# The Origin and Growth of the Russian Soviets

THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE RUSSIAN SOVIETS
By M. PHILIPS PRICE.
PRICE THREEPENCE
Published by the People's Russian Information Bureau, 152 Fleet Street, E.C.4
Printed by the National Labour Press, Ltd., 8/9/10 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C. 4. and at Manchester and Leicester.
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THE ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE RUSSIAN SOVIETS.
At the end of the eighteenth century France, after two years of embittered struggle, threw off the tyranny of a feudal aristocracy. During this struggle she was surrounded by the armed forces of a coalition of European kings, which invaded her territories to impose upon her the old political system. Prussian peasants shed their blood in the Argonnes that "Le grand Monarque" might once more oppress her people. British seamen died at Toulon that feudal seigneurs might direct again the councils of Versailles. Looking back on these times to-day, we admit that the rôle of the English and of other European governments during the French Revolution was not a creditable one.
A little over a century has passed. Feudalism has given way to modern bourgeoisdom; the Divine Right of Kings to the Divine Right of Mammon. Russia, which was never touched by the purging fire of the French Revolution, has groaned under a threefold tyranny—a theocratic Tsarism, relic of her proximity to Asia; an agrarian feudalism which escaped the European conflagrations of last century; a middle class, grown up under the influence of Western industrialism, but demoralised and corrupted by its two companions. At the beginning of this century, the governing power in Russia rested on these three rotten pillars—two of them decaying relics of a bygone age, the third an abortion of modern times. Those who knew the social conditions in Eastern Europe could perceive that in the general break-up which would inevitably follow the war in those parts, the collapse of the old order in Russia would be the first act of a great world drama. How did the ruling classes of England, France, and Germany treat the new Russia, which, phoenix-like, arose upon the ruins of the old? The following lines, I think, will help to show that the treatment of the new Russia was as little creditable to those ruling classes as was the treatment of the French Revolution by the coalition of European kings.
The Russian Revolution was set in motion by elemental, anarchic forces, which had been pent up throughout the ages, and which, like a lava-flow, burst the overlying crust of convention, unreality, and insincerity which held them down. Everyone was discontented with Tsarism. The war, unpopular with the masses from the first, caused untold miseries. Famine, of which the Bolsheviks are falsely accused of being the authors, was already raging in the autumn of 1916, and got steadily worse under Kerensky, as the war, like a great pump, sucked the life-blood out of the country's industries. I know from my own observation as ​a war correspondent, that, after the summer of 1916, the Russian army was no longer fit for the offensive, not owing to Bolshevik propaganda but simply owing to the impossibility, in an economically undeveloped country, of feeding and supporting a fifteen million army in a three years' war. By the winter of 1916–1917, when no one in Russia except a few intellectuals had ever heard of Bolsheviks, the principal towns of Central Russia were filled with deserters. One of the Tsar's retired diplomats even admitted in the columns of the "Novaya Jizn," in July, 1917, that the Russian Revolution was nothing more than "a mass uprising against the war." But it was something more besides.
The working classes of the Russian towns used to live in conditions of want and misery which were probably without parallel in Europe. They were forced to work such long hours that they often dropped with fatigue. They were systematically underfed. The factories where they worked were spy-dens. Nor was the peasant's lot any better. Half the land of Russia belonged to private landlords, the Church and the Imperial family; and that was the best half. On it the peasants had to work like serfs. The rest of the land, much of it forest and swamp, was left to them to get what they could out of it. The corn produced on the good land (a large percentage of the cereal production of Russia) was systematically exported under the bounty system to pay for the Tsar's warships and armaments, while the peasants in the villages near by were often starving. Add to this the miseries of the three years war, and it is not difficult to see why, as soon as the rumour got about over the length and breadth of the gigantic plain that "little father Tsar" was no more, that policemen had been locked up by the workmen in Petrograd, that Cossacks had gone over to the masses, the spell-binding discipline, born of fear, vanished. The flood in fact was let loose. Everywhere throughout the land in these days squads of soldiers got together to talk things over. Groups of workmen hung about the factory shops, and peasants crowded round the village commune building. The same word was on everyone's lips. "What next?" These thousands of informal meetings that took place from the Baltic provinces to the Pacific coast, from the Arctic Circle to the oases of Turkestan, were not summoned by anyone. They were the creation of the free spirit of man, which had just burst the bonds of an archaic, now useless, form of society. They were the first rude instruments, now blunt, soon to be sharpened, which were to build the new order of society. They were in fact the embryo Soviets.
ORDER OUT OF CHAOS.
