Russia in 1919/the Russian Pendulum
By . New York: B. W. Huebsch. 1919. 12mo, xii+232 pp. $1.50.
By . New York: The Macmillan Co. 1919. 12mo, xvi+256 pp. $2,00.
THESE two books, both sincere, well-written, and informing, will be found worth while by all students of Russian affairs. Mr. Ransome’s book is an account of a visit to the Soviet Republic by a sympathetic man of letters of liberal tendencies; Mr. Bullard’s is that of an exceedingly careful and unbiased observer, to whom historical accuracy is the matter of chief concern. One is an impressionistic picture of a great social experiment; the other a history, not only of the experiment itself, but also of the causes which led to it.
A student of matters Russian for a great many years, a privileged witness of the struggle of 1905, there are few publicists to-day who can write of the Russian mêlée with Mr. Bullard’s authority. The Russian Pendulum is thus the work of no casual visitor, but of one with wide knowledge of Russian history and diplomacy, local and provincial law and custom, and the Russian mind and temperament. Political parties of the old rêgime, the coöperative societies, Lenine s foreign policy, the rise and fall of Kerensky, the various present Siberian governments, the connection of the Bolsheviki with the Germans— these are some of the topics discussed.
Perhaps Mr. Bullard’s greatest service, however, is his presentation of Bolshevism as something peculiarly and intensely Russian, a system, an ethic, which belongs, not on the world, but on the Russian stage. Born of the Eastern mind, it appears as a creed to which only a passive and fatalistic people, long enslaved, could possibly submit. Mr. Bullard, too, throws real light on the question how the Bolsheviki got into the saddle. Alone in a revolutionary milieu of endless talk and vague romantic aspiration, the Bolsheviki appear to have had definite aims; alone they offered a talked-to-death population a complete and ferociously logical scheme. Realistic, unscrupulous, opportunist, and merciless, they have succeeded in forcing a great empire to their will.
So solid, informing, and scrupulously fair is Mr. Bullard’s study, that Mr. Ransome’s suffers by comparison. To neglect it, however, would be doing injustice to an account that is very much worth while. The mild prejudice in favor of the Bolsheviki which it displays ought to stand in its favor, for the world, to be just, must have an ear for the defendant’s counsel. Mr. Ransome tells us that he could think of no one of Lenine’s calibre ‘who possessed his joyous temperament,’and yielding a little to sentiment, pictures for us, ‘ this little bald-headed man . . . every one of his wrinkles a wrinkle of laughter.’ Yet if Mr. Ransome s own testimony is to be credited, there is little to laugh at in the Russia of this laughing man. The book is a picture of a cold and hungry chaos, through which human beings move hopeless and bewildered. As a friendly critic’s view of Bolshevist Russia, it is well worth reading. Mr. Bullard’s study, however, is quite the best thing of its kind which has come to hand. H. B. B.