Crisis in Russia: The Long View
I
ON Sunday, June 13, Signor Mussolini gave his own answer, in the Popolo d’ltalia, to the question which the whole world was asking about the significance of the trial and execution of eight Russian Generals a day or two before. ‘Bolshevism,’ he wrote, ‘is passing through a mortal crisis, and the end cannot be far off. An army where the Chiefs are shot, be they spies or innocent men, cannot last.’
On the same day a leading weekly journal in London drew a parallel between the case of Stalin and that of the Roman Emperor Tiberius in his closing years. It observed that after Tiberius had detected and suppressed the conspiracy of his most trusted minister, Seianus (the commander of his personal bodyguard), he became psychopathically nervous for his own safety. Unable to rely on anyone, he put his faith in frequent executions. Nobody in high place was secure. To be informed against was to be tried; to be tried was to die. Ever since he suppressed the conspiracy (if there was one) of Zinoviev and Kamenev, this journal went on, and probably before that, since the murder of his close partisan Kirov, it may be that Stalin has felt and acted like Tiberius. His situation presents many parallels; he took over the Soviet headship from its founder, Lenin, as Tiberius took over the Roman imperial dignity from its founder Augustus; and in neither instance could the successor enjoy the founder’s undisputed position.
These are only two among many explanations of what has gone on in Soviet Russia. Both may be inadequate. If Stalin is, as some reports suggest, a very sick man, if he is ‘ psychopathically nervous’ for his own safety, as the Emperor Tiberius was, Russian Bolshevism is passing through a severe crisis which may or may not be ‘mortal.’ Bolshevism is the oldest of the revolutionary dictatorial systems which have changed the political texture of modern Europe. Dictatorships are never eternal, and the Russian dictatorship may be the first to decay. Yet to me it seems that before trying to pass judgment upon the Russian crisis the nature of the circumstances amid and out of which it has developed needs to be dispassionately considered.
Glancing back at the origins of the Marxist Communism which was at first the soul of Bolshevism, one is struck by the curious play of historical cause and effect. In the later decades of the eighteenth and the earlier decades of the nineteenth centuries various mechanical inventions altered the methods of industrial production and laid the foundations of what was presently to be called ‘capitalist industry.’ Old, semifeudal relationships between master and man were replaced by the ‘cold cash nexus’ which Marx and Engels were presently to denounce in their Communist Manifesto of 1848. Adam Smith extolled the new economic freedom, and saw only light in its division of labor and unfettered competition. Karl Marx, who observed the less attractive features of this freedom, saw only its darker sides, and upon them based his Communist doctrine. These things are well known. But it is not often realized that capitalist industry in Great Britain was able to develop unchecked, with a minimum of respect for the value of the human lives which it employed and exploited, because England was engaged in a lifeand-death struggle with Napoleonic France, and because her ruling classes were in no mood, when that exhausting ordeal had ended at Waterloo, to pay much heed to social problems.
In his recent History of Europe a distinguished British historian, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, formerly Minister of Education, draws attention to this circumstance. ‘While the Government of England was struggling for its life with revolutionary and Napoleonic France,’ he writes, ‘and the governing classes were stricken with the fear of revolutionary danger at home, it was vain to expect that the needs of the new, unknown, half-barbarous industrial population . . . would be sympathetically considered. Even William Pitt, who at one moment showed a real flash of interest and comprehension, recoiled from the task of alleviating the lot of the wage-earning population.’ And Burke, whose flaming imagination embraced the Indian and the American scene, and the vast significance of the French Revolution, had no eyes for the urgent domestic problems of the Industrial Revolution in England — the sweated labor of women and small children, the shameful housing, the disparity between wages and profits, the uncertainty and insecurity of employment. It was not until the forties of the nineteenth century that the evils proceeding from this rapid and soulless industrialization were brought home to the conscience of the nation.
Meanwhile those evils had inspired the thoughts which Marx and Engels expressed in their Communist Manifesto, thoughts that were to become the gospel of Bolshevism in Russia from 1917 onwards. As Trotsky has truthfully said, ‘The whole of Marx is in the Communist Manifesto‘; for what Marx wrote later in Das Kapital was an amplification of this fundamental treatise. And one of the most remarkable things about Russian Communism appears to me the comparative success that has attended the adaptations to a mainly peasant people, politically inexperienced, of economic theories based upon the defects of an immature industrial capitalism in a totally different country.
