The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📕

Eager reactionaries outside Russia will no doubt point to nonpartyism as a symptom of friendship for themselves. It is nothing of the sort. On all questions of the defense of the Republic the nonparty voting is invariably solid with that of the Communists. The nonparty men do not want Denikin.

They do not want Baron Wrangel. They have never heard of Professor Struhve. They do not particularly like the Communists.

They principally want to be left alone, and they principally fear any enforced continuation of war of any kind. If, in the course of time, they come to have a definite political programme, I think it not impossible that they may turn into a new kind of constitutional democrat. That does not mean that they will have any use for M. Milukov or for a monarch with whom M. Milukov might be ready to supply them. The Constitution for which they will work will be that very Soviet Constitution which is now in abeyance, and the democracy which they associate with it will be that form of democracy which were it to be accurately observed in the present state of Russia, that Constitution would provide. The capitalist in Russia has long ago earned the position in which, according to the Constitution, he has a right to vote, since he has long ago ceased to be a capitalist. Supposing the Soviet Constitution were today to be literally applied, it would be found that practically no class except the priests would be excluded from the franchise. And when this agitation swells in volume, it will be an agitation extremely difficult to resist, supposing Russia to be at peace, so that there will be no valid excuse with which to meet it. These new constitutional democrats will be in the position of saying to the Communists, “Give us, without change, that very Constitution which you yourselves drew up.” I think they will find many friends inside the Communist Party, particularly among those Communists who are also Trade Unionists. I heard something very like the arguments of this new variety of constitutional democrat in the Kremlin itself at an All-Russian Conference of the Communist Party. A workman, Sapronov, turned suddenly aside in a speech on quite another matter, and said with great violence that the present system was in danger of running to seed and turning into oligarchy, if not autocracy. Until the moment when he put his listeners against him by a personal attack on Lenin, there was no doubt that he had with him the sympathies of quite a considerable section of an exclusively Communist audience.

Given peace, given an approximate return to normal conditions, nonpartyism may well profoundly modify the activities of the Communists. It would certainly be strong enough to prevent the rasher spirits among them from jeopardizing peace or from risking Russia’s chance of convalescence for the sake of promoting in any way the growth of revolution abroad. Of course, so long as it is perfectly obvious that Soviet Russia is attacked, no serious growth of nonpartyism is to be expected, but it is obvious that any act of aggression on the part of the Soviet Government, once Russia had attained peace-which she has not known since 1914-would provide just the basis of angry discontent which might divide even the disciplined ranks of the Communists and give nonpartyism an active, instead of a comparatively passive, backing throughout the country.

Nonpartyism is already the peasants’ way of expressing their aloofness from the revolution and, at the same time, their readiness to defend that revolution against anybody who attacks it from outside. Lenin, talking to me about the general attitude of the peasants, said: “Hegel wrote ‘What is the People? The people is that part of the nation which does not know what it wants.’ That is a good description of the Russian peasantry at the present time, and it applies equally well to your Arthur Hendersons and Sidney Webbs in England, and to all other people like yourself who want incompatible things. The peasantry are individualists, but they support us. We have, in some degree, to thank Kolchak and Denikin for that. They are in favor of the Soviet Government, but hanker after Free Trade, not understanding that the two things are self-contradictory. Of course, if they were a united political force they could swamp us, but they are disunited both in their interests and geographically. The interests of the poorer and middle class peasants are in contradiction to those of the rich peasant farmer who employs laborers. The poorer and middle class see that we support them against the rich peasant, and also see that he is ready to support what is obviously not in their interests.” I said, “If State agriculture in Russia comes to be on a larger scale, will there not be a sort of proletarianization of the peasants so that, in the long run, their interests will come to be more or less identical with those of the workers in other than agricultural industry!” He replied, “Something in that direction is being done, but it will have to be done very carefully and must take a very long time. When we are getting many thousands of tractors from abroad, then something of the sort would become possible.” Finally I asked him point blank, “Did he think they would pull through far enough economically to be able to satisfy the needs of the peasantry before that same peasantry had organized a real political opposition that should overwhelm them!” Lenin laughed. “If I could answer that question,” he said, “I could answer everything, for on the answer to that question everything depends. I think we can. Yes, I think we can. But I do not know that we can.”

Nonpartyism may well be the protoplasmic stage of the future political opposition of the peasants.

I have done my best to indicate the essential facts in Russia’s problem today, and to describe the organization and methods with which she is attempting its solution. I can give no opinion as to whether by these means the Russians will succeed in finding their way out of the quagmire of industrial ruin in which they are involved. I can only say that they are unlikely to find their way out by any other means. I think this is instinctively felt in Russia. Not otherwise would it have been possible for the existing organization, battling with one hand to save the towns front starvation, to destroy with the other the various forces clothed and armed by Western Europe, which have attempted its undoing. The mere fact of continued war has, of course, made progress in the solution of the economic problem almost impossible, but the fact that the economic problem was unsolved, must have made war impossible, if it were not that the instinct of the people was definitely against Russian or foreign invaders. Consider for one moment the military position.

Although the enthusiasm for the Polish war began to subside (even among the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area of non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude with Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position of Soviet Russia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919. In 1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flattering letter to the Kaiser. In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov, Vitebsk and Mohilev. We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel. In the east, the front which became known as that of Kolchak, was on the Volga. Soviet Russia was a little hungry island with every prospect of submersion. A year later the Germans had vanished, the flatterers of the Kaiser had joined hands with those who were temporarily flattering the Allies, Yudenitch’s troops were within sight of Petrograd, Denikin was at Orel, almost within striking distance of Moscow; there had been a stampede of desertion from the Red Army. There was danger that Finland might strike at any moment. Although in the east Kolchak had been swept over the Urals to his ultimate disaster, the situation of Soviet Russia seemed even more desperate than in the year before. What is the position today! Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland are at peace with Russia. The Polish peace brings comparative quiet to the western front, although the Poles, keeping the letter rather than the spirit of their agreement, have given Balahovitch the opportunity of establishing himself in Minsk, where, it is said, that the pogroms of unlucky Jews show that he has learnt nothing since his ejection from Pskov.

Balahovitch’s force is not important in itself, but its existence will make it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier of Poland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polish population, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmen may again choose war as the least of many threatening evils. Still, for the moment, Russia’s western frontier is comparatively quiet.

Her northern frontier is again the Arctic Sea. Her eastern frontier is in the neighborhood of the Pacific. The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupied by no enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding is the small semi-circle north of the Crimea. There Denikin’s successor, supported by the French but exultantly described by a German conservative newspaper as a “German baron in Cherkass uniform,” is holding the Crimea and a territory slightly larger than the peninsula on the main land. Only to the immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevik propaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic to any one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on the eve of military collapse.

In any case it is easy in a revolution to magnify the influence of military events on internal affairs. In the first place, no one who has not actually crossed the Russian front during the period of active operations can well realize how different are the revolutionary wars from that which ended in 1918. Advance on a broad front no longer means that a belt of men in touch with each other has moved definitely forward. It means that there have been a series of forward movements at widely separated, and with the very haziest of mutual, connections. There will be violent fighting for a village or a railway station or the passage of a river. Small hostile groups will engage in mortal combat to decide the possession of a desirable hut in which to sleep, but, except at these rare points of actual contact, the number of prisoners is far in excess of the number of casualties. Parties on each side will be perfectly ignorant of events to right or left of them, ignorant even of their gains and losses. Last year I ran into Whites in a village which the Reds had assured me was strongly held by themselves, and these same Whites refused to believe that the