For the new social order the first necessity was a new discipline. The informal gatherings of workmen, soldiers and peasants, which were called Soviets (the Russian name for ​Council), had now this task before them. In Petrograd, on the second day of the March revolution, the garrison soldiers issued an order that there was to be no more saluting of officers, and that no order was to be obeyed unless it was countersigned by the soldiers' Soviet. Inasmuch as the bulk of the officers and all the generals were known to be Monarchists or, at the best, only supporters of a bourgeois republic, the necessary measures had to be taken to protect the Revolution. But soon the soldiers' Soviets began to go further. "What is the meaning of this war with Germany?" began to come from thousands of throats. "Is there no means of stopping it by appealing to the German soldiers direct?" they argued. Surely a natural and obvious, if somewhat unconventional thing for war-weary soldiers to do. Soldiers, using Soviets to fraternise with people whom they no longer wished to fight, became now a common phenomenon. And yet none had heard of Bolsheviks in these days.
In the factories during this time meetings were held and committees elected. The latter were to see that wages kept pace with the cost of living. They were to look into the proprietors' books, and see how much war profit was being made, and lop off enough to fill up that ever narrowing margin between weekly wages and weekly expenses. And was the peasant with his dessiatine of land, on which he had to starve, going to allow the rich black earth near by to fill the barns of the "baryn?" Whom had he to fear now? The "Zemsky Nachalnik" (rural police spy) was sitting in the local jail, whither he was used to send others. The fruit of that seigneur's land was to go to the peasants' barns that year. And it went—somewhat anarchically, it is true, and not without heart-burnings as to how much should go to each peasant. But the spell was broken here also. Russia was steadily moving down the road which led to a new social order.
By the summer of 1917, the class which considered itself the rightful successor to the Tsarist heritage—the bourgeoisie, manufacturers and war-profit parvenus—began to recover from the shock of the revolution, which had gone so far past what they considered respectable. Girondin-like, they began to organise resistance to "anarchy," to insist on discipline in the army, to demand that every citizen of the republic should carry out his patriotic duty. Alas! what duty? To shoot and be shot at by German workmen, in order that Russian war-profit parvenus should dominate at Constantinople, and French bankers exploit the Alsace-Lorraine iron mines! No, the time for this had gone by. The spell had been broken. The people now must know the reason why they were to die. But the Russian bourgeoisie could not read the signs of the times. The Mene-Tekel hand was writing on the wall, but they could not see it. Desperate, they organised the Korniloff rebellion, which only aggravated the strife. This rebellion first showed the real power of the Soviets. The ​soldiers' committees put their men into the field telegraphs, they had their comrades on the railways. No message of the counter-revolution passed. Their messages for help and instructions flew all over Russia. The counter-revolution vanished; but the war did not. The soldiers came to the Soviet offices and said: "Start negotiations with the Germans for a general peace; we shall stay in the trenches till the first snows, and after that we go home with our rifles and divide up the landlords' land." No, it was not Bolsheviks who said this. Lenin at the time was in hiding, and accused by the very soldiers who were saying this of being a German spy. Moreover Lenin's friends who had control of most of the soldiers' Soviets by September, 1917, were trying to calm these war-weary soldiers; and indeed, when they came into power in October, exhorted them at any rate to remain in the trenches till peace was signed, and not demobilise anarchically and turn Russia into a chaos. A mighty power—the will to peace and international solidarity—had laid hold of the psychology of the Russian masses. That power was manifesting itself in disorderly anarchic ways, because it was crude, elemental, and sprung from the masses themselves. If the Bolsheviks had not put themselves at the head of that movement, some other unknown group would have done so and have become world famous. The Bolsheviks, although they are by no means pacifists, finding the movement there, led and directed it into orderly channels. For they held there would be no real peace in the world till the class which was interested in war was removed. So they captured the elemental impulse of the masses for peace and turned it against those classes, which, they considered, alone stood in the way of peace. Soldiers' Soviets, those informal bodies, which had sprung up spontaneously in the first days of the Revolution, were used by them as the channels through which these elemental impulses could be expressed to the outer world in a language of reason.
A similar task fell to the lot of the workers' Soviets. All through the summer of 1917 Petrograd and Moscow workmen tried to better their conditions through their own elected factory or shop stewards' committees. But every step they took to control the action of the employers was met by counter-measures of sabotage, and often of open resistance by "white guards," hired by the employers to defend the "sacred rights of property." Chaos increased. One group of workmen often struggled with another group in the attempt to get hold of the much-needed raw materials. Meanwhile famine became worse and worse, and the Workers' Soviets were in danger of turning into committees for grabbing whatever they could get for their own members. Then the Bolsheviks came along, and in October, when they came into power, found the Workmen's Soviets already there, gave the latter political as well as economic power, and began to mobilise the disorganised proletarian masses.