II
As Lenin was to discover, the full rigor of Marxist doctrine could not be applied to Russian conditions. Hence Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy,’ known as the ‘Nep,’ after the collapse of pure Communism in 1921. But Lenin never abandoned the idea of the proletarian world-revolution, which was likewise the breath of Trotsky’s nostrils. Orthodox Marxism, or Bolshevism, clings to belief in the necessity of proletarian revolution everywhere as the only means of assuring the safety of proletarian revolution anywhere. In the words of the Communist Manifesto: —
Common action by the various proletariats in civilized countries is one of the first conditions for their emancipation. And when the antagonism of classes within nations shall have disappeared, the hostility of one nation toward another will likewise disappear. Communism is working for union and understanding between the democratic parties of all countries. Its aims cannot be attained without the violent overthrow of the existing social order. Proletarians have nothing but their chains to lose. They have a whole world to gain. Proletarians of all lands, unite!
Soon after Joseph ‘Stalin,’ a Georgian revolutionary of many names, had succeeded Lenin in the leadership of Soviet Russia, a different Communist method began to appear. There were ‘Five-Year Plans’ and collective farming. A hard, determined ‘Man of Steel,’ as Lenin nicknamed him, the new leader was not given to flights of political imagination. Trotsky’s notions of permanent world-revolution attracted him not at all; and the suggestion that Soviet Russia should spend her strength and her resources in missionary work for a proletarian overthrow of capitalist society everywhere struck him as fantastic. Let Soviet Russia make a success of Bolshevism at home, let her create a model Communist or even Socialist State, and the rest of the world would be moved to follow her example. Meanwhile the world-revolution would have to wait. To build up the Russian Revolution on sure foundations was task enough.
Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, disagreed and had to go into exile. Many other prominent Bolshevists also disagreed, and opposed Stalin secretly or openly. Reprimanded, punished, pardoned, and finally arrested, tried, and executed, they met a fate even less happy than that of Trotsky. How far were Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others who made abject confession of their guilt in August 1936, or Sokolnikov, Radek, and the fifteen who likewise confessed and were condemned in the Moscow trial of last January, really ‘guilty’ of the treason ascribed to and admitted by them? This question is as hard to answer as a similar question would be upon the alleged and hitherto unpublished confessions of the eight Generals who were shot last June.
‘Wrecking’ or sabotage there certainly has been. One consideration which, unless I err, has not yet been urged in public was put before me some months ago by an eminent German scientist and technician who was given an important post in Russia when his Jewish antecedents compelled him to give up work in Hitlerite Germany. A number of well-equipped laboratories were placed at his disposal, with a competent staff of Russian research workers. He was also in a position to know how German was being taught in the Soviet schools, which specialized in the study of foreign languages. At first he was delighted with the way his staff worked. Experiments were intelligently conducted. He began to be troubled when he found that none of them ever led to a tangible conclusion. Casting about for an explanation, and making cautious inquiries, he discovered that the inconclusiveness of the work done was simply a form of sabotage, of ‘wrecking’; and that this form was, in its turn, a kind of silent opposition to the Stalin system. It was, indeed, the only form which opposition could safely take.
In the linguistic schools where German was being taught he detected the same spirit. The work was going on, but results were insignificant. In the teaching of German, for instance, the professors would spend a whole year in imparting to their pupils exact knowledge of one or two of the more complicated rules of German grammar, while carefully abstaining from any attempt to teach the simpler rules or the language itself. Comprehensive ignorance of German among the pupils was the natural consequence.
When I asked this eminent German — who ended by throwing up his job in disgust — whether this ‘wrecking’ was due to Trotskyite leanings, he felt unable to answer. It might or might not be, he said, but he was disposed to set it down rather to a spirit of clandestine opposition, to an almost unconscious and unconfessed yearning for some degree of individual freedom, coupled with a desire to outwit the authorities in ways which they could neither control nor discover.
