Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

by Arthur Ransome

  This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is also particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It affords a real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and such dictatorship is necessary, since no one could expect from members of the class that is being ousted from its place of domination wholehearted assistance in its own undoing. Those democrats in other countries and – in Russia – who do not understand what is happening under their eyes, exclaim at the unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They forget, or have never realised, that the object of the social revolution is to put an end to the existence of the bourgeois or exploiting class, not merely to make it powerless. If exploitation is destroyed then there can be no class of exploiters, and the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from government is merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful the transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the more honourable position of equality with his fellow workers. Once the conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation have been destroyed, the old divisions of the class struggle will automatically have disappeared.

  By the nature of things it has so happened that practically all the foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged to the privileged classes in their respective countries, and have been accustomed to associate with the privileged classes in Russia. They have consequently found it difficult to escape from their class in judging the story happening before their eyes. Those working men sent from the Allied countries, less with the idea of studying the revolution, but of telling it to do what the Allies wanted, have also been specially chosen, and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open mind they should have. Socialists especially, who had long dreamed of revolution, found it particularly difficult to recognise in this cloudy, tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened for them into something more docile, less self willed. Nothing has been more remarkable or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who by their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest from the revolutionary movement.

  I do not propose to recapitulate the whole programme of the Soviet government, nor to spend minutes, when I have so few, in discussing in detail their efforts towards an equitable land settlement, their extraordinarily interesting work in building up, under the stress of famine and war, an economic industrial organisation which shall facilitate the eventual socialisation of Russia. That is material for many letters, and here I have not time for one. I therefore take the two events which have been most misused in blackening the Soviet government to those who should have been its friends. These were the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, and the negotiations which ended, temporarily at least, in a separate peace between Russia and the Central Empires. I will take these two events, and try to show what happened in each case, and why the reproaches flung at the Soviets on account of them were due either to misunderstanding or to malice.

  The Constituent Assembly

  I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was one of the events that best served the people who were anxious to persuade public opinion that the Soviet government was a government of usurpation, holding its own by force, and not representing the will of the people. I think that, without any special pleading, it will be possible to bring together facts which put an entirely different light on that event. The mere fact that the parties opposed to the Bolsheviks had spent eight months murdering the Constituent Assembly, putting it off day by day in hopes that the country would change, and that the revolution would come crawling home asking for a quiet life, leaving the gentlemen to do the work of the government, should be set against the short speech of the sailor who told the Assembly that it had talked enough, that its guards were tired, and that really it was time to go to bed. It should be remembered that the Constituent Assembly was for neither party an end in itself. For each party it represented a political instrument, not a political aim. It was a tool, not a task. It was thrown away when further use of it would have damaged the purpose for which it was invented.

  Look back, for a moment, on its history. The very idea of a Constituent Assembly was first put forward by the Soviet, by the very body which, in the end, opposed its realisation. The Soviet, in those exhilarating days of March 1917, declared that without such an Assembly the future of Russia could not be decided. The effect of this declaration was to make impossible Miliukov’s plan of choking the revolution at birth. Miliukov, in the first days of the revolution tried by means of quick jugglery with abdications, a regency, and a belated constitution, to profit by the elemental uprising of the masses to secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of the Tsar’s bureaucracy, into the hands of the bourgeoisie. For him, the revolution was to be a tramcar which would stop conveniently at the point where the Cadet Party used to alight. The idea of the Constituent Assembly was a like a big label on that tramcar showing that it had a further destination. It became clear at once that that car would not stop at the point that Miliukov had chosen. The next hope of the bourgeoisie was to keep it moving to prevent it stopping anywhere else until the passengers should be so tired of moving that they would be glad to stop anywhere and would be amenable and peaceable on alighting.

  The bourgeois parties deliberately postponed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, since it was clear that, were it to meet at once, its members would be practically identical with those of the Soviet, so that the voice of the bourgeoisie would be unheard in the roar of the waking masses. The aim of the bourgeoisie was: (1) to postpone the elections until the electors had wearied of the Soviets, and (2) to postpone such reforms as most concerned the destruction of their own privileges (such as the land reforms) until they could summon a Constituent Assembly whose character would be agreeable to themselves. While the bourgeoisie held this attitude it was natural that the Soviets, and most of all the left party in the Soviets, should use the Constituent Assembly as a means of showing up the duplicity of their bourgeois opponents.