​And so with the peasants. During the summer of 1917, the landlords and their agents among the war-profit parvenus organised resistance to the peasant land committees. Peasant elders were arrested and thrown into prison, some were even shot. The peasants replied by sacking the landlords' mansions. Anarchy was raging in the provinces when the Bolsheviks came into power in October. The latter, restraining the righteous indignation of the peasants, declared their informal committees, the first-fruits in the villages of the March Revolution, to be the legal authority, possessing the right to take the landlords' land and to work it in the interests of the whole community. Long and difficult has been the struggle of the Bolsheviks with the disorderly forces among the Russian peasantry. The latter, divided into rich and poor, struggled among themselves for the landlords' land, split up into two contending factions—one of small proprietors and rich speculators, the other of labourers or those peasants who hire no labour. And the rural Soviet became the champion of this last class of peasants. Thus the seed sown in the soil of anarchic revolt germinated into the young shoot, which fed in the atmosphere of order and discipline.
THE STRUGGLE WITH GERMAN IMPERIALISM.
The regeneration of Russia could only begin when once the Soviets had completed their development and had come to the zenith of their power. For they were the only organised bodies in the land which, thanks to their spontaneous growth from the masses, were capable of replacing the rule of Tsarism and of its middle-class satellites. After October, 1917, therefore, it seemed as if order through Soviets would prevail over the chaos, bred in the first days of the March Revolution. For the working classes, schooling themselves in their factory and village committees, were fighting famine and struggling to raise production. But the war was still nominally going on with the Prussian war lords. The country was open to any tyrant who chose to walk in it. The soldiers had nearly all gone from the front by Christmas, 1917. The Bolshevik leaders of the Soviets had now the most terrific task before them. They had to secure some sort of peace, in order to give the ruined and exhausted land a breathing space and the workers a chance to repair the damage of the war. If there were no peace, anarchy and famine would submerge the whole land. Would the Governments of Western Europe allow the Russian people that peace which alone could alleviate their sufferings?
There is probably nothing more tragic in modern history than the picture of revolutionary Russia, struggling with the German war lords and deserted by the Allies. Not possessing any material resources to enforce the justice of his cause, Trotsky had to rely upon the conscience and sense of justice of the Western world. This was the time when the Allies, if they had known ​the day of their visitation, if they had understood what immense moral forces were driving the Russian Revolution, would have declared their peace programme, and, with Trotsky, would have exposed to the world the cynical intrigues of the Russian militarists. The Allied Governments did not do this, because they could not. They did not dare to face their people and tell them that they too had plans of conquest. The moment for uniting the moral front of the Allies with that of revolutionary Russia passed. It never came again.
Russia was thus left alone in the world to face the German war lords. Two courses were open to her. She could either play the idealist and decline to accept any peace which did not embody her principles in toto; or she could pursue Real-Politik and, estimating all the forces which were making for the internal breakup of her enemies, could make an agreement with them as a temporary expedient. In the days preceding the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace two very fundamental human impulses were seen struggling together inside the Russian Revolution. The one was altruistic, ready for self-sacrifice, Brunnhilda-like, upon the flaming pyre of an idea. The other was wise and calculating, prepared to save what could be saved now in order to gain the more surely in the end. The struggle between these two impulses, old as the human race itself, was reflected in the controversy between those among the Russian revolutionaries who would sign the Brest-Litovsk peace, and those who would not. The Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Anarchists in Russia, like artists, lived only for their ideals, which they would realise at once, or else would perish. The greater part of the Bolsheviks and the hungry masses, following Lenin, lived not only for their ideals but for the means to realise them. The former, rather than sign the Brest-Litovsk peace renounced all claim to participation in the government, and resorted to acts of individual terror in the hope of striking fear into the breasts of the tyrants. The latter recoiled, pour mieux sauter, and fostered their forces till the day came, when they knew they could, strike.