Whether the experience of this German was typical I cannot say. He may have lived and worked in disaffected centres; and he did not question the fact that remarkable results had been achieved in the collective farms and in aircraft, tank, and tractor factories. He spoke only of his own experience. In other respects he confirmed the description of Russian Communist society which I had received a little earlier from another non-Russian observer. It ran: —
Every Russian under the age of thirty, man, woman, and child, is convinced (and was convinced even when they were waiting in long queues for a piece of black bread) that they are living in a Communist paradise, and the rest of the world in a capitalist hell. They do not now want to go out and compel the rest of the world to come into their Communist paradise; but if the demons from the capitalist hell try to break in, then Europe may see something on a very much bigger scale though not unlike the rush of the Napoleonic armies over Europe, carrying the ideals of the French Revolution early in the nineteenth century.
My German informant added: ‘ I should put the “frontier" between the two Russias higher than the age of thirty. I think it is nearer forty. Remember that a Communist mother, aged thirty-five to-day, was herself little more than a child when the Revolution came in 1917, and that all her impressions have been derived from Soviet schools, institutes, and propaganda, She has no pre-Communist background. Only Russians above forty have anything like a pre-Communist background or standard of comparison; and for those of them whose sympathies were “white,” or antiCommunist, life has not been easy. Their numbers have diminished rapidly and are still decreasing. There is no communication between their Russia and the Russia of Stalin. The “frontier” is an impassable barrier.’
It ought to follow, though it may not follow in practice, that the Communist generations below the age of forty will be incapable of reacting spontaneously against any official versions of events which may reach them through the omnipresent radio, the Soviet press, or party councils. This is perhaps true of the youngest generation whose minds have been entirely formed under Stalin. It is perhaps not true of the older Communist generations which received the pure milk of the Marxist word and were taught to believe in world-revolution before Stalin took over. One would imagine that it must come as a shock to a majority of Russian Communists when they hear that respected veterans of the Revolution, the creators of the Communist paradise, were no better than rogues and traitors who deserved the dog’s death they have suffered, or that valiant commanders of the Red Army like Marshal Tukhachevsky, or Generals as distinguished as Yakir and Putna, had been secretly in the service of Nazi Germany. However oddly Russian Communist minds may work, it would seem that there must be limits to their versatility in unquestioning belief.
III
Yet at this point an element of doubt creeps in. Is there no truth in the charges that the partisans of Trotsky, and even eminent commanders of the Red Army, have been in touch with the secret agents of Nazi Germany? Before looking at such evidence as the published official reports of the court proceedings against, the alleged traitors may offer, it will be well to examine what I may call a theory of probability. I know well that likelihood is not proof, and that in many a Western court of law the truth, as finally established, would have seemed highly improbable if it had been put forward as a hypothesis. Still, in the theory of probability which I shall now outline, there are elements which I know to be sound, though I may not think it fair to the memory of dead men to mention names and places.
My theory falls into at least three parts. The first part is a mixture of fact and conjecture. It is a fact that Trotsky and his sympathizers look upon Stalin as an apostate from the true Marxist creed of world-wide proletarian revolution. It is a further fact that Trotsky, the apostle of this true faith, lives in exile uncomforted by any feeling that his fate is just; and he may even be animated by vindictive passion. It is a fact that he has, or had, many secret sympathizers among Communists in Soviet Russia, and open sympathizers elsewhere. It is also a fact, albeit a fact not yet publicly attested, that in many Communist circles the view has prevailed that Stalin’s successor would be chosen among the partisans of Trotsky. To them the future might belong.
These are a few preliminary facts. What follows is conjecture. It may fairly be assumed that Stalin was aware of the facts, and knew that he, and his comparatively successful apostasy, were menaced. It may also be assumed that his secret police, the OGPU, were kept busy collecting information and supplying it to him. And it is reasonably certain that, like the Oriental he is, he will not have struck at his secret opponents until he felt sure of his power to crush them, and to remove possible rivals, by a series of smashing blows. He will have wished to do this in such a way as to secure the approval of the great majority of Communist Russians by making it appear that he was the stalwart defender of their paradise against traitors in league with capitalist devils.
