Bolshevism
By . New York: Harper & Brothers. 1919. 12mo, x+389 pp. $1.50.
THIS solid, informing, and unspectacular book, written by a distinguished Socialist of the constructive school, at last brings an honest light into that morass of lies, propaganda, and hatred in which the greatest social experiment of the day has lain obscured. Better still, it is a pledge that the Western democracies have finally seen that the widespread Bolshevist idea must be fought by another idea, and that the industrial worker is not to be turned away from the poison of ‘class-consciousness’ and ‘class-action’ by mere reiteration of the fact that Trotzky is an East Hide Jew with a Hittite nose, or that the London banking world seriously suspects Lenin of having murdered his own grandmother. A democracy puerile enough to use such weapons deserves its fate. We owe Mr. Spargo a genuine debt for having revealed the enemy, and armed us against him.
The first part of the book is a history, written with understanding, sympathy, and far from ordinary skill, of the events preceding the Revolution. For instance, the dramatic rise to power of that papier-maché Cæsar, Kerensky, is made intelligible for the first time by an account of the rôle that Kerensky had played in preceding years. This historical matter out of the way, Mr. Spargo goes on to prove three propositions; one, that Bolshevism is not a normal growth of the Revolution, but a usurping fanaticism maintained by violence; two, that it is the bitter enemy of democratic institutions; and three, that the industrial workers of Russia, after having enslaved and cruelly destroyed the bourgeois classes, are now slaves to the most terrible fanatic bureaucracy which ever burdened the earth. He sustains these propositions by evidence of dignity and weight, quotations from Lenin’s pamphlets, Trotzky’s speeches, and like material; we are spared such hodge-podges of truth and forgery as the Sisson documents, and ‘atrocity’ hysteria which leads us to remember the harm done to the body, and to forget the vile assault upon the soul.
He closes with a fine paragraph.
‘And just as the world of civilized mankind recognized Prussian militarism as its deadly enemy, to be overcome at all costs, so, too, Bolshevism must be overcome. And that can best be done, not by attempting to drown it in blood, but by courageously and consistently setting ourselves to the task of removing the social oppression, the poverty, and the servitude which produce the desperation of soul that drives men to Bolshevism. The remedy for Bolshevism is a sane and far-reaching programme of constructive social democracy.’ H. S.