The actual formulation of the Soviet constitution was a matter of
practice in a developing democratic revolutionary power. There have been
a number of small formal changes, of readjustments of interdependent
parts in the machine, but I do not think either opponents or supporters
of the Soviet government can quarrel seriously with the following
statement:
Every workman, every peasant, in Russia has the right to vote in the
election of deputies to his local Soviet, which is made up of a number
of deputies corresponding to the number of electors. The local Soviets
choose their delegates to an All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. This
Ail-Russian Assembly elects its Central Executive Committee on a basis
of approximately one in five of the delegates to the Assembly. This
central executive committee controls, appoints and dismisses the
People's Commissaries who are the actual government. All decrees of
state importance are passed by the Central Executive Committee before
being issued as laws by the Council of People's Commissaries.
At each successive All-Russian Assembly of Soviets the executive
committee automatically resigns, and the Assembly as a whole expresses
its approval or disapproval of what has been done by its representatives
and by the Council of Commissaries during the period since the previous
All-Russian Assembly, and, electing a new Executive Committee, which in
political character accurately cor resounds to the party coloring of the
Assembly, insures that the controlling organ shall accurately reflect
the feeling of the electorate.
No limit is set to local re-election. Deputies are withdrawn and others
substituted for them whenever this seems necessary to the local
electorate. Thus the country is freed from the danger of finding itself
governed by the ghosts of its dead opinions, and, on the other hand,
those ghosts find themselves expeditiously laid in their graves as soon
as, becoming ghosts, they cease to have the right to rule.
Just as the Soviet constitution insures that the actual lawgivers shall
be in the closest touch with the people, just as it insures that in deed
instead of in amiable theory, the people shall be their own lawgivers,
so also it provides for intercommunication in a contrary direction. The
remotest atom on the periphery is not without its influence on the
centre. So also the centre through the Soviets affects the atoms on the
periphery. The institution of Soviets means that every minutest act of
the Council of People's Commissaries is judged and interpreted in
accordance with its own local conditions by each local Soviet. No other
form of government could give this huge diverse entity of Russia, with
its varying climates and races, with its plains, its teppes, its wild
mountains, the free local autonomy of interpretation which it needs. The
shepherd of the Caucasus, the Cossack from the Urals, and the fishermen
from the Yenisei cat sit together in the All-Russian Assembly, and know
that the laws whose principles they approve are not steel bands too
loose for one and throttling another, but are instruments which each
Soviet can fashion out in its own way for the special needs of its own
community.
This constitution is one particularly apt for Russia. It is also
particularly apt for a country in a time of revolution. It affords a
real dictatorship to the class that is in revolt, and such dictatorship
is necessary, since no one could expect from members of the class that
is being ousted from its place of domination whole-hearted assistance in
its own undoing. These democrats in other countries and in Russia who do
not understand what is happening under their eyes exclaim at the
unfairness of excluding the bourgeoisie from power. They forget, or have
never realized, that the object of the social revolution is to put an
end to the existence of a bourgeois, or exploiting class, not merely to
make it powerless. If exploitation is destroyed then there can be no
class of exploiters, and the present exclusion of the bourgeoisie from
the government is merely a means of hastening and rendering less painful
the transition of the bourgeois from his parasitic position to the more
honorable position of equality with his fellow workers. Once the
conditions of parasitism, privilege and exploitation have been destroyed,
the old divisions of the class struggle will automatically have
disappeared.
By the nature of things it has so happened that practically all the
foreign observers of events in Russia have belonged to the privileged
classes in their respective countries, and have been accustomed to
associate with the privileged classes in Russia. They have consequently
found it difficult to escape from their class in judging the story
happening before their eyes. Those working men sent from the Allied
countries, less with the idea of studying the revolution, but of telling
it to do what the-Allies wanted, have also been men specially chosen,
and deprived by their very mandates of the clear eyes and open mind they
should have had. Socialists especially, who had long dreamed of
revolution, found it particularly difficult to recognize in this cloudy,
tremendous struggle the thing which their dreams had softened for them
into something more docile, less self-willed. Nothing has been more
remarkable or less surprising than the fact that of all the observers
sent here from abroad those men have seen the thing clearest who by
their upbringing and standards of life have been furthest from the
revolutionary movement.
