Chapter 1

Produced by David Starner, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

By Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup, Harper Frank,And Alfred Golder

THE JUGO-SLAV MOVEMENT

By Robert Joseph Kerner

PREFACE

Whatever may be its final outcome the Russian Revolution of 1917 bids fair to remain one of the great events of modern history. Its consequences are still immeasurable and today to many they appear as fraught with menace as with hope. They have within less than a year led a mighty empire to the brink of dissolution and no man can foretell where and how the process will end for worse or for better. The Russian Revolution saved the Central Powers at the moment when their prospect looked darkest, but on the other hand it facilitated the entrance of the United States into the war as one for liberty and democracy. Time has yet to show whether the loss or the gain has been the greater for the Allied cause and for mankind. It will be paid for at a heavy price but our hope cannot easily be shaken that sooner or later an event so full of promise for the misruled millions of the autocratic empire of the Tsar will mark a step forward, not backward, in the progress of the world. The whole story of the sudden out-break in Petrograd which in little more than a day swept away the fabric of imperial government will not soon be told, if ever. All real information on the subject is timely and valuable. We need such studies as those contained in the present volume, in order that we may understand what has happened, and why it has happened.

The rise of the modern Jugo-Slav movement offers us a very different picture. The subject and even the name are new to most people, the scale is much smaller; the events have been less dramatic. But the unconquerable resistance which a small disjointed nationality has offered throughout the ages to ill fortune, oppression, and to attempts to obliterate it entirely arouses our admiration. The movement too was intimately connected with the outbreak of the present world war which cannot be understood without taking it into account. It still represents only an ardent hope for the future but when the day of peace and justice comes no permanent allotment can be made of the lands east of the Adriatic that shall not give it at least some satisfaction.

ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE.

MARCH 18, 1918. THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS IN THE LIBERATING MOVEMENT IN RUSSIA

By Alexander Petrunkevitch

In an interview dated November 21, and published in the _New York Times_ in a special cable from Petrograd, Leon Trotzky in defending the attitude of the people toward the Bolsheviki _coup d'etat_ is reported to have said substantially the following: "All the bourgeoisie is against us. The greater part of the intellectuals is against us or hesitating, awaiting a final outcome. The working class is wholly with us. The army is with us. The peasants, with the exception of exploiters, are with us. The Workmen's and Soldiers' government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants against the capitalists and landowners."

On the other hand my father, Ivan Petrunkevitch, floorleader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the first Duma and since that time owner and publisher of the Petrograd daily _Rech_ writes in a private letter dated June 12: "... the present real government, i. e., the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies, whose leaders are neither soldiers nor workmen, but intellectuals, etc." Nothing has happened during the months intervening between the letter and the interview to change the composition of the Council appreciably. It is true that Kerensky who was vice-president of the Council has been meanwhile deposed; that Tshcheidze had to relinquish the presidency in the Council to Trotzky long before Kerensky's downfall; but the leaders of the Council still are intellectuals, are well educated men, some of them well known writers on political and economic questions and withal very different from the masses which they lead and which they purport to represent. In justice to those who had to give way to the Lenine-Trotzky crowd of supporters, I wish to state emphatically that I do not want to put them on the same plane. Tseretelli, Plekhanov, Tshcheidze, and their co-workers are men of great courage, high ideals, and personal integrity. On the other hand their successors in power are men of a totally different type. The integrity of many of their number has been openly questioned, the accusations, published & broadcast, remained unanswered, and no suit for libel was brought by the men thus accused. Lenine was put under suspicion of having accepted German help and of having planned with Germany's agents the disorganization of the Russian army. It has been even charged on apparently good evidence that the leaflets distributed at the front were printed with German money. Trotzky was accused by Miliukov in the _Rech_ (June 7) of having received $10,000 from German-Americans for the purpose of organizing the attack on Kerensky's government. Ganetsky was forced to leave Denmark by an order of the Danish government, having been convicted of dishonest dealings in a Danish court. Zinoviev is accused of forgery. Others are also under suspicion which has been only increased by the arrest and imprisonment of Burtzev who is known for his untiring efforts to hunt down traitors to the cause of the Russian Revolution and who had important evidence in his possession. It is also a remarkable fact that the majority of the present leaders are known broadly only under assumed names. Lenine's true name is Uljanov, Trotzky's--Bronstein, Zinoviev's--Apfelbaum, Sukhanov's--Gimmer, Kamenev's--Rosenfeld, Steklov's--Nakhamkis, and a number of others whose identity is not even always known. Trotzky's assertion that the Workmen's and Soldiers' Government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants is therefore nothing but a perversion of facts.

