2
The Soul Of Bolshevism
Marxism is the most urban religion that has ever existed. It was born in underground printing presses, in squalid London lodgings, in dingy cafés and third-rate hotels; its prophets were wanderers from one European capital to another whose dreams, like themselves, were rootless, took no account of earth or of things growing or of allegiances; not having any contact with civilisation, hating civilisation, they saw the future as do some capitalists - their prototypes - in terms of machines and papers and columns of grey, regimented men and women who shout obedient slogans and build mechanically a hideous paradise.
What the Bolsheviks have done in the towns of Russia is nothing; a kind of inverted American boom; a kind of morbid equivalent of the general post-war economic extravagance; a thing that might pass and be quickly forgotten. The particular horror of their rule is what they have done in the villages. This, I am convinced, is one of the most monstrous crimes in history, so terrible that people in the future will scarcely be able to believe it ever happened.
If you go now to the Ukraine or the North Caucasus, exceedingly beautiful countries and formerly amongst the most fertile in the world, you will find them like a desert; fields choked with weeds and neglected; no livestock or horses; villages seeming to be deserted, sometimes actually deserted; peasants famished, often their bodies swollen, unutterably wretched. You will discover, if you question them, that they have had no bread at all for three months past; only potatoes and some millet, and that now they are counting their potatoes one by one because they know nothing else will be available to eat until the summer, if then. They will tell you that many have already died of famine, and that many are dying every day; that thousands have been shot by the government and hundreds of thousands exiled; that it is a crime, punishable by the death sentence without trial, for them to have grain in their houses.
They will only tell you these things, however, if no soldier or stranger is within sight. At the sight of a uniform or of someone properly fed, whom they assume, because of that fact, to be a Communist or a Government official, they change their tone and assure you that they have everything in the way of food and clothing that the heart of man can desire, and that they love the dictatorship of the proletariat, and recognise thankfully the blessings it has brought to them. Strange as it may seem, a certain number of these poor wretches are from time to time made to speak in this strain to parties of tourists. I found that the name of Bernard Shaw was known to them. They spoke of him privately in the same tone, and spitting as venomously, as when they spoke of Stalin.
I saw these conditions for myself in the North Caucasus and the Ukraine, and heard from many sources, some Russian, some foreign, and some even Communist, that similar conditions prevailed in all the agricultural districts of Russia. This is unquestionably the case. It is impossible to describe the horror of it. I saw in India villages devastated by cholera. It was terrible. They were dead villages. Yet plagues pass, and I knew that the villages would fill again with living people. I saw in Belgium villages devastated by war. They, too, were dead villages. Yet even the war had ended, and I knew that the villages would fill again with living people. Villages devastated by the Bolsheviks were terrible beyond words because there seemed no end. It was as though a blight had settled on the country. It was a though nothing would ever grow there again. It was as though the peasants, their lives torn up by the roots, were ghosts haunting a place where they had once lived and been happy.
Why should it ever stop? I asked myself - soldiers, impersonal, some of them Mongols with leaden faces and slit eyes; members of the GPU, dapper, well-fed, often Jews, carrying out the orders of the dictatorship of the proletariat, destroying more surely than barbarians (who come with sword and fire, things relatively clean) the life, the soul of a country. Why should it ever stop until there is no class-enemy left to destroy
-that is, no-one left; and no grain left to collect because none planted? Thinking it over afterwards ,I came to the conclusion that the thing could only be explained on the supposition that the dictatorship of the proletariat hated Russia and was determined to destroy Russia even though thereby it also destroyed itself.
From the beginning, the Bolsheviks have regarded the peasants as so much raw material for carrying out their plans. They gave them the land in order to get power, and, having got power, took the land away from them. After the famine of 1921; after the Kronstadt revolt, when those whom Trot-sky had called ‘the pride and the glory of the Revolution’ demanded, amongst other things, free elections and a secret ballot; liberty of speech and of the Press for workers and peasants; the right to organise Trade Unions; equal rations for all who worked; and when they were, in consequence, shot down in hundreds by Trotsky’s orders, and then handed over to the GPU, that had run away when the revolt started, for an orgy of sadistic revenge - after all this, the peasants were given the right to trade freely with their produce. As soon, however, as they began to grow prosperous again, the promises that had been made to them were broken. Those peasants who, because they were more industrious or more unscrupulous or more intelligent than their fellows, had prospered, were treated as dangerous criminals; the New Economic Policy, like the Torgsin shops, was a means of locating thrift and wealth in order to destroy the one and steal the other.
Collectivisation and de-kulakisation followed. The peasants were driven, mostly at the end of a rifle, into collective farms, which, being incompetently and often corruptly directed by picked Communists, have failed to produce enough food to feed the town populations, let alone provide exports to pay for Socialist construction. Last autumn and winter the Government’s agents went over the country like a swarm of locusts taking everything edible, and leaving behind them a desert. The dictatorship of the proletariat has entrusted the task of making this desert fruitful again to its ‘flaming sword,’ the GPU which, under the name of ‘political departments’ established in every machine-tractor-station and State farm - that is, everywhere - will attempt to produce crops by the same methods as those by which timber has been produced for export.