I do not propose to recapitulate the programme of the Soviet government,
nor to spend minutes, when I have so few, in discussing in detail their
efforts towards an equitable land settlement, or their extraordinarily
interesting work in building up, under the stress of famine and of war,
an economic industrial organization which shall facilitate the eventful
socialization of Russia. That is material for many letters, and here I
have not time for one. I therefore take the two events which have been
most misused in blackening the Soviet government to those who should
have been its friends. These were the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly and the negotiations which ended; temporarily at least, in a
separate peace between Russia and the Central Empires. I take these two
events, and try to show what happened in each case and why the
reproaches flung at the Soviets on account of them were due either to
misunderstanding or to malice.
The Constituent Assembly.
I suppose in America, as in England, the dissolution of the Constituent
Assembly was one of the events that best served the people who were
anxious to persuade public opinion that the Soviet government was a
government of usurpation holding its own by force, and not representing
the will of the people. I think that, without any special pleading, it
will be possible to bring together facts which put an entirely different
light on that event. The mere fact that the parties opposed to the
Bolsheviks had spent eight months in murdering the Constituent Assembly,
putting it off day by day in hopes that the country would change, and
that the revolution would come crawling home asking for a quiet life,
leaving the gentlemen to do the work of the government, should be set
against the short speech of the sailor who told the assembly it had
talked enough, that its guards were tired, and that really it was time
to go to bed. It should be remembered that the Constituent Assembly was
for neither party an end in itself. For each party it represented a
political instrument, not a political aim. It was a tool, not a task. It
was thrown away when further use of it would have damaged the purpose
for which it was invented. Look back, for a moment, on its history. The
very idea of a constituent assembly was first put forward by the Soviet,
by the very body, which, in the end, opposed its realization. The Soviet,
in those exhilarating days of March, 1917, declared that without such an
assembly the future of Russia could not be decided. The effect of this
declaration was to make impossible Miliukov's plan of choking the
revolution at birth. Miliukov, in the first days of the revolution,
tried by means of quick jugglery with abdications, a regency and a
belated constitution, to profit by the elemental uprising of the masses
to secure an exchange of authority out of the hands of the Tsar's
bureaucracy into-the hands of the bourgeoisie. For him, the revolution
was to be a tram car which would stop conveniently at the point where
the Cadet party wished to alight. The idea of the Constituent Assembly
was like a good big label on that tram car showing that it had a further
destination. It became clear at once that the car would not stop at the
point that Miliukov had chosen. The next hope of the bourgeoisie was to
keep it moving to prevent it stopping anywhere else until the passengers
should be so tired of moving that they would be glad to stop anywhere
and would be amenable and peaceable on alighting. The bourgeois parties
deliberately postponed the meeting of the Constituent Assembly, since it
was clear that, were it to meet at once, its members would be
practically identical with those of the Soviet, so that the voice of the
bourgeoisie would be unheard in the roar of the waking masses. The aim
of the bourgeoisie was (i) to postpone the elections until the electors
had wearied of the Soviets, and (2) to postpone such reforms as most
concerned the destruction of their own privileges (such as the land
reforms) until they could summon a Constituent Assembly whose character
would be agreeable to themselves. While the bourgeoisie held this
attitude it was natural that the Soviets, and, most of all the left
party in the Soviets should use the Constituent Assembly as a means of
showing up the duplicity of their bourgeois opponents. Gradually
circumstances changed. The bourgeoisie lost hope, and transferred their
allegiance to the moderate majority of the Soviets, since they began to
realize that the marked increase of Bolshevism heralded something from
their point of view even worse than the Constituent Assembly as it would
have been in April or May. The extremely flexible representation of the
Soviets showed that the masses were coming nearer and nearer to the
position of the Bolsheviks, or rather to a readiness to support the
Bolshevik leaders in view of the manifest failure of the coalition
government to get peace or indeed anything else that the masses desired.
The Constituent Assembly became now the last hope of the original
moderate members of the Soviet executive, who felt the ground of real
support in the active political masses slipping from beneath their feet.
At this point came the October revolution, when the coalition, already a
ghost, and a discredited ghost, was laid in its grave. Immense Bolshevik
majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets, and then in the
All-Russian Assembly of Soviets, proved that the mass of active
political opinion in the country fully approved of the step that had
been taken.
Then followed the elections to the Constituent Assembly (organized and
canvassed before the October revolution) in which there was a majority
against the Bolsheviks. The explanation of this is perfectly simple. It
lies in the fact that a revolution is a very uncomfortable thing for
everybody who takes part in it, and that great numbers of people, during
the preceding eight months had come to look forward to the Constituent
Assembly much as children look forward to the word FINISH at the end of
a difficult lesson-book. The Constituent Assembly meant for these people
an end to political debate, an end even to political life, an end anyhow
to revolution. In every country it is only a small minority that really
concerns itself with politics. Outside that minority is a big
unconscious voting material, which does not concern itself with active
politics, and asks nothing from its government except to be let alone.