The second part of my theory concerns the foreign enemies of Russian Bolshevism, chief among them Germany and Japan. Long before the signing of the Germano-Japanese Treaty against the Communist International, or Comintern, on November 27, 1936, there had been close coöperation between Berlin and Tokyo, so that, in the event of war, Russia might be compelled to fight on two fronts. It is probable that the secret services of Germany and Japan were already coordinating their efforts, and that the obligation which the two High Contracting Parties undertook, in the Additional Protocol to their treaty, was simply a formal recognition of existing arrangements. In this Protocol, Germany and Japan engaged themselves to ‘exchange information upon the activities of the Communist International, and also to take investigatory and defensive measures against the Communist International.’ What will have been the nature of these ‘investigatory and defensive measures’? They will doubtless have included some contact with the disaffected Communist, or Trotskyite, centres in Russia and abroad, since those centres will have possessed information not easily obtainable by others. A further probability, amounting almost to a fact, is that the German secret agents, at any rate, will have been men formerly affiliated to the Communist Party in Germany and taken over by the German Secret State Police, or Gestapo, as so many former Communists were. It would have been quite useless to send ordinary Prussian police officers, ignorant of the Communist jargon and of Marxist ways of reasoning, to maintain contact with and to win the confidence of even the anti-Stalin Communists.
Moreover, there were precedents for this sort of thing. During the World War, German agents kept in touch with Lenin and his fellows in Switzerland; and it was on the recommendation of a distinguished metaphysician, then in the German diplomatic service, that arrangements were made early in 1917 to send Lenin back to Russia. This diplomatist understood that a dose of revolutionary Communism was the very thing needed to cause an explosion in Russia after the constitutional revolution of March 1917. So Lenin was fetched from Switzerland, transported through Germany in closed railway carriages, and Trotsky was enabled to come back from the United States. As a result, the Russian front exploded. Even before Lenin’s return the Russian Communists had issued to the army their famous prikaz, or order, No. 1. It called upon soldiers to disobey their officers and to take charge of arms and internal administration. After Lenin’s return, the Russian front against Germany was kept in being with the greatest difficulty; and early in March 1918, when Lenin’s authority had been fully established, Trotsky presided over the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk which ended by the cession of huge areas of Russian territory to the Germans.
This territory was not ceded out of love for Germany. According to Lenin’s ideas, if not those of Trotsky, it mattered little who might take the territory. They were going to start a Communist world-revolution which would overthrow all ‘imperialist’ governments and bring the proletariats of the world together. The Germans thought otherwise. They looked upon the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a lasting settlement which, so soon as the great German offensive should have succeeded in the West after its beginning on March 21, 1918, would enable Germany to develop the Ukraine and other rich regions of European Russia as a German colony in Europe. In conjunction with the Treaty of Bucharest, which gave Germany control of Rumanian wheat, oil, and timber, this would establish German mastery over Central and Eastern Europe on firm foundations. The Russian Bolshevists might then do their worst — and be thankful if Germany should continue to tolerate their existence.
These German plans went awry. The great offensive in the West failed. The Peace Treaties of Versailles, SaintGermain, and Trianon radically altered the map of Europe to Germany’s disadvantage. The Treaties of BrestLitovsk and of Bucharest were obliterated. But Germany has never forgotten them; and it is interesting to reflect that Herr Hitler’s Note to Great Britain of March 31, 1936, is, in reality, based on the assumption that the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest are alone valid. His Note rejected the Locarno Pact as being an emanation of the Treaty of Versailles. It rejected also the Treaty of Versailles because it did not observe all the conditions of the Armistice; and it repudiated the Armistice because its provisions were not fully respected in the Versailles Treaty. In fact, Hitler’s Note of March 31, 1936, was a pre-Armistice Note — that is the Note of a Power still belligerent and at peace only with Soviet Russia and Rumania in virtue of the Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and of Bucharest.