To all intents and purposes the whole peasantry has been arrested and sentenced to forced labour. The proletariat’s ‘flaming sword’ is at its best in dealing with helpless, unorganised, starved people; even so, a hundred million peasants may well prove unmanageable. If not, if, under the patronage of ‘political departments,’ the fields bear abundantly, then a new and most hideous kind of slavery will have to be reckoned with, a slavery different from, and more awful than, any hitherto known in the world.
***
In the centre of Moscow and opposite the Foreign Office, which is in every sense of the word a sort of annex to it, stands the headquarters of the GPU -a solid building; the best designed and most substantially built in Russia since the Revolution; equipped with offices, a prison, a slaughterhouse, an excellently stocked restaurant and multiple store reserved exclusively for its personnel. Altogether a comfortable, attractive place, always busy, always with people passing in and out, mostly men in uniform, very smart, very important looking, very contemptuous in their manner towards what Trotsky speaks of so often and so affectionately in his ‘History of the Russian Revolution’ as the ‘broad’ or ‘toiling’ masses. It need scarcely be said that this building is not one which tourists are shown over when they visit Moscow.
The GPU embodies all the fear, all the distrust, all the passion to be revenged on society, all the hatred of civilisation and of human happiness that lives in the soul of Bolshevism. It is the soul of Bolshevism; and as time goes on, as the trivial hypocrisies in which Bolshevism has dressed itself - in order to deceive and flatter and use for its purposes the frustrated intellectuals of civilised Europe and uncivilised America -tend to get thrown aside, it emerges as the ultimate authority in Russia, the very dictatorship of the proletariat.
No one who has not seen it for himself can understand the terror that this or
ganisation inspires, not merely in avowed enemies of the Soviet régime - ex-bourgeoisie, priests, people who were for any reason privileged under the old social order - but in the whole population. It is not so much that they dread what the GPU may do to them, though it can do anything without anyone, even their nearest relatives, knowing; they dread the thing itself, because of its nature, because it is utterly evil, because it is morbid, because it belongs to those fearful distortions and perversions that exist in all human beings, but that, in a civilised society, emerge only occasionally in some criminal or madman.
I often used to think, when I was in Russia, that the general attitude towards the GPU must be like the general attitude in the Middle Ages towards the Powers of Darkness - quite irrational; quite unrelated to knowledge or experience of its manner of working; yet somehow understandable, somehow in keeping with the facts of the case. There is, mixed up with it all, a kind of mysticism. I turned up once in a back number of ‘Pravda’ an obituary notice of Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka and first head of the GPU, written by his successor. It described Dzerzhinsky as a saint, an ascetic, a man who rose above petty bourgeois emotions like pity, or a respect for justice or for human life; a man of infinite industry; a rare spirit whose revolutionary passion was unearthly and uncontaminated. The very prose of the obituary notice was lyrical. It had a rhythm like a religious chant. I thought, and still think, that I had found in it the quintessence of revolution; and I hated this quintessence because it was a denial of everything that has been gained in the slow, painful progress of civilisation; because it was beastly, because it idealised and spiritualised evil; because it glorified destruction and death; and, going beneath the animal, beneath hate, beneath lust, beneath every kind of appetite, founded itself on impulses which, though they have in the past sometimes been organised into abominable, underground cults, have never before held sway over a hundred and sixty million people inhabiting a sixth of the world’s surface.
This is the Terror .The people who execute it are naturally not normal. Most of them are not Russians. I counted in the Presiduum of the GPU only two unquestionably Russian names. The present acting head is a Polish Jew. A good number of the underlings are also Jews, with a fair sprinkling of Letts and Poles. The ‘flaming sword of the proletariat’ has been forged in ghettoes and wherever are collected men with a grudge against their fellows and against society; and the population of Russia lives, terrified, under its shadow. It is a product of pogroms, and is itself the greatest pogrom of history. To attempt to make its acts or its procedure conform with a civilised judicial system, as did certain politicians and newspapers in connection with the recent Metropolitan-Vickers affair - to judge them on that basis is like trying to read military strategy into the frenzied movements of a frightened tiger, or, better, to extract enlightened moral principles from the ravings of a diseased mind.
The theory of the class war has provided the GPU with an instrument after its own heart, the class enemy is anyone, and it is the business of the GPU to destroy the class enemy. Since the class war cannot end until the dictatorship of the proletariat has ‘liquidated’ itself - that is, never - it offers the GPU a prospect of unending activity. Priests and relics of the old Tsarist bourgeoisie, even kulaks, have become vieux jeu when the whole peasantry is available, and when, thanks to the passport system, the town populations have been delivered into its hands.