This indifferent mass which took very little part in the living politics
of the Soviets was ready to vote for the Constituent Assembly in a sort
of dim belief that those elections mean a return to quiet life, and
should therefore be encouraged. It voted much as rich, men give alms to
a charity. It voted in much the spirit of the rich man who is willing to
give alms to a deserving charity for which he would be most unwilling to
do any real work. It knew vaguely that the bourgeoisie were fairly bad,
and it had also heard that the Bolsheviks were terrible people, It
therefore put its votes on the side of those people against whom it had
heard nothing in particular. And the result was that the live part of
the nation was faced almost at the moment of coming into their own with
a legacy in the form of an assembly the majority in which was made up of
the very men whom they had just overthrown. The question was a plain one.
Should the conscious workers of the country submit to the dead weight of
the unconscious, even if that dead weight were artfully fashioned by
their enemies into the form of the very tool with which they had been
successfully working? The question was put at a moment of extreme
difficulty, when acceptance of the Constituent Assembly would have
relieved the Bolsheviks (at the New Year)-of tremendous responsibility.
It would have been an easy way out, for cowards. But the Bolsheviks were
not afraid of responsibility, were not looking for easy ways out, were
confident that the whole of the active, conscious population was behind
them, and swept the Assembly aside. Not anywhere in Russia did the
indifferent mass stir in protest. The Assembly died like the Tsardom,
and the coalition before it. Not any one of the three showed in the
manner of its dying that it retained any right to live.
Peace Negotiations
The day after the October revolution Lenin proposed and the Assembly
carried the declaration on peace with its promise to do away with the
secret diplomacy that had kept Russia in the war beyond her strength,
and allowed small groups to gamble in the lives of nations. On that day,
October 26th (old style), the whole world was told that the new Russian
government was ready to conclude peace itself, and invited all the
fighting countries to put an end to the war " without annexation [that
is without the seizure of other people's land and without the forced
incorporation of other nationalities] and without indemnity." The
declaration was sent out by radio on November 7th, o. s. Some
governments prevented its publication, others sought to disguise its
true character and to give it the appearance of an offer of separate
peace. The Allies replied to it with a threat conveyed to the Russian
Commander-in-Chief, Dukhonin, that further steps towards separate peace
would have serious consequences. It should, of course, be remembered
that the Allies were in a position of peculiar difficulty. Practically
all the Russians who were able to give direct information to members of
Allied governments belonged to the classes that had persistently fed
themselves and others with lies as to the character of the Bolsheviks.
They believed that the Soviets could hold authority only for a few days
and they persuaded the Allied governments to share that belief. The next
step of the Soviets was an agreement, made across the front itself,
stopping all military operations between the Black Sea and the Baltic.
This was followed by yet another invitation to the Allies to join Russia
in peace negotiations. Meanwhile the German government with one eye on
the military party and the other on the feeling of German Labor, which
at that time was unrestful and excited by the Russian revolution, was
hesitating over its answer. I shall not here attempt any detailed
history of what followed. My only point is that the Soviet government
cannot be accused of having sought and obtained a separate peace. The
first aim of the Bolsheviks was, as it always will be, a Universal
Social Revolution. They hoped to illustrate to the workers of the world
the possibility of honorable peace, and nothing would have pleased them
better than to find that such a peace was rejected by all governments
alike, so that the workers convinced of its possibility should rise and
overthrow them. That was their general aim. They, least of all
governments in the world, were interested in a German victory. Their
proposal was for a general peace, for the peace which Russia, in agony,
had been waiting for a year.
What followed ? Step by step, they published every detail of their
negotiations over the armistice, every word of the German replies. Then
came the first German answer as to the conditions of peace, in which
Germany and her allies expressed themselves ready to make the Russian
formula the basis of negotiation. The Bolsheviks believe that if the
Allies had even at that late hour joined them, so that in withdrawing
from that position the Germans would have been facing a continuance of
the war as a whole instead of merely a failure to obtain peace with the
weakest of the Allies, peace on the Russian formula would have been
attainable. The Allies left them, unrecognized, ignored, to continue
their struggle single-handed. The Germans now took a bolder line and the
hand outstretched in spurious friendship became a grasping claw. The
first Russian delegation came home to confer with the Soviet government
as to what was to be done in this new situation when the peace they had
promised their exhausted army, their tortured working classes, seemed to
be fading like a mirage. Trotski at the head of a reinforced delegation
went to Brest with one of the most daring plans with which any David has
sought to destroy his Goliath.
