Six Weeks in Russia, 1919

by Arthur Ransome

  On March 2, I went to an election meeting of workers and officials of the Moscow Co-operatives. It was beastly cold in the hall of the university where the meeting was held, and my nose froze as well as my feet. Speakers were announced from the Communists, Internationalists, Mensheviks, and Right Social Revolutionaries. The last named did not arrive. The presidium was for the most part non-Communist, and the meeting was about equally divided for and against the Communists. A Communist led off with a very bad speech on the general European situation and to the effect that there was no salvation for Russia except by the way she was going. Lozovsky, the old Internationalist, spoke next, supporting the Bolsheviks’ general policy but criticising their suppression of the press. Then came Dan, the Menshevik, to hear whom I had come. He is a little, sanguine man, who gets very hot as he speaks. He conducted an attack on the whole Bolshevik position combined with a declaration that so long as they are attacked from without he is prepared to support them. The gist of his speech was: 1. He was in favour of fighting Kolchak. 2. But the Bolshevik policy with regard to the peasants will, since as the army grows it must contain more and more peasants, end in the creation of an army with counter-revolutionary sympathies 3. He objected to the Bolshevik criticism of the Berne delegation on very curious grounds, saying that though Thomas, Henderson, etc., backed their own imperialists during the war, all that was now over, and that union with them would help, not hinder, revolution in England and France. 4. He pointed out that ‘All power to the soviets’ now means ‘All power to the Bolsheviks’, and said that he wished that the soviets should actually have all power instead of merely supporting the Bolshevik bureaucracy. He was asked for his own programme, but said he had not time to give it. I watched the applause carefully. General dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs was obvious, but it was also obvious that no party would have a chance that admitted its aim was extinction of the soviets (which Dan’s ultimate aim certainly is, or at least the changing of them into non-political industrial organisations) or that was not prepared to fight against reaction from without.

  I went to see Sukhanov (the friend of Gorky and Martov, though his political opinions do not precisely agree with those of either), partly to get the proofs of his first volume of reminiscences of the revolution, partly to hear what he had to say. I found him muffled up in a dressing gown or overcoat in an unheated flat, sitting down to tea with no sugar, very little bread, a little sausage and a surprising scrap of butter, brought in, I suppose, from the country by a friend. Nikitsky, a Menshevik, was also there, a hopeless figure, prophesying the rotting of the whole system and of the revolution. Sukhanov asked me if I had noticed the disappearance of all spoons (there are now none but wooden spoons in the Metropole) as a symbol of the falling to pieces of the revolution. I told him that though I had not lived in Russia 30 years or more, as he had, I had yet lived there long enough and had, before the revolution, sufficient experience in the loss of fishing tackle, not to be surprised that Russian peasants, even delegates, when able, as in such a moment of convulsion as the revolution, stole spoons if only as souvenirs to show that they had really been to Moscow.

  We talked, of course, of their attitude towards the Bolsheviks. Both work in soviet institutions. Sukhanov (Nikitsky agreeing) believed that if the Bolsheviks came further to meet the other parties, Mensheviks, etc., ‘Kolchak and Denikin would commit suicide and your Lloyd George would give up all thought of intervention.’ I asked, What if they should be told to hold a Constituent Assembly or submit to a continuance of the blockade? Sukhanov said, ‘Such a Constituent Assembly would be impossible, and we should be against it.’ Of the Soviets, one or other said, ‘We stand absolutely on the platform of the Soviet government now: but we think that such a form cannot be permanent. We consider the soviets perfect instruments of class struggle, but not a perfect form of government.’ I asked Sukhanov if he thought counter-revolution possible. He said ‘No’, but admitted that there was a danger lest the agitation of the Mensheviks or others might set fire to the discontent of the masses against the actual physical conditions, and end in pogroms destroying Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike. Their general theory was that Russia was not so far developed that a socialist state was at present possible. They therefore wanted a state in which private capital should exist, and in which factories were not run by the state but by individual owners. They believed that the peasants, with their instincts of small property holders, would eventually enforce something of the kind, and that the end would be some form of democratic republic. These two were against the offering of concessions to the Allies, on the ground that those under consideration involved the handing over to the concessionaires of the whole power in northern Russia—railways, forests, the right to set up their own banks in the towns served by the railway, with all that this implied. Sukhanov was against concessions on principle, and regretted that the Mensheviks were in favour of them.