IV
It is well to bear this circumstance in mind when the plausibility of the charges against a former Soviet Ambassador like Sokolnikov and an important Bolshevist like Radek are being considered. One can imagine the shrewd men in the German secret police getting into touch with Trotsky, or Trotsky’s friends, and seeking to persuade them that, if Stalin and Marshal Voroshilov could be got rid of, Trotsky would come back, and that with Trotsky it would be easy to make a Russo-German agreement. Nazi Germany may have thought that what Trotsky and his friends had done once for Imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk they might do again; and that German ‘colonial’ ambitions in Europe could be satisfied without the cost and the losses of another war.
If this conjecture were baseless, it would be harder to account for the violent outbursts against Russia in which Hitler and Goebbels indulged at the Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg last September. Hitler was not always antiBolshevist. One of his first acts as Chancellor and Leader was to renew the Russo-German Treaty of Rapallo of April 1922 and to prolong the understanding between the German Reichswehr and the Russian Red Army. Only after the Polono-German agreement of January 1934 did his bearing change; and it is an uncontradicted fact that among the secret features of that agreement was an understanding that Poland would facilitate the detachment of the Ukraine from Russia in the interests of Germany. If German agents were really working with the anti-Stalin Communist elements in Russia and abroad, to get rid of Stalin and bring about a situation in Russia which would facilitate the accomplishment of German designs, there is some sense in the outbursts of rage at Nuremberg in September after the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev at Moscow in August had upset the German-Trotskyite plan. The bigger trial of Radek, Sokolnikov, and others in January of this year also becomes comprehensible.
By way of illustration, let me summarize the evidence of Sokolnikov as given on pages 151-156 of the verbatim report of the January trial.
SOKOLNIKOV: Allow me to revert to the conversation with Radek. . . . During this conversation we spoke of the changes that had taken place. We said that while in 1933 and 1934 the principal military menace to the Soviet Union lay in the Far East, the military menace the most serious was offered by Germany in 1935. . . . Pyatakov [one of the accused] told me that Trotsky had been negotiating with Hess [Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy]. In these negotiations Hess was empowered to put forward demands which concerned not only German interests but also the interests of another country [Japan?]. Pyatakov told me that he had understood Trotsky to say that these were negotiations on a number of questions and that agreement had been reached on them. Of course it was assumed that this draft agreement . . . would not remain an agreement between these two persons.
That is to say, the first alternative was designed for the contingency of power passing into the hands of the [anti-Stalin] bloc irrespective of anything arising before the outbreak of a war. To put it plainly, in such an event the other side undertook to give the government of the bloc its friendly support. As regards the bloc, it undertook a number of obligations of an economic character which secured economic advantages to the other side. The second alternative envisaged that the bloc would come to power as a result of a war and as a result of a defeat of the Soviet Union. In this event the parties to the agreement pledged themselves to establish relations with the government of the bloc, thus, strictly speaking, I think, ensuring their advent to power, and hence withholding support from rival groups. The bloc undertook to conclude peace immediately and recognize territorial concessions.
In this agreement they [the territorial concessions] were stated as follows: that Japan, in the event of her taking part in the war, would receive territorial concessions in the Amur region and the maritime province of the Far East; as regards Germany, it was contemplated to ‘satisfy the national interests of the Ukraine.’ Beneath this transparent veil was understood the establishment of German control over the Ukraine coupled with the secession of the latter from the U. S. S. R. Moreover a number of economic concessions were contemplated, going somewhat farther than the economic concessions of the first alternative. . . . We figured that we had certain chances [of retaining some independence]. Where did we see them? We saw them in the play of international contradictions. We considered that, let us say, complete sway in the Soviet Union could never be established by German Fascism because it would encounter the objections of other imperialist rivals, that certain international conflicts might occur, that we could rely on other forces which would not be interested in strengthening Fascism.
If this, with much other corroborative evidence, was entirely fabricated by Stalin and his helpers, the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937 must stand as two of the most monstrous judicial outrages ever perpetrated. If, on the other hand, there was in the evidence any considerable substratum of truth, — as I am disposed to think there must have been, — Stalin’s behavior, though ruthless, and ill-advised as regards the effect upon public opinion outside Russia, becomes intelligible. I have reason to think that my view of the trials is shared by painstaking and conscientious British observers who know Soviet Russia well and whose names are respected throughout the Englishspeaking world as those of honest and sober-minded students of political and economic phenomena. To their considered (though hitherto unpublished) explanation of the psychology of this Communist ‘treason’ I shall return. For the present, and as the third part of my theory of probability, I wish to glance at the trial and execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven other Generals last June.