The absence of the Allies had deprived him of the possibility of
exhibiting to the working classes of the world the inability of their
present governments to conclude a peace in which should be neither
conqueror nor conquered. He now attempted to bring about a revolution in
Germany or to obtain such a peace for Russia by making the German
government itself illustrate in their negotiations with him their utter
disregard for the expressed wishes of the German people. He did actually
succeed in causing huge strikes both in Austria and in Germany, and it
is impossible for anyone to say that he would not have finally succeeded
in hitting the Goliath of Force opposed to him fairly between the eyes
with this shining pebble of an idea, which was the only weapon at his
command, if, at the last moment his aim had not been deflected, and the
target shifted, by the treachery of the handful of men who in the
Ukraine were resisting by every means in their power the natural
development of the Soviets. These men, preferring to sell their country
to Germany than to lose the reins of government themselves, opened
separate negotiations, thereby breaking the unity of the ideal front
which Trotski opposed to the Germans. The Germans saw that with part of
that front they could come immediately to terms. Instantly their tone in
the negotiations changed. They persuaded their own people that the
Russians were themselves to blame for not getting the peace they
required, and that a just peace was possible only with the Ukraine.
Meanwhile the soldiers and workers of the Ukraine were gradually
obtaining complete power over their own country, so that when Germany
actually concluded peace with the Ukraine, the so-called government
whose signatures were attached to that treacherous agreement was
actually in asylum in German headquarters and unable to return to its
own supposed capital except under the protection of German bayonets. The
Soviet triumphed in the Ukraine, and declared its solidarity with Russia.
The Germans, like the Allies, preferred to recognize the better dressed
persons who were ready to conclude peace with them in the name of a
country which had definitely disowned them. From that moment the Brest
peace negotiations were doomed to failure. Trotski made a last desperate
appeal to the workers of Germany. He said, " We will not sign your
robber's peace, but we demobilize our army and declare that Russia is no
longer at war. Will the German people allow you to advance on a
defenseless revolution ? "
The Germans did advance, not at first in regular regiments, but in small
groups of volunteers who had no scruples in the matter. Many German
soldiers, to their eternal honor, refused to advance, and were shot. The
demobilization of the Russian army meant little, because it had long
ceased to be anything but a danger to the peaceful population in its
rear. The Soviet had only the very smallest real force, and that, as yet,
unorganized, with enthusiasm but without confidence, utterly unpracticed
in warfare, consisting chiefly of workmen, who, as was natural, were the
first to understand what it was they had to defend. It soon became clear
that serious resistance was impossible. The Soviet government was faced
with a choice: to collapse in a quite unequal struggle; or to sign a
shameful peace. Many thought that the cause of revolution would be best
served by their deaths, and were ready to die. Lenin doubted the
efficacy of such a rhetorical gesture, and believed that the secession
of Russia from the war would insure the continuation of the war by the
imperialistic groups until such time as other countries reached the
same-exhaustion as had been reached by Russia, when in his opinion,
revolution would be inevitable. He held that, for the future of the
World Revolution, the best that could be done would be the preservation
even in seriously limited territory of the Soviet government, as a
nucleus of revolution, as an illustration of the possibility of
revolution, until that moment when the workers of Russia should be
joined by the workers of the world. His opinion carried the majority,
first of the Executive Committee, then of the fourth Ail-Russian
Assembly. The Germans replied to the Russian offer to sign peace with a
statement which was an ironic parody of the Russian declaration at Brest:
the Russians had said, "We will not sign peace, but the war is ended."
The Germans said, " We agree to peace, but the war shall continue."
And, indeed, while the Soviet government moved to Moscow, the Germans
using in the south the pretext of the Ukrainian Rada, and in the north
that of the bourgeois Finnish government, advanced through the Ukraine
to the outlet of the Don, and in the north to the very gates of
Petrograd. The matter stands so, as I write these lines. By the time you
read them much will have happened that it is impossible now to foresee.