  I saw Martov at the offices of his newspaper, which had just been suppressed on account of an article, which he admitted was a little indiscreet, objecting to the upkeep of the Red Army (see Chapter Twenty-one). He pointed eloquently to the seal on some of the doors, but told me that he had started a new paper, of which he showed me the first number, and told me that the demand for it was such that although he had intended that it should be a weekly he now expected to make it a daily. Martov said that he and his party were against every form of intervention for the following reasons: 1. The continuation of hostilities, the need of an army and of active defence were bound to intensify the least desirable qualities of the revolution, whereas an agreement, by lessening the tension, would certainly lead to moderation of Bolshevik policy. 2. The needs of the army overwhelmed every effort at restoring the economic life of the country. He was further convinced that intervention of any kind favoured reaction even supposing that the Allies did not wish this. ‘They cannot help themselves,’ he said, ‘the forces that would support intervention must be dominated by those of reaction, since all of the non-reactionary parties are prepared to sink their differences with the Bolsheviks, in order to defend the revolution as a whole.’ He said he was convinced that the Bolsheviks would either have to alter or go. He read me, in illustration of this, a letter from a peasant showing the unreadiness of the peasantry to go into communes (compulsion in this matter has already been discarded by the central government). ‘We took the land,’ wrote the peasant in some such words, ‘not much, just as much as we could work, we ploughed it where it had not been ploughed before, and now, if it is made into a commune, other lazy fellows who have done nothing will come in and profit by our work.’ Martov argued that life itself, the needs of the country and the will of the peasant masses, would lead to the changes he thinks desirable in the soviet regime.

  The Right Social Revolutionaries

  The position of the Right Social Revolutionaries is a good deal more complicated than that of the Mensheviks. In their later declarations they are as far from their romantic anarchist left wing as they are from their romantic reactionary extreme right. They stand, as they have always stood, for a Constituent Assembly, but they have thrown over the idea of instituting a Constituent Assembly by force. They have come into closer contact with the Allies than any other party to the left of the Cadets. By doing so, by associating themselves with the Czech forces on the Volga and minor revolts of a reactionary character inside Russia, they have pretty badly compromised themselves. Their change of attitude towards the Soviet government must not be attributed to any change in their own programme, but to the realisation that the forces which they imagined were supporting them were actually being used to support something a great deal further right. The Printers’ Gazette, a non-Bolshevik organ, printed one of their resolutions, one point of which demands the overthrow of the reactionary governments supported by the Allies or the Germans, and another condemns every attempt to overthrow the Soviet government by force of arms, on the ground that such an attempt would weaken the working class as a
whole and would be used by the reactionary groups for their own purposes.

  Volsky is a Right Social Revolutionary, and was President of that Conference of Members of the Constituent Assembly from whose hands the directorate which ruled in Siberia received its authority and Admiral Kolchak his command, his proper title being Commander of the Forces of the Constituent Assembly. The Constituent Assembly members were to have met on January 1 of this year, then to retake authority from the directorate and organise a government on an All-Russian basis. But there was continual friction between the directorate and the Conference of Members of the Constituent Assembly, the directorate being more reactionary than they. In November came Kolchak’s coup d’etat, followed by a declaration against him and an appeal for his overthrow issued by members of the Constituent Assembly. Some were arrested by a group of officers. A few are said to have been killed. Kolchak, I think, has denied responsibility for this, and probably was unaware of the intentions of the reactionaries under his command. Others of the members escaped to Ufa. On December 5, 25 days before that town was taken by the Bolsheviks, they announced their intention of no longer opposing the Soviet government in the field. After the capture of the town by the Soviet troops, negotiations were begun between the representatives of the Conference of Members of the Constituent Assembly, together with other Right Social Revolutionaries, and representatives of the Soviet government, with a view to finding a basis for agreement. The result of those negotiations was the resolution passed by the Executive Committee on February 26 (see Chapter Twenty-one). A delegation of the members came to Moscow, and were quaintly housed in a huge room in the Metropole, where they had put up beds all round the walls and big tables in the middle of the room for their deliberations. It was in this room that I saw Volsky first, and afterwards in my own.

  I asked him what exactly had brought him and all that he represented over from the side of Kolchak and the Allies to the side of the Soviet government. He looked me straight in the face, and said: ‘I’ll tell you. We were convinced by many facts that the policy of the Allied representatives in Siberia was directed not to strengthening the Constituent Assembly against the Bolsheviks and the Germans, but simply to strengthening the reactionary forces behind our backs.’

  He also complained: ‘All through last summer we were holding that front with the Czechs, being told that there were two divisions of Germans advancing to attack us, and we now know that there were no German troops in Russia at all.’

  He criticised the Bolsheviks for being better makers of programmes than organisers. They offered free electricity, and presently had to admit that soon there would be no electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently base their policy on the study of actual possibilities. ‘But that they are really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is clear to us. We are, therefore, prepared to help them in every possible way.’

  He said, further: ‘Intervention of any kind will prolong the regime of the Bolsheviks by compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet government, although we do not like it, and to support it because it is defending the revolution.’

  With regard to help given to individual groups or governments fighting against Soviet Russia, Volsky said that they saw no difference between such intervention and intervention in the form of sending troops.

  I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in almost the same words as those used by Martov, that life itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter their policy or to go. Sooner or later the peasants would make their will felt, and they were against the bourgeoisie and against the Bolsheviks. No bourgeois reaction could win permanently against the Soviet, because it could have nothing to offer, no idea for which people would fight. If by any chance Kolchak, Denikin and Co were to win, they would have to kill in tens of thousands where the Bolsheviks have had to kill in hundreds, and the result would be the complete ruin and the collapse of Russia in anarchy. ‘Has not the Ukraine been enough to teach the Allies that even six months’ occupation of non-Bolshevik territory by half a million troops has merely the effect of turning the population into Bolsheviks?’

