Is it too late to accomplish this vast humanitarian task? Is the disaster so great that the maximum of the world’s effort will be merely a palliative? Time will show. But if the Russian dilemma has not outgrown the world’s ability to solve it, Russia must for years to come be primarily a humanitarian problem, to be approached from the humanitarian standpoint.
There are many who fear that even now the faction of the Third International will surely seek to exploit the magnanimity of other countries to its own political advantage. Of course it will! The ideals of that institution dictate that the appeal to Western philanthropy shall conceal such a dagger as was secreted behind the olive branch to Western capitalism. Has not the Third International to this day persistently proclaimed its intention to conspire against the very Governments with which the Bolsheviks have made, or are hoping to make, commercial contracts, and from which they now beg philanthropic aid? But the Third International, I believe, has a bark which is much worse than its bite. Our fear of it is largely of our own creation. Its lack of understanding of the psychology of Western workers is amazing, and its appeals are astonishingly illogical. To kill it, let it talk.
The essential impotence of the Third International is fully recognized by those little nations that were once part of Russia. Having thrown off the yoke of revolution, they have long sought to open economic intercourse with their unlovable eastern neighbour. True, their attitude is inspired in part by apprehension of those who would compel them forcibly to renew the severed tie rather than allow them to reunite voluntarily with Russia when the time shall mature; but their desire for normal intercourse is based primarily on the conviction that the communistic experiment would rapidly succumb under any normal conditions introduced from outside. Nothing will undermine Bolshevism so effectually as kindness, and the more nonpolitical, disinterested, and all-embracing that kindness, the greater will be its effect. With the supplanting of the spirit of political bigotry by that of human sympathy many rank and file Communists, attracted to the party in their ignorance by its deceptive catch-phraseology and the energy, resolution, and hypnotic influence of its leaders, will realize with the rest of Russia and with the whole world that Bolshevism is politically a despotism, economically a folly, and as a democracy a stupendous delusion, which will never guide the proletarian ship to the harbour of communistic felicity.
Misgivings are often expressed in liberally minded circles that reaction might undo all that has been achieved since that historic moment when Nicholas II signed the deed of abdication from the Russian throne. “Reaction,” in these days of loose terminology, is a word as much abused as “bourgeois,” “proletariat,” or “soviet.” If it means stepping backward, a certain amount of healthy reaction in Russia is both desirable and inevitable. Are not retrogression and progress at times identical? No man, having taken the wrong turning, can advance upon his pilgrimage until he returns to the crossroads. But the Russian nation has undergone a psychological revolution more profound than any visible changes, great though these are, and the maximum of possible reaction must still leave the country transformed beyond recognition. This would still be the case even if the sum-total of revolutionary achievements were confined to the decrees promulgated during the first month after the overthrow of the Tsar. We need not fear healthy reaction.
No power on earth can deprive the peasant of the land now acquired, in the teeth of landlord and Bolshevik alike, on a basis of private ownership. By a strange irony of fate, the Communist regime has made the Russian peasant still less communistic than he was under the Tsar. And with the assurance of personal possession, there must rapidly develop that sense of responsibility, dignity, and pride which well-tended property always engenders. For the Russian loves the soil with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his mind. His folk-songs are full of affectionate descriptions of it. His plough and his harrow are to him more than mere wood and iron. He loves to think of them as living things, as personal friends. Barbaric instincts have been aroused by the Revolution, and this simple but exalted mentality will remain in abeyance as long as those continue to rule who despise the peasant’s primitive aspirations and whose world-revolutionary aims are incomprehensible to him. A veiled threat still lies behind ambiguous and inconsistent Bolshevist protestations. When this veiled threat is eliminated and the peasant comes fully into his own I am convinced that he will be found to have developed independent ideas and an unlooked-for capacity for judgment and reflection which will astonish the world, and which with but little practice will thoroughly fit him for all the duties of citizenship.
Shortly after the Baltic republic of Lithuania had come to terms with Soviet Russia, one of the members of the Lithuanian delegation who had just returned from Moscow told me the following incident. In discussing with the Bolsheviks, out of official hours, the internal Russian situation, the Lithuanians asked how, in view of the universal misery and lack of liberty, the Communists continued to maintain their dominance. To which a prominent Bolshevist leader laconically replied: “Our power is based on three things: first, on Jewish brains; secondly, on Lettish and Chinese bayonets; and thirdly, on the crass stupidity of the Russian people.”
This incident betrays the true sentiments of the Bolshevist leaders toward the Russians. They despise the people over whom they rule. They regard themselves as of superior type, a sort of cream of humanity, the “vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat,” as they often call themselves. The Tsarist Government, except in its final degenerate days, was at least Russian in its sympathies. The