When all allowances have been made for the rivalry of various groups in the Higher Command of the Russian Red Army, and for the possibility that one group may have managed so to play upon the fears of Stalin and of Marshal Voroshilov as to bring about the downfall of the other group, there remains the question whether there was not, in this case also, the appearance of a substratum of truth in the charges brought against the executed officers. As I have said, I do not feel it would be fair to mention names or places. But what I know from facts personally observed and information received in the early part of 1936 — that is to say, six months before the trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev in August 1936 — convinces me that one at least of the incriminated and executed officers maintained close and friendly relations with German officers in a certain European capital, and that these Germans were in equally close touch with military and naval representatives of Japan.
I am not for a moment suggesting that these friendly relations amounted to any kind of ‘treasonable commerce.’ I am suggesting that, since echoes of the information which the Russian officer in question gave his German friends reached my ears in perfectly innocent fashion, echoes of the same information are likely to have found their way to official and military quarters in Berlin and Tokyo. It would then be enough, if any secret agent of the OGPU, or other representative of the Russian intelligence service in Berlin or Tokyo, got wind of the source of this information, for the Russian officer to become suspect and ultimately to be put on trial. In the atmosphere of suspicion and alarm which surrounded the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937 this sort of thing, however harmless, might easily be magnified into the crime of treason.
V
What remains? Is Bolshevism, as Mussolini writes, ‘passing through a mortal crisis’ so that ‘the end cannot be far off’? This would, in my view, be a premature conclusion — a conclusion, moreover, which ought to give Mussolini and Hitler food for anxious thought. The Italian Fascist and the German Nazi systems have been built up ostensibly as the ramparts of the Italian and German social structures against the Bolshevist danger. The recorded fact that Mussolini himself never believed in the reality of a Bolshevist danger in Italy is not to the point. As he himself has put it, he climbed into power on the shoulders of those who did believe in the Bolshevist danger. More to the point is it that he and Hitler induced tens of millions of Italians and Germans, not to mention hundreds of millions elsewhere, to believe it. Fascism and Naziism have gained support in the world mainly by offering the multitudes who have something to lose a choice between two systems. One system, the Bolshevist, suppresses both private property and individual freedom. The other, the Nazi-Fascist, professes to respect private property, or capital, and only to suppress individual freedom as a means of saving those who forfeit their freedom from losing what property or capital they may have to lose. So multitudes, fearing for their pockets, have tacitly or explicitly acquiesced in the suppression of their individual liberties as being less bad than the loss of their property. But, if the end of Bolshevism is not far off, if the Bolshevist bugbear disappears and, with it, the ostensible threat to private property, can Mussolini and Hitler feel quite sure that their peoples will not begin to regret the loss of individual freedom and to demand that it be restored? If I were Mussolini or Hitler, I should pray that Bolshevism might continue to keep my frightened and libertyless dupes in the Fascist or Nazi fold.
But is Bolshevism nearing its end? Is Stalin really transforming it into a kind of Russian National Socialism? Is he tolerating, if not encouraging, the formation in Russia of a new bourgeoisie, a new aristocracy, a new official hierarchy? If so, the days of Bolshevism (in its Marxist form) are certainly numbered. For reasons independent of any of the Moscow trials I think they may be numbered. If so, it will be because the economic theories of Marx are radically unsound, because his doctrine of ‘surplus value’ does not hold water, because the fallacious nature of the reasoning on which it is based invalidates the whole principle of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ and because his ‘materialist interpretation of history’ cannot stand against the superior truth that men and nations do not live by bread alone. Had Trotsky and the orthodox Marxists succeeded in regaining control of Russia, with or without German and Japanese help, they would merely have restored bloody chaos. If anything remains of Stalin and his system, after present storms and discontents shall have subsided, he may turn out to have builded better than he knew. I am not yet inclined to write ‘Finis’ beneath the annals of Soviet Russia, if only because the Soviet system in itself, and apart from its Marxist fallacies, corresponds too closely to the Russian national character.
