The Russian Revolution; The Jugo Slav Movement by Unknown
U >>
Unknown >> The Russian Revolution; The Jugo Slav Movement
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 Produced by David Starner, David Widger
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
BY
ALEXANDER PETRUNKEVITCH
SAMUEL NORTHRUP
HARPER FRANK 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 THE ROLE OF THE NTELLECTUALS 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.
Nothing is more instructive than the rapid change in the position which the
Constitutional Democratic party occupied in the eyes of the people after
the revolution. Before the outbreak of hostilities all parties were against
war. But soon, under the influence of the German methods of warfare in
Belgium, France, and Russia, the feeling changed. Even the Mensheviki among
the Social-Democrats declared themselves in favor of war and the only
party remaining firm in condemning all war was that of the Bolsheviki. The
entrance of the Turks into the war was almost considered a godsend by
the Constitutional Democrats, Octoberists, and Conservatives in the Duma
because it cleared the way for a final settlement of the Balkan problem
and promised the elimination of Turkey from Europe. Long after Sazonov was
removed, when the consent of England and France to give Russia free hand in
Constantinople and the Straits was read in a telegram before the Duma, a
general outburst of enthusiasm took place, the members demanding to
know why Sazonov, who was justly credited with this achievement, was in
retirement and not in charge of the foreign office which he should have
held by right. Miliukov's speeches and writings on the future settlement
of the Balkan problem were jokingly spoken of as his dissertation for the
degree of foreign secretary. At home the party was pursuing a policy of
patient endurance, postponing strife for the future until the crimes of the
tsar's government made further silence impossible. At that time the whole
tissue of treason was not yet known, but enough was in evidence to demand
vigorous protest. Not being a revolutionary party the Constitutional
Democrats abstained from any action not strictly within the law and merely
condemned the activity of the Government. They desired amelioration of the
fundamental laws, but even that they would have preferred to accomplish by
persuasion rather than by force. In fact they considered socialist demands
unreasonable, socialization of Russia premature, and any violent overthrow
unwise and hazardous. For the latter opinion they found support in the
failure of the uprising of the working class in 1905-06, when the punitive
expeditions proved the loyalty of the army to the throne. Consequently the
attitude of the army in the memorable days of the March revolution was a
great surprise to them. At the same time they attributed to themselves the
lion share in the overthrow, presumably on the ground that masses follow
leaders and the Constitutional \ Democrats were the only ones who had a
chance for open protest in the Duma and made use of it. This delusion led
to a series of tactical errors and cost them dearly. In all elections they
polled a comparatively small vote. Trying to save Russia for the Allies
they failed to meet the Russian Socialists on their own ground and were
forced to explain away differences of opinion much too thoroughgoing to be
explained away. In a country which is in the throes of the most remarkable
revolution ever witnessed, they tried to apply non-revolutionary
methods and drew on themselves the suspicion of the masses of being
counter-revolutionists. From the very moment when Miliukov announced the
passing of the supreme power from the Tsar to Grand Duke Michail, when his
words were answered by angry shouts in favor of a democratic republic, the
position of the party became precarious. They had either to revise their
own program and to catch up with the rush of the progressive current, or
else to find themselves in the ro1e of inundated rocks over which the
waters flow. The announcement that the party would support a demand for a
republic was too late to change the first impression, while the proposition
to accept unconditional expropriation of land in place of the compensation
plan was defeated in heated debate at the party convention. Under normal
circumstances the party would have probably been steadily losing support,
but the arrest and imprisonment of the best and highly honored leaders by
the Bolsheviki is bound to put fresh vigor into their efforts and give new
life to their cause.
The leaders of the Bolsheviki themselves have fallen into error of a
different kind. Being primarily a party of the wage earning day laborers,
the program of the Bolsheviki puts the interest of the proletariat above
everything else. From insufficient observation of peasant life and the fact
that peasants want socialization of land, they jump to the conclusion that
the country is ready for complete socialization. Only the more educated
leaders among them realize that such a conclusion is premature. But to
bring about the necessary change in as near a future as possible, the
leaders of the Bolsheviki have fanned hatred of the proletariat toward the
"bourgeois" classes. One must give them credit in this respect. They know
the value of simple language when they put this hatred into words. Listen
to the Russian Marseillaise: "Rise, brothers, all at once against the
thieves, the curs--the rich ones! Against the vampire Tsar! Beat them,
kill them--the cursed evil-doers! Glow, dawn of better life!" The simple
ideology, the easy catch phrases in which the language of this ideology is
couched, the primeval character of the passion aroused, contribute to the
success which the party enjoys among working people and homeless paupers.
Therein lies the power of the Bolsheviki. But reaction is bound to come
and here again the peasants will play the chief role. All accounts of
conversations with peasants tend to show that they have very vague ideas
of socialism. In fact the Social-Democrats have not taken the trouble to
acquaint the peasants with the principles of their teaching, leaving that
field almost entirely to the influence of socialist-revolutionists.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6