march on Petrograd for a price. The principal condition which they laid down was the express and definite recognition of their complete independence within frontiers which it would be unfruitful here to discuss. The Kolchak government was ready to treat with the Finnish Cabinet, as the _de facto_ government, and to recognize Finland's present status for what it is in international law; but as they could not give what they did not possess, their recognition must, they explained, be like their own authority, provisional. A similar reply was made to the Esthonians; to this those peoples demurred. The Russians stood firm and the negotiations fell through. It is to be supposed that when they have recovered their former status they will prove more amenable to the blandishments of the Allies than they were to the powerful bribe dangled before their eyes by the Esthonians and the Finns?

But if the improvised arrangements entailing dismemberment which the Great Powers imposed on Russia during her cataleptic trance are revised, as they may be, whenever she recovers consciousness and strength, what course will events then follow? If she seeks to regather under her wing some of the peoples whose complete independence the League of Nations was so eager to guarantee, will that body respond to the appeal of these and fly to their assistance? Russia, who has not been consulted, will not be as bound by the canons of the League, and one need not be a prophet to foretell the reluctance of Western armies to wage another war in order to prevent territories, of which some of the plenipotentiaries may have heard as little as of Teschen, becoming again integral parts of the Slav state. Europe may then see its political axis once more shifted and its outlook obscured. Thus the system of equilibrium, which was theoretically abolished by the Fourteen Points, may be re-established by the hundred and one economico-political changes which Russia's recovery will contribute to bring about.

A decade is but a twinkling in the history of a nation. Within a few years Russia may once more be united. The army that will have achieved this feat will constitute a formidable weapon in the hands of the state that wields it. As everything, even military strength, is relative, and as the armies of the rest of Europe will not be impatient to fight in the East, and will therefore count for considerably less than their numbers, there will be no real danger of an invasion. Russia is a country easy to get into, but hard to get out of, and military success against its armies there would in verity be a victory without glory, annexation, indemnities, or other appreciable gains.

It is hard to believe that the distinguished statesmen of the Conference took these eventualities fully into account before attempting to reshape amorphous Russia after their own vague ideal. But whether we assess their work by the standards of political science or of international ethics, or explain it as a series of well-meant expedients begotten by the practical logic of momentary convenience, we must confess that its gifted authors lacked a direct eye for the wayward tides of national and international movements; were, in fact, smitten by political blindness, and did the best they could in these distressing circumstances.

FOOTNOTES:

[260] From whatever angle this Russian business is viewed, the policy of the Allies, if it can be dignified with that name, seems to be a compound of weakness, ineptitude, and shilly-shally."--Cf. _The Westminster Gazette_, July 5, 1919.

[261] Cf. _Journal des Débats_, August 13, 1919. Article by M. Auguste Gauvain.

[262] There can be no doubt that the Bolshevist government under Lunatcharsky has made a point of furthering the arts, sciences, and elementary instruction. All reports from foreign travelers and from eminent Russians--one of these my university fellow-student, now perpetual secretary of the Academy--agree about this silver lining to a dark cloud.

[263] This latter fact was doubtless known to the British government, which decided as early as March to recall the British troops from northern Russia.

[264] I published the facts in _The Daily Telegraph_, April 21, and _The Public Ledger_ of Philadelphia, April 10, 1919.

[265] Colonel House is said to have dissociated himself from the President on this occasion.

[266] It was sent at the end of October, 1918, and to my knowledge was not published in full.

[267] Omsk, Ekaterinodar, Archangel, and the Crimea. The last-named disappeared soon afterward.

[268] See Chapter IV "Censorship and Secrecy," p. 132.

[269] Pertinax in _L'Echo de Paris_, July 5, 1919.

[270] This admission was made to a distinguished member of the Diplomatic Corps.

[271] In _The Daily Telegraph_, June 19, 1919, and in _The Public Ledger_ of Philadelphia.

[272] In July M. Pichon told the Esthonian delegates that France recognized the independence of their country in principle. But this declaration was not taken seriously, either by the Russians or by the French.

XI

BOLSHEVISM

What is Bolshevism? A generic term that stands for a number of things which have little in common. It varies with the countries where it appears. In Russia it is the despotism of an organized and unscrupulous group of men in a disorganized community. It might also be termed the frenzy of a few epileptics running amuck among a multitude of paralytics. It is not so much a political doctrine or a socialist theory as a psychic disease of a section of the community which cannot be cured without leaving permanent traces and perhaps modifying certain organic functions of the society affected. For some students at a distance who make abstraction from its methods--as a critic appreciating the performance of "Hamlet" might make abstraction from the part of the Prince of Denmark--it is a modification of the theory of Karl Marx, the newest contribution to latter-day social science. In Russia, at any rate, the general condition of society from which it sprang was characterized not by the advance of social science, but by a psychic disorder the germs of which, after a century of incubation, were brought to the final phase of development by the war. In its origins it is a pathological phenomenon.