  Twenty seven / The Third International

  MARCH 3

  One day near the end of February, Bukharin, hearing that I meant to leave quite soon, said rather mysteriously, ‘Wait a few days longer, because something of international importance is going to happen which will certainly be of interest for your history.’ That was the only hint I got of the preparation of the Third International. Bukharin refused to say more. On March 3 Reinstein looked in about nine in the morning and said he had got me a guest’s ticket for the conference in the Kremlin, and wondered why I had not been there the day before, when it had opened. I told him I knew nothing whatever about it; Litvinov and Karakhan, whom I had seen quite recently, had never mentioned it, and guessing that this must be the secret at which Bukharin had hinted, I supposed that they had purposely kept silence. I therefore rang up Litvinov, and asked if they had had any reason against my going. He said that he had thought it would not interest me. So I went. The conference was still a secret. There was nothing about it in the morning papers.

  The meeting was in a smallish room, with a dais at one end, in the old Courts of Justice built in the time of Catherine the Second, who would certainly have turned in her grave if she had known the use to which it was being put. Two very smart soldiers of the Red Army were guarding the doors. The whole room, including the floor, was decorated in red. There were banners with ‘Long Live the Third International’ inscribed upon them in many languages. The presidium was on the raised dais at the end of the room, Lenin sitting in the middle behind a long red covered table with Albrecht, a young German Spartacist, on the right and Platten, the Swiss, on the left. The auditorium sloped down to the foot of the dais. Chairs were arranged on each side of an alleyway down the middle, and the four or five front rows had little tables for convenience in writing. Everybody of importance was there; Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Chicherin, Bukharin, Karakhan, Litvinov, Vorovsky, Steklov, Rakovsky, representing here the Balkan Socialist Party, Skripnik, representing the Ukraine. Then there were Stang (Norwegian Left Socialists), Grimlund (Swedish Left), Sadoul (France), Finberg (British Socialist Party), Reinstein (American Socialist Labour Party), a Turk, a German-Austrian, a Chinese, and so on. Business was conducted and speeches were made in all languages, though where possible German was used, because more of the foreigners knew German than knew French. This was unlucky for me.

  When I got there people were making reports about the situation in the different countries. Finberg spoke in English, Rakovsky in French, Sadoul also. Skripnik, who, being asked, refused to talk German and said he would speak in either Ukrainian or Russia, and to most people’s relief chose the latter, made several interesting points about the new revolution in the Ukraine. The killing of the leaders under the Skoropadsky regime had made no difference to the movement, and town after town was falling after internal revolt. (This was before they had Kiev and, of course, long before they had taken Odessa, both of which gains they confidently prophesied). The sharp lesson of German occupation had taught the Ukrainian Social Revolutionaries what their experiences during the last 15 months had taught the Russian, and all parties were working together.

  But the real interest of the gathering was in its attitude towards the Berne conference. Many letters had been received from members of that conference, Longuet for example, wishing that the Communists had been represented there, and the view taken at Moscow was that the left wing at Berne was feeling uncomfortable at sitting down with Scheidemann and company; let them definitely break with them, finish with the Second International and join the Third. It was clear that this gathering in the Kremlin was meant as the nucleus of a new International opposed to that which had split into national groups, each supporting its own government in the prosecution of the war. That was the leit motif of the whole affair.

  Trotsky, in a leather coat, military breeches and gaiters, with a fur hat wi
th the sign of the Red Army in front, was looking very well, but a strange figure for those who had known him as one of the greatest anti-militarists in Europe. Lenin sat quietly listening, speaking when necessary in almost every European language with astonishing ease. Balabanova talked about Italy and seemed happy at last, even in Soviet Russia, to be once more in a ‘secret meeting’. It was really an extraordinary affair and, in spite of some childishness, I could not help realising that I was present at something that will go down in the histories of socialism, much like that other strange meeting convened in London in 1848.

  The vital figures of the conference, not counting Platten, whom I do not know and on whom I can express no opinion, were Lenin and the young German, Albrecht, who, fired no doubt by the events actually taking place in his country, spoke with brain and character. The German-Austrian also seemed a real man. Rakovsky, Skripnik, and Sirola the Finn really represented something. But there was a make-believe side to the whole affair, in which the English Left Socialists were represented by Finberg, and the Americans by Reinstein, neither of whom had or was likely to have any means of communicating with his constituents.

  MARCH 4

  In the Kremlin they were discussing the programme on which the new International was to stand. This is, of course, dictatorship of the proletariat and all that that implies. I heard Lenin make a long speech, the main point of which was to show that Kautsky and his supporters at Berne were now condemning the very tactics which they had praised in 1906. When I was leaving the Kremlin I met Sirola walking in the square outside the building without a hat, without a coat, in a cold so intense that I was putting snow on my nose to prevent frost-bite. I exclaimed. Sirola smiled his ingenuous smile. ‘It is March,’ he said, ‘spring is coming.’