There is, however, nothing extraordinary in the fact itself that intellectuals are the real leaders of all Russian parties. Better education and wider knowledge of the affairs of the world have always appealed to the dark masses who realize only dimly their own desires and grasp at any concrete formulation of reforms which contains a tangible promise or seems to express those desires. At the same time they often put their own meaning into the words of their leaders, which is true even of factory workers in the larger cities. As for the peasants, representing about 90 per cent of the entire population, they are still very poorly educated, questions of national import remain outside their horizon, and even their language is not the language of the educated Russian, inasmuch as it lacks the rich vocabulary of modern life and is devoid of the very conceptions to which this vast treasury of words applies. Their mind, great as it is in its potentialities, still moves in the furrows of familiar ideas abhorring things too much at variance with inherited traditions or actual experience. Yet in the turmoil of revolutionary activity the peasants are going to have their say and may become the decisive factor, because they are voters and are casting their votes for those leaders whose words they believe to contain the greatest promise and the least menace of a general disruption of their accustomed mode of life.

We are thus brought back, for the present at least, to the necessity of recognizing that even the state of anarchy under which Russia is laboring, even the rule of the renowned proletariat so much trumpeted about by Lenine and Trotzky, is in reality the work of intellectuals, an answer of the masses to the call of their leaders, a groping for principles beyond their perception.

It suffices a very casual examination of the programs and resolutions of various political parties to see the truth of this statement. They are expressive of the opinions of the leaders, not of the masses; are couched in the language of the educated Russian, not in that of the workman or peasant and, except for the concluding slogans like "Peace, Bread, and Land," are alien to the very spirit of the masses. In this respect all parties are confronted with the same difficulty since all strive to get the support of the masses, yet have to express principles evolved through careful and extensive study of national, political, and economic problems, strange to the uneducated mind. For the same reason the methods of surmounting the difficulty differ in many respects and are characteristic of each party.

The Conservative Intellectuals of Russia early realized the necessity of meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing to him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an all-suffering motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a powerful appeal upon the imagination, for a long time superseding and forcing into the background the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled longing for more land. The ideology of a perfect monarchy is so simple and its shortcomings so easily attributable to dishonesty of officials, that it answered the peasant's thoughts as long as he was not able to see the folly of distinguishing between the system and its realization, but separated in his mind the image of his loving monarch from the cruel reality of everyday life as he still distinguishes between the faith and the priest. The great mistake of all conservatives is that they seek to bring about a state of perfect justice by improving only the quality of the ruling body without changing the conditions of life of the ruled mass. Yet even so the Conservatives had quite a following among the peasants up to the time of the revolution of 1917 and in a way may still have a future before them.

The Octoberists find no support in the masses and do not make any serious attempt to gain it. They frankly acknowledged themselves as the party of industry and trade, having no wider interests at heart than the maintenance of order and law throughout the country. Their leaders were forced into a revolutionary attitude only at the time when there was danger of a universal collapse of Russia if the tsar's government persisted, and they may be forced to join in a counter-revolution, if their interests are again endangered. Their ideology is that of a capitalistic class and their power depends entirely on the future development of industry and trade in Russia. For the present they are nowhere. Unable to find a new basis for their activity in place of class interest, they lack unity of purpose and are deserted by their own former supporters among their employees. Trade and industry are disorganized and the party may never be resurrected.

The Constitutional Democrats are in this respect better off. They find their support chiefly among more or less educated people of various pursuits: lawyers, bankers, brokers, journalists, teachers, artists, scientists, etc. Their program embraces the interests of all classes and demands political, judicial, economic, industrial and agrarian legislation of a very radical and extensive kind. Their horizon of vision includes the sufferings and aspirations of the often incongruous elements of the vast whole, but their ideology is still based on the long outworn idealistic capitalism and for this reason alone does not and cannot appeal to not-owning classes. Their agrarian program is in this respect the most striking example. It is worked out in great detail and is aimed at a betterment of the condition of peasants without deep injury to the present landowners. It recognizes the right of the peasant to more land, it provides for future state ownership of land to prevent it from falling into wrong hands, but does not condemn the principle of landownership, nor the injustice of present ownership, and for that reason elaborates a method of compensation for compulsorily alienated land through universal taxation.

To avoid excessive burden to the impoverished peasant the compensation is to be in the shape of bonds representing the average value of the land in each particular case, only the interest on these bonds to be paid yearly from universal taxes--a topsy-turvy mortgage system, as it were, in which the state becomes the proprietor and mortgagor of the land, while its present owners are turned into forced mortgagees. Under this system the peasants will get all land available, but 90 per cent will have to pay for what is owned by a small fraction of even the remaining 10 per cent of the entire population. The proposed scheme proved to be too radical for the tsar's government in 1906 and caused the downfall of the first Duma. It provoked at the time bitter comment in Germany also, where the conservative and national-liberal press accused the Russian Constitutional Democratic party of putting forward impossible demands and of attacking the very principle of property ownership. Yet the principle underlying the proposed reform is unquestionably capitalistic and is the chief cause of the hatred and contempt which the party enjoys on the part of Social-Democrats.