  Gradually circumstances changed. The bourgeoisie lost hope and transferred their allegiance to the moderate majority in the Soviets, because they began to realise that the marked increase of Bolshevism heralded something from their point of view even worse than the Constituent Assembly as it would have been in April or May. The extremely flexible representation of the Soviets showed that the masses were coming nearer and nearer to the position of the Bolsheviks, or rather to a readiness to support the Bolshevik leaders in view of the manifest failure of the coalition government to get peace, or indeed anything else that the masses desired. The Constituent Assembly now became the last hope of the original moderate members of the Soviet Executive, who felt the ground of real support in the active political masses slipping from beneath their feet. At this point came the October Revolution, when the coalition, already a ghost, and a discredited ghost, was laid in its grave. Immense Bolshevik majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and then in the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets, proved that the mass of active political opinion in the country fully approved of the step that had been taken.

  Then followed the elections to the Constituent Assembly (organised and canvassed before the October Revolution) in which there was a majority against the Bolsheviks. The explanation of this is perfectly simple. It lies in the fact that a revolution is a very uncomfortable thing for everybody who takes part in it, and that great numbers of people during the preceding eight months had come to look forward to the Constituent Assembly much as children look forward to the word FINIS at the end of a difficult lesson-book. The Constituent Assembly meant for these people an end to political debate, an end even to political life, an end anyhow to revolution.

  In every country it is only a small minority that really concerns itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big unconscious mass of voting material, which does not concern itself with active politics, and asks nothing from its government except to be let a
lone. This indifferent mass, which took very little part in the living politics of the Soviets, was ready to vote for the Constituent Assembly in a sort of dim belief that those elections would mean a return to a quiet life, and should therefore be encouraged. It voted much as rich men give alms to a charity. It voted in much the spirit of the rich man who is willing to give alms to a deserving charity for which he would be most unwilling to do any real work. It knew vaguely that the bourgeoisie were fairly bad, and it had also heard that the Bolsheviks were terrible people. It therefore put its vote on the side of those people against whom it had heard nothing in particular. And the result was that the live part of the nation was faced – almost at the moment of coming to their own – with a legacy in the form of an Assembly, the majority in which was made up of the very men whom they had just overthrown. The question was a plain one. Should the conscious workers of the country submit to the dead weight of the unconscious, even if that dead weight was artfully fashioned by their enemies into the form of the very tool with which they had themselves been successfully working? The question was put at a moment of extreme difficulty, when acceptance of the Constituent Assembly would have relieved the Bolsheviks (at the New Year) of tremendous responsibility. It would have been an easy way out, for cowards. But the Bolsheviks were not afraid of responsibility, were not looking for easy ways out, were confident that the whole of the active, conscious population was behind them, and swept the Assembly aside. Not anywhere in Russia did the indifferent mass stir in protest. The Assembly died, like the Tsardom, and the coalition before it. Not any one of the three showed in the manner of its dying that it retained any right to live.

  Peace negotiations

  The day after the October Revolution Lenin proposed, and the Assembly carried, the declaration on peace, with its promise to do away with the secret diplomacy that had kept Russia in the war beyond her strength, and allowed small groups to gamble with the lives of nations. On that day, October 26, the whole world was told that the new Russian government was ready to conclude peace itself, and invited all the fighting countries to put an end to the war. Without annexation (that is, without the seizure of other people’s land and without the forced incorporation of other nationalities), and without indemnity. The declaration was sent out by radio on November 7. Some goverments prevented its publication, others sought to disguise its true character and to give it the appearance of an offer of separate peace. The Allies replied to it with a threat, conveyed to the Russian Commander-in-Chief Dukhonin, that further steps towards peace would have serious consequences. It should of course be remembered that the Allies were in a position of peculiar difficulty. Practically all the Russians who were able to give direct information to members of the Allied goverments belonged to the classes that had persistently fed themselves and others with lies as to the character of the Bolsheviks. They believed that the Soviets could hold authority only for a few days and they persuaded Allied goverments to share that belief.

  The next step of the Sovietswas and agreement made across the front itself, stopping all military operations between the Black Sea and the Baltic. This was followed by yet another invitation to the Allies to join Russia in peace negotiations. Meanwhile the German government, with one eye on the military party and the other on the feeling of German labour, which at that time was unrestful and excited by the Russian Revolution, was hesitating over its answer. I shall not here attempt any detailed history of what followed. My only point is that the Soviet government cannot be accoused of having sought and obtained a separate peace. The first aim of the Bolsheviks was, as it always will be, a universal social revolution. They hoped to illustrate to the workers of the world the possibility of honourable peace, and nothing would have pleased them better than to find that such a peace rejected by all goverments alike, so that the workers, convinced of its possibility, should rise and overthrow them. That was their general aim. They, least of all goverments in the world, were interested in a German victory. Their proposal was for a general peace, for the peace which Russia, in agony, had been awaiting for a year.