The GPU is responsible for defining class enemies, for sentencing them, and for executing the sentence .It decides that a Ukrainian peasant who has hidden a few poods of grain in his house to feed himself and his family through the winter when everything else has been requisitioned by the Government, is a class enemy, and, accordingly, either shoots or exiles him. It has spies everywhere, listening, watching; every so often it unearths or invents - scarcely, I believe, itself knowing which - a counter-revolutionary plot, and, by torture and threats and bribery, gathers the material for a spectacular State trial. Like some criminals ,it has a morbid appetite for publicity, and loves to figure on the front page in foreign newspapers; like all diseased minds, it is morbidly curious about everyone and everything, and makes a speciality of using for its purposes facts about the private lives of people who have fallen into its hands or whom it wishes for any reason to terrorise. The weak are its particular prey; and it is able, even without violence, even without their knowing how it has happened, to reduce them to a condition in which they will confess anything, promise anything.
Bolsheviks justify the class war on the ground that it is necessary in order to achieve a state of classlessness. Actually, however, its directors have evolved into a ruling class more privileged and more powerful than any other in the world; a ruling class that has power of life and death over the whole population, that is utterly irresponsible in the exercise of its privileges, that is beyond criticism because to criticise it is to criticise the dictatorship of the proletariat, which means to be guilty of treason against the Soviet State and to qualify for the death sentence. While social inequalities are being ruthlessly smoothed out at one end of society, new and more arbitrary and more pronounced inequalities are coming into existence at the other. Each layer of class enemies that is destroyed reveals another whose destruction is necessary.
This is worse than civil war. It is a people making war on itself. It is war by the proletariat for the proletariat on the proletariat. It is the dictatorship of the proletariat blockading the dictatorship of the proletariat. In consequence of this class war, Russia has become a battlefield and the Russians a subject people. As the productivity of these subject people and of this battlefield becomes more and more inadequate, the Soviet Government calls for more and more frenzied activity on the ‘class war front’ - a vicious circle which seems to bear out Danton’s gloomy prophecy - made when, having sent many to the guillotine, he realised that he would shortly find his way there himself - that revolutions, after they have consumed everyone else, at last consume themselves.
3
The Kingdom Of Heaven On Earth
The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth has haunted this Generation, as the Evangelical’s Hell haunted our fathers, but much more disastrously, since eternal torment at least pre-supposes eternal life – that is, Eternity and sin – that is, imperfection; whereas the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is all pretence, a denial of the very nature of life. If an epitaph were required for this sad and terrible time, it might well be found in ‘The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth’.
The basic error is to suppose that under any circumstances there might be a perfect State, since the very existence of a State at all is a symptom of imperfection; or, under any circumstances a perfect law, since Law exists only because Man is imperfect, sinful, because of the Fall. Heaven and Hell are conceivable, but the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is inconceivable. Otherwise, it would have come to pass long ago, and there have been no occasion for Satan to tempt Christ by showing him the Kingdoms of the Earth or for Christ to reject them. Otherwise, Christ would have lived instead of dying, and the long, troubled history of mankind be shorn of its horror and its glory.
What does it mean, a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth? It means that it would be possible so to arrange matters that there would be no injustice, no exploitation, no conflict, no having of our reward according as we pursue power or lust or love; it means that Man, imperfect Man, could create a perfect environment, and therefore that there is nothing in the universe greater than Man, no God, and nothing in living on this earth for a few years except living on this earth for a few years; it means that religion, art, all the obscure longings which from age to age, from civilization to civilization, have led individuals to reach beyond the bounds of Flesh and Time, have been a vain delusion.
That is Hell if you like, the materialist’s hell or doom, the most frightful which has ever been envisaged. It would be a fascinating, though sombre, pursuit to trace this idea from its origins, and through all its manifold phases – whether in terms of scien
tific marvels like those HG Wells envisaged, or of social felicity such as the Fabians and Marxists and all their many affiliates have long proclaimed, or of mere asinine sensual well-being such as Walt Whitman, DH Lawrence and others pointed to as the fulfilment of life. Materialism is the soil in which it has grown; first a little, tender shoot - education which was to perfect the mind, science which was to perfect the body and its circumstances, original goodness in these favourable conditions blossoming,and everyone healthy, wealthy and wise for ever and ever.
The little, tender shoot did not fulfil its promise, but ripened into an alarming crop. Many became literate, yes; but what did they read? Wealth accumulated, yes; but how was it spent and how distributed? Original goodness blossomed, yes; but its manifestations were indistinguishable from the manifestations of original sin, except that they were unbridled, unashamed, arrogant. The confidently announced Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, in fact, failed to put in an appearance. Instead, there was the most ferocious war in history; poverty and misery and suffering without end.
Time and Eternity Page 4