Four and a half years of an unprecedented campaign which drained to exhaustion the financial and economic resources of the European belligerents upset the psychical equilibrium of large sections of their populations. Goaded by hunger and disease to lawless action, and no longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness. Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made them insensible to the less immediate restraints of a religious character. These phenomena are not unusual concomitants of protracted wars. History records numerous examples of the homecoming soldiery turning the weapons destined for the foreign foe against political parties or social classes in their own country. In other European communities for some time previously a tendency toward root-reaching and violent change was perceptible, but as the state retained its hold on the army it remained a tendency. In the case of Russia--the country where the state, more than ordinarily artificial and ill-balanced, was correspondingly weak--Fate had interpolated a blood-stained page of red and white terror in the years 1906-08. Although fitful, unorganized, and abortive, that wild splutter was one of the foretokens of the impending cataclysm, and was recognized as such by the writer of these pages. During the foregoing quarter of a century he had watched with interest the sowing of the dragon's teeth from which was one day to spring up a race of armed and frenzied men. Few observers, however, even in the Tsardom, gaged the strength or foresaw the effects of the anarchist propaganda which was being carried on suasively and perseveringly, oftentimes unwittingly, in the nursery, the school, the church, the university, and with eminent success in the army and the navy. Hence the widespread error that the Russian revolution was preceded by no such era of preparation as that of the encylopedists in France.

Recently, however, publicists have gone to the other extreme and asserted that Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and a host of other Russian writers were apostles of the tenets which have since received the name of Bolshevism, and that it was they who prepared the Russian upheaval just as it was the authors of the "Encyclopedia" who prepared the French Revolution. In this sweeping form the statement is misleading. Russian literature during the reigns of the last three Tsars--with few exceptions, like the writings of Leskoff--was unquestionably a vehicle for the spread of revolutionary ideas. But it would be a gross exaggeration to assert that the end deliberately pursued was that form of anarchy which is known to-day as Bolshevism, or, indeed, genuine anarchy in any form. Tolstoy and Gorky may be counted among the forerunners of Bolshevism, but Dostoyevsky, whom I was privileged to know, was one of its keenest antagonists. Nor was it only anarchism that he combated. Like Leskoff, he was an inveterate enemy of political radicalism, and we university students bore him a grudge in consequence. In his masterly delineation[273] of a group of "reformers," in particular of Verkhovensky--whom psychic tendency, intellectual anarchy, and political crime bring under the category of Bolshevists--he foreshadowed the logical conclusion, and likewise the political consummation, of the corrosive doctrines which in those days were associated with the name of Bakunin. In the year 1905-06, when the upshot of the conflict between Tsarism and the revolution was still doubtful, Count Witte and I often admired the marvelous intuition of the great novelist, whose gallery of portraits in the "Devils" seemed to have become suddenly endowed with life, and to be conspiring, shooting, and bomb-throwing in the streets of Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa, and Tiflis. The seeds of social revolution sown by the novelists, essayists, and professional guides of the nation were forced by the wars of 1904 and 1914 into rapid germination.

As far back as the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs all the poison of Europe and then gives it off in greater quantity and deadlier intensity. When we admit Russia, we admit the cholera, dissolution, death. That is the meaning of Russian propaganda. Yesterday she said to us, 'I am Christianity.' To-morrow she will say, 'I am socialism.' It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still reach and slay.

"It might commove Europe and bespatter it with blood, but that would not hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the abysmal ooze of definite dissolution."

Russia, then, led by domiciled aliens without a fatherland, may be truly said to have been wending steadily toward the revolutionary vortex long before the outbreak of hostilities. Her progress was continuous and perceptible. As far back as the year 1906 the late Count Witte and myself made a guess at the time-distance which the nation still had to traverse, assuming the rate of progress to be constant, before reaching the abyss. This, however, was mere guesswork, which one of the many possibilities--and in especial change in the speed-rate--might belie. In effect, events moved somewhat more quickly than we anticipated, and it was the World War and its appalling concomitants that precipitated the catastrophe.