The Soviet Government and the Allies
From the moment of the October revolution on, the best illustration of
the fact that the Soviet government is the natural government of the
Russian people, and has deep roots in the whole of the conscious
responsible part of the working classes and the peasantry, has been the
attitude of the defeated minorities who oppose it. Whereas the
Bolsheviks worked steadily in the Soviets when the majority was against
them, and made their final move for power only when assured that they
had an overwhelming majority in the Soviets behind them, their opponents
see their best hope of regaining power not in the Soviets, not even in
Russia itself, but in some extraordinary intervention from without. By
asking for foreign help against the Soviet government they prove that
such help should not be given, and that they do not deserve it. The
Soviet has stood for six months and more, absolutely unshaken h^ any
movement against it inside Russia. In the Ukraine the anti-Soviet
minority asked for intervention and received it. German bayonets, German
organization, destroyed the Soviets of the Ukraine, and then destroyed
the mock government that had invited their help. We, the Allies,
supported that anti-Soviet minority, and, in to far as our help was
efficacious, contributed our share in obtaining for Germany a victorious
progress from one end of the Black Sea coast to the other. In helping
the Ukrainian minority we helped the Germans to secure Ukrainian bread
and coal and iron that would otherwise have gone to help Russia to
recuperate. In Finland we repeated the mistake. We gave at least moral
help to the White Finns, simply because they were opposed to the Red
Finns, who were supported by the Soviets. Now, too late, we realize that
the White Finns were the pawns of Germany, and that in the defeat of the
Red Finns we witnessed the defeat of the only party in Finland which was
bound, by its socialistic nature, to be an enemy of imperialistic
GerDo not let us make the same mistake in Russia. If the Allies
lend help to any minority that cannot overturn the Soviets without their
help, they will be imposing on free Russia a government which will be in
perpetual need of external help, and will, for simple reasons of
geography, be bound to take that help from Germany. Remember that for
the German autocracy, conscious of the socialistic mass beneath it, the
mere existence of the Soviet government of Russia is a serious danger.
Remember that any non-Soviet government in Russia would be welcomed by
Germany and, reciprocally, could not but regard Germany as its protector.
Remember that the revolutionary movement in Eastern Europe, no less than
the American and British navies, is an integral part of the Allied
blockade of the Central Empires.
And, apart from the immediate business of the war, remember that Germany
is seeking by every means, open and secret, to obtain such command over
Russia's resources as will in the long run allow her to dictate her will
to Russia's people. Remember that the Soviet government, fully aware of
this, would be glad of your help, of your cooperation, would be glad
even to give you control over some part of her resources, if only to
prevent that ominous ultimate dominion within Russia of a single foreign
power.
Remember all these things, if indeed you need, as I think you do not
need, such selfish motives to prompt you to the support of men who, if
they fail, will fail only from having hoped too much. Every true man is
in some sort, until his youth dies and his eyes harden, the potential
builder of a New Jerusalem. At some time or other, every one of us has
dreamed of laying his brick in such a work. And even if this thing that
is being builded here with tears and blood is not the golden city that
we ourselves have dreamed, it is still a thing to the sympathetic
understanding of which each one of us is bound by whatever he owes to
his own youth. And if each one of us, then, all the more each nation by
what it owes to those first daring days of its existence, when all the
world looked askance upon its presumptuous birth, America was young once,
and there were men in America who would have brought in foreign aid to
reestablish their dominion over a revolted nation. Are those the men to
whom America now looks back with gratitude and pride?
Well, writing at a speed to break my pen, and with the knowledge that in
a few hours the man leaves Moscow who is to carry this letter with him
to America, I have failed to say much that I would have said. I write
now with my messenger waiting for my manuscript and somehow or other,
incoherent, incomplete as it is, must bring it to an end. I will end
with a quotation from your own Emerson: " What is the scholar, what is
the man for, but for hospitality to every new thought of his time? Have
you leisure, power, property, friends? you shall be the asylum and
patron of every new thought, every unproven opinion, every untried
project, which proceeds out of good will and honest seeking. All the
newspapers, all the tongues of today will of course at first defame what
is noble; but you who hold not of today, not of the Times, but of the
Everlasting, are to stand for it; and the highest compliment man ever
receives from heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discredited
angels." No one contends that the Bolsheviks are angels. I ask only that
men shall look through the fog of libel that surrounds them and see that
the ideal for which they are struggling; in the only way in which they
can struggle, is among those lights which every man of young and honest
heart sees before him somewhere on the road, and not among those other
lights from which he resolutely turns away. These men who have made the
Soviet government in Russia, if they must fail, will fail with clean
shields and clean hearts, having striven for an ideal which will live
beyond them. Even if they fail, they will none the less have written a
page of history more daring than any other which I can remember in the
story of the human race. They are writing it amid showers of mud from
all the meaner spirits in their country, in yours and in my own. But,
when the thing-is over, and their enemies have triumphed, the mud will
vanish like black magic at noon, and that page will be as white as the
snows of Russia, and the writing on it as bright as the gold domes that
I used to see glittering in the sun when I looked from my windows in
Petrograd. And when in after years men read that page they will judge
your country and mine, your race and mine, by the help or hindrance they
gave to the writing of it.
ARTHUR RANSOME.
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