  What followed? Step by step, they published every detail of their negotiations over the armistice and every word of the German replies. Then came the first German answer as to the conditions of peace, in which Germany and her allies expressed themselves ready to make the Russian formula the basis of negotiation. The Bolsheviks believed that if the Allies had even at that late hour joined them, so that in withdrawing from that position the Germans would have been facing a continuance of the war as a whole instead of merely a failure to obtain peace with the weakest of the Allies, peace on the Russian formula would have been attainable. The Allies left them, unrecognised, ignored, to continue their struggle singlehanded. The Germans now took a bolder line, and the hand outstretched in spurious friendship became a grasping claw. The first Russian delegation came home to confer with the Soviet government at to what was to be done in this new situation; the peace they had promised their exhausted army, their tortured working classes, seemed to be fading like a mirage. Trotsky, at the head of a reinforced delegation, went to Brest with one of the most daring plans with which any David has sought to destroy his Goliath.

  The absence of the Allies had deprived him of the possibility of exhibiting to the working classes of the world the inability of their present goverments to conclude a peace in which there should be neither conqueror nor conquered. He now attempted to bring about a revolution in Germany, or to obtain such a peace for Russia by making the German government itself illustrate in their negotiations with him their utter disregard for the expressed wishes of the German people. He did actually succeed in causing huge strikes in both Austria and in Germany, and it is impossible for anyone to say that he would not have finally succeeded in hitting the Goliath of force opposed to him fairly between the eyes with this shining pebble of an idea, which was the only weapon at his command, if, at the last moment, his aim had not been deflected and the target shifted by the treachery of the handful of men in the Ukraine who were resisting by every means in their power the natural development of the Soviets. These men, preferring to sell their country to Germany than to lose the reins of government themselves, opened separate negotiations, thereby breaking the unity of the ideal front which Trotsky opposed to the Germans. The Germans saw that with part of that front they could come immediately to terms. Instantly their tone in the negotiations changed. They persuaded their own people that the Russians were themselves to blame for not getting the peace they required, and that a just peace was only possible with the Ukraine. Meanwhile the soldiers and workers of the Ukraine were gradually obtaining complete power over their own country, so that when Germany actually concluded peace with the Ukraine, the so-called government whose signatures were attached to that treacherous agreement was actually in asylum in German headquarters and unable to return to its own supposed capital except under the protection of German bayonets. The Soviet triumphed in the Ukraine, and declared its solidarity with Russia. The Germans, like the Allies, preferred to recognise the better dressed persons who were ready to conclude peace with them in the name of a country which had definitely disowned them. From that moment the Brest peace negotiations were doomed to failure. Trotsky made a last desperate appeal to the workers of Germany. He said, ‘We will not sign your robber’s peace, but we demobilise our army and declare that Russia is no longer at war. Will the German people allow you to advance on a defenceless revolution?’

  The Germans did advance, not at first in regular regiments, but in small groups of volunteers who had no scruples in the matter. Many German soldiers, to their eternal honour, refused to advance, and were shot. The demobilisation of the Russian army meant little, because it had long ceased to be anything but a danger to the peaceful population in its rear. The Soviet had only the very smallest real force, and that, as yet, unorganised, with enthusiasm but without confidence, utterly unpracticed in warfare, consisting chiefly of workmen who, as was natural, were the first to understa
nd what it was they had to defend. It soon became clear that serious resistance was impossible. The Soviet government was faced with a choice: to collapse in a quite unequal struggle, or to sign a peace agreement of which they disapproved. Many thought that the cause of revolution would be best served by their deaths, and were ready to die. Lenin doubted the efficacy of such a rhetorical gesture, and believed that the secession of Russia from the war would ensure the continuation of the war by the imperialistic groups until such time as other countries reached the same exhaustion as had been reached by Russia, when in his opinion, revolution would be inevitable. He held that, for the future of the world revolution, the best that could be done would be the preservation, even in seriously limited territory, of the Soviet government as a nucleus of revolution, as an illustration of the possibility of revolution, until that moment when the workers of Russia should be joined by the workers of the world. His opinion carried the majority first of the Executive Committee, then of the fourth All-Russian Assembly. The Germans replied to the Russian offer to sign the peace with a statement which was an ironic parody of the Russian declaration at Brest. The Russians had said, ‘We will not sign peace, but the war is ended,’ the Germans said, ‘We agree to peace, but the war shall continue.’

  And, indeed, while the Soviet government moved to Moscow, the Germans, using in the south the pretext of the Ukrainian Rada, and in the north that of the bourgeois Finnish government, advanced through the Ukraine to the outlet of the Don, and in the north to the very gates of Petrograd. The matter stands so, as I write these lines. By the time you read them, much will have happened that it is impossible now to foresee.