In the beginning of the sixties the conservative land committee appointed by Alexander II, composed of hereditary landowners, avowed enemies of any economic liberation of peasants, out of fear that private ownership of land might enrich the peasants and make them dangerous to the established order, devised a scheme of communal ownership of land and unconsciously taught the peasants the principles of socialism. In 1907 Constitutional Democrats opposed the bill of the Government for the dissolution of land communities and substitution of private for communal land ownership at the request of individual peasants. The objection raised was on the ground that peasants suddenly possessed of a chance to get ready money would sell their land to a few exploiters and being unable to put it to good use would rapidly become paupers. The best men in the Duma opposed Stolypin's bill, and the law was introduced by stealth and promulgated during a forced recess of the Duma. Contrary to expectation the law neither led to the results desired by the Government, nor to those feared by Constitutional Democrats. It remained a dead letter. Few members of peasant communities applied for separation. The Government tried to boost its scheme by building at its own expense model, fake peasant homes. The peasants had already their own idea as to remedies in regard to land shortage and did not want any substitute.

The difficulty of making the peasant respect the principle of private ownership of land is due to many causes. The most liberal minded landowners were usually those who spent their winters in various occupations in large cities and used their estates as summer homes and a partial source of income. The work of supervision was only too often intrusted to utterly unscrupulous and uneducated managers belonging to the peasant class, while the neighboring peasants were employed as day laborers in the field and garden. This kind of labor was already available, because peasants were unable to derive sufficient income from their own land to pay the heavy taxes and to support their families. Scarcely any landowners understood anything of agriculture and few paid any attention to it. I know splendid estates which brought in miserable incomes, not normal even under the antiquated system of four year crop rotation and quite absurd if measured by standards of modern American farming, yet sufficient to place at the disposal of the owners a splendid mansion in Moscow or Petrograd and a no less splendid summer home on their estate. There, during the hot summer days, the owners were enjoying their comfort in idleness and talking of reforms necessary for the benefit of the peasants, while peasant women were cutting the wheat for them with sickles, stooping and sweating under the scorching rays of the sun. The superintendents of those estates enriched themselves at the expense of the blind or careless and carefree owners under the very eyes of the peasants who hated the superintendents, pitied or despised the liberal owners, as the case might be, and gloomily compared their own poverty and labor with the ease and wealth of their employers.

The more thrifty and less liberal owners, who remained the greater part of the year on their estates, were perhaps more respected but still less liked. Any attempt at careful management of the estate was invariably considered to be a sign of stinginess or of hardheartedness. The idea of property is not clearly defined in the mind of the average peasant who considers plants that are not planted but grow wild to be a gift of God. In disputes involving such cases the line between rightful possession and theft is difficult to draw, and men who took the controversy to court were invariably hated. A glaring example of this kind was an otherwise liberal minded landowner, a well known professor of sociology, who spent three-quarters of a year in lecturing at a foreign university of which he was a member and who was finally murdered on his own estate.

The home life of even liberal intellectuals was another barrier between them and the masses. Not only was coarse food considered to be good enough for domestics, but they seldom, if ever, had a decent corner for themselves in the house and their miserable wages were out of all proportion with the long hours of service required. Many families had guests almost daily, the company sitting around a samovar, discussing and conversing until one or two in the morning, while the sleepy domestics were stealing a nap in the anteroom, ready to appear at the call of the mistress. The table had to be cleared after the guests and the family retired for the night and the breakfast had to be prepared, boots polished, stoves heated, rooms cleaned in the early morning. For the master might rest until ten or eleven, but the children have to be at school by eight and the servants must be ready to serve them. And though many families kept professional servants, the country homes depended almost entirely in winter as well as in summer on local help.

Attempts to improve the condition of peasants were numerous and in some respects successful, but found an obstacle on the one hand in the attitude of the Government and on the other in the conservatism and suspicion of the peasants themselves. Fire insurance and cooperative enterprises helped to a certain degree, but an almost complete absence of expert agriculturists in the ranks of the landowners prevented them from demonstrating on their own estates the value of applied knowledge as well as from teaching the peasants how to increase the productivity of the land through intensive farming. Thus it came to pass that the vast majority of landowners, both conservative and liberal, remained strangers to the people among whom they lived, whose labor they employed, and for whose welfare many were in earnest concerned. The Constitutional Democratic party is strong in the cities. In the country it has no followers and in the sweeping incendiary fires of 1905-06 estates were burned which belonged in several cases to men who spent their life in fighting for freedom against the tsar's government.

No less unfortunate is the party in its relation to the class of factory workers. That part of its program which relates to the labor question embraces a number of important reforms meeting almost all demands of the working class. The barrier between them is the capitalistic principle. A perusal of the lists of Constitutional Democrats who have subscribed large sums for the Russian liberty loan will show why workmen speak of them as capitalists even though the party has accepted the principle of progressive income taxation. There is a feeling of intense hatred toward all Constitutional Democrats on the part of all workmen.