Yet what are we to make of a system that seems to be going the way of revolutionary France, where one sect of fanatics decapitated the members of other sects until they themselves reached the guillotine in their turn? And here I revert to the views of those British students of Russia referred to above. They knew and liked Sokolnikov, though they thought him a mysterious person, a fanatical revolutionary, and a consummate conspirator. They also knew Radek well. They have read the evidence of the Moscow trials and feel no doubt that the prisoners were guilty. Their explanation is that the behavior of these men is an effect of long-continued underground conspiracy to overthrow a Tsarist régime of absolute autocracy and cruel repression. Successive generations of Russian revolutionaries were hunted by the Tsar’s police, were in constant peril of imprisonment, flogging, and death, and so were moulded to a particular pattern of behavior which ended by becoming a fixed character. Lies and aliases, deceit and trickery, theft and assassination, filled their whole lives. Not all of them were heroic. Some among them succumbed to the temptation of betraying their comrades and became Tsarist spies and agents provocateurs.
This ‘pattern of behavior’ had analogies in other revolutionary struggles. It was not unknown in Scotland and England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The same pattern can be traced in Danton and Barras, Sieyès and Bonaparte, not to mention Talleyrand and Napoleon III. In Russia, which was, in 1900, on much the same level of morals and civilization as were England and France in 1700, this pattern of revolutionary behavior persists and is likely to persist. The Stalin group has now been on top for some time. Its opponents naturally employ the same revolutionary means they had used against the Tsarist Government. In 1932—1933, when the conspiracies against Stalin began to take shape, there were famine and crisis in Russia. The fate of the collective farms seemed to be trembling in the balance. It was only to be expected that those who thought Stalin’s policy wrong and disastrous should take to underground conspiracy and should invoke the aid of hostile foreign government, just as the English and Scottish nobility, statesmen, and ministers of religion did, a couple of centuries ago, when they called in alternately the Dutch and the French.
How long this pattern of behavior will last none can say. It is likely to last as long as the generation whose early lives were spent in underground conspiracies against the Tsar. But if Soviet Communism, or Stalin’s National Socialism, can succeed in solving the problem of poverty in the midst of plenty, and of gaining time for the new generations that have never known conspiracy to evolve a new type of Russian life, some degree of spontaneous stability may presently be attained. For the near future the prophecy which Lenin wrote to one of his followers in November 1922 holds good: ‘For a long time to come there will be doubts, uncertainty, suspicion, and treachery.’
To this diagnosis and forecast I have little to add, for I do not know whether the Russian people will be left to work out their own salvation or whether Germany, in default of success in attempts to despoil them by agreement, may not try the adventure of despoiling them by force. To some extent the answer to this doubt may lie in the hands of Great Britain. In the recent past, British policy has not invariably been valiant, wide, or perspicacious. At times it has even seemed to be directed by faint-hearted and purblind muddlers. It has been accompanied — as Sir Norman Angell shows in his latest book, The Defence of the Empire — by a series of retreats from positions which former generations of British statesmen, with the approval of their people, would stoutly have defended. Even to-day it is not certain that British Ministers understand that the loud demand of Nazi Germany for a return of Imperial Germany’s oversea colonies is in the nature of a bargaining card, or that this demand is unlikely to be pressed if Great Britain will close one eye while Nazi Germany carves out for herself a colonial empire nearer home at the expense of independent States in Central Europe and of Russia. Great is the power of the pretense that Naziism defends the Western world against Bolshevism; and of this pretense Hitler is an arch-exploiter.
Things may be heading for an almighty smash. The principles of democracy, individual freedom, and responsible representative government may be doomed to go down before the onslaught of totalitarian, deified States and their not less deified Leaders. Still, I have a notion that before this happens many millions of Britons will want to know the reason why it should happen; and that it need not happen at all if England speaks out in time and tells the world beforehand what she will do because the very laws of her existence must, in any event, make it impossible for her not to do it.