As circumstances willed it, certain layers of the people of central Europe were also possessed by the revolutionary spirit at the close of the World War. In their case hunger, hardship, disease, and moral shock were the avenues along which it moved and reached them. This coincidence was fraught with results more impressive than serious. The governments of both these great peoples had long been the mainstays of monarchic tradition, military discipline, and the principle of authority. The Teutons, steadily pursuing an ideal which lay at the opposite pole to anarchy, had risked every worldly and well-nigh every spiritual possession to realize it. It was the hegemony of the world. This aspiration transfigured, possessed, fanaticized them. Teutondom became to them what Islam is to Mohammedans of every race, even when they shake off religion. They eschewed no means, however iniquitous, that seemed to lead to the goal. They ceased to be human in order to force Europe to become German. Offering up the elementary principles of morality on the altar of patriotism, they staked their all upon the single venture of the war. It was as the throw of a gambler playing for his soul with the Evil One. Yet the faith of these materialists waxed heroic withal, like their self-sacrifice. And in the fiery ardor of their enthusiasm, hard concrete facts were dissolved and set floating as illusions in the ambient mist. Their wishes became thoughts and their fears were dispelled as fancies. They beheld only what they yearned for, and when at last they dropped from the dizzy height of their castles in cloudland their whole world, era, and ideal was shattered. Unavailing remorse, impotent rage, spiritual and intense physical exhaustion completed their demoralization. The more harried and reckless among them became frenzied. Turning first against their rulers, then against one another, they finally started upon a work of wanton destruction relieved by no creative idea. It was at this time-point that they endeavored to join hands with their tumultuous Eastern neighbors, and that the one word "Bolshevism" connoted the revolutionary wave that swept over some of the Slav and German lands. But only for a moment. One may safely assert, as a general proposition, that the same undertaking, if the Germans and the Russians set their hands to it, becomes forthwith two separate enterprises, so different are the conceptions and methods of these two peoples. Bolshevism was almost emptied of its contents by the Germans, and little left of it but the empty shell.

Comparisons between the orgasms of collective madness which accompanied the Russian welter, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the other, are unfruitful and often misleading. It is true that at the outset those spasms of delirium were in both cases violent reactions against abuses grown well-nigh unbearable. It is also a fact that the revolutionists derived their preterhuman force from historic events which had either denuded those abuses of their secular protection or inspired their victims with wonder-working faith in their power to sweep them away. But after this initial stage the likeness vanishes. The French Revolution, which extinguished feudalism as a system and the nobility as a privileged class, speedily ceased to be a mere dissolvent. In its latter phases it assumed a constructive character. Incidentally it created much that was helpful in substance if not beautiful in form, and from the beginning it adopted a positive doctrine as old as Christianity, but new in its application to the political sphere. Thus, although it uprooted quantities of wheat together with the tares, its general effect was to prepare the ground for a new harvest. It had a distinctly social purpose, which it partially realized. Nor should it be forgotten that in the psychological sphere it kindled a transient outburst of quasi-religious enthusiasm among its partizans, imbued them with apostolic zeal, inspired them with a marvelous spirit of self-abnegation, and nerved their arms to far-resonant exploits. And the forces which the revolution thus set free changed many of the forms of the European world, but without reshaping it after the image of the ideal.

Has the withering blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every region over which it swept is blocked with heaps of unsightly ruins, It has depreciated all moral values. It passed like a tornado, spending its energies in demolition. Of construction hardly a trace has been discerned, even by indulgent explorers.[275] One might liken it to a so-called possession by the spirit of evil, wont of yore to use the human organs as his own for words of folly and deeds of iniquity. Bolshevism has operated uniformly as a quick solvent of the social organism. Doubtless European society in 1917 sorely needed purging by drastic means, but only a fanatic would say that it deserved annihilation.

It has been variously affirmed that the political leaven of these destructive ferments in eastern and central Europe was wholesome. Slavs and Germans, it is argued, stung by the bankruptcy of their political systems, resolved to alter them on the lines of universal suffrage and its corollaries, but were carried farther than they meant to go. This mild judgment is based on a very partial survey of the phenomena. The improvement in question was the work, not of the Bolshevists, but of their adversaries, the moderate reformers. And the political strivings of these had no organic nexus with the doctrine which emanated from the nethermost depths in which vengeful pariahs, outlaws, and benighted nihilists were floundering before suffocating in the ooze of anarchism. Neither can one discern any degree of kinship between Spartacists like Eichhorn or Lenin and moderate reformers as represented, say, by Theodor Wolff and Boris Savinkoff. The two pairs are sundered from each other by the distance that separates the social and the anti-social instinct. Those are vulgar iconoclasts, these are would-be world-builders. That the Russian, or, indeed, the German constitutional reformers should have hugged the delusion that while thrones were being hurled to the ground, and an epoch was passing away in violent convulsions, a few alterations in the electoral law would restore order and bring back normal conditions to the agonizing nations, is an instructive illustration of the blurred vision which characterizes contemporary statesmen. The Anglo-Saxon delegates at the Conference were under a similar delusion when they undertook to regenerate the world by a series of merely political changes.