The Russian lords, not because they wanted to but because they had to, gave a breathing space to the Russian Revolution. For they were engaged in playing their last card in a desperate, terriffic onslaught on France. The Soviet Government of Russia is accused of being responsible for this onslaught; but I submit that its tactics formed an important part of the armoury which finally broke the power of Prussian militarism. The very fact that the politically non-conscious elements of the German people got a taste of peace on the East front, broke their will to war, "If we can have peace with Russia," their minds instinctively argued, "why can we not have it also with the Allies?" But month after month went by and they began to see that the ​German army must either conquer the world or else make a compromise peace. They knew they could not do the former because of America; their own war lords would not let them do the latter. But the example of the peace with Russia was before them, and, seeing it, their spirit of rebellion against the war rose ever stronger. The German towns began to fill with deserters, workers struck, discipline collapsed and with it the army. For the Russian revolutionaries knew how to make use of this new psychology in the German people's mind. The peace on the Eastern front was made use of to flood the Ukraine with Bolshevik agents, who spread revolutionary literature broadcast, and who within a few months had turned the Kaiser's glorious, "Heer im Osten" into a hybrid between a rabble and a revolutionary committee. M. Joffe, while playing at diplomacy with the Kaiser's ministers in Berlin, was distributing pamphlets right and left, calling upon the German proletariat to overthrow their tyrants. The fear and hatred in which the propertied classes of Germany held the Bolsheviks can be seen by the fact that, at the moment of writing, Bolsheviks are pining in German prisons, are hunted like hares and murdered by the armed hooligans of the Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske Government of "Socialist" Germany. I ask an unprejudiced observer: Does this look as if the Bolsheviks were the agents of German Imperialism?
THE ALLIED INTERVENTION.
The months that immediately followed the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace were used by the Soviet Government of Russia for realising two objectives. The first was the building up of a Red proletarian army which would be a barrier in the East to Prussian militarism. The second was the reconstruction of the economic life of the country upon Socialist principles, which would be an example to the proletariat of Central Europe and undermine their loyalty to their own Imperialist war lords. If the Allied governments, even at this period of the Revolution, had chosen to examine the facts, they would have seen that with clean hands they had nothing to fear from working with Bolshevik Russia. But the hands of the Allies were not clean. London and Paris had become since the early months of 1918 a centre of all the reactionary emigrants from Russia. Sinister forces on the Stock Exchanges dreamed of seeing in power the same ministers of Tsarism to whom they had lent money in the past, and who were expected to remain their contented slaves in the future. Instead of responding to the invitation of Russia to send instructors to drill the Red Army, reorganise the railways, and open concessions in payment for the Tsar's war-loans, the Allied Governments became responsible for one of the most foolish as well as abominable acts of modern history. In May 1918 there was formed in most of the chief towns of Great Russia, under the direction of ​General Alexeieff, a secret society of Tsarist officers and members of the bourgeoisie, whose aim it was to organise counter-revolutionary guards and overthrow the Soviet Republic at a given moment. Letters discovered by the Soviet authorities at this time prove that close relations existed between General Alexeieff and the French Military Mission in Russia. The plot of the officers' secret society was discovered, but the majority of persons implicated escaped, and in June took up their activities in the towns of East European Russia. Plans were then worked out by General Alexeieff and the French Military Mission to seize the towns on the Volga, cut off the food from Central Russia, and draw the country into the war again by establishing the eastern front on a line running from Archangel to the mouth of the Don. The Czecho-Slovak volunteer forces, which had been on the south-western front before the Brest-Litovsk peace, were taken under the protection of the French Military Mission. The Czecho-Slovak commanders asked for leave to go to the West European front, and the Soviet Government gave this permission. Their troops were therefore sent by slow stages across Russia to Vladivostock, where they were to embark for France. About the middle of June the Soviet authorities became aware of the fact that during the previous weeks the sum of eleven million roubles had been paid by the French Consul in Moscow to the Czecho-Slovak National Council, and eighty thousand pounds by the British Consul. Becoming suspicious of the objects for which this large sum of money was paid, the Soviet authorities asked for an explanation, and meanwhile delayed the transport of the Czecho-Slovak troops. The latter, having been duly prepared by propaganda to believe that the Bolsheviks were laying a trap for them to hand them over to the Germans, lost their heads and seized the railway stations of those towns in East Russia where they happened to be at the moment. These towns were all on the lines drawn up on the plans of General Alexeieff's secret officers' society and the French Military Mission. As soon as the frightened Czecho-Slovaks had made their impulsive coup, they found themselves surrounded by Alexeieff's officer guards, led by Frenchmen, and were forced to follw them in the war which the latter immediately declared against the Soviet Government of Russia. Thus the way to a reconciliation was blocked by the carefully prepared plans of the counter-revolutionaries, who made the Czecho-Slovaks their tools. The counter-revolution became an accomplished fact, and Central Russia, cut off from Ukrainian corn by the Germans, was now deprived of its last corn stores on the Volga. The people who were responsible for this hoped that the famine in that part of Russia where the Soviet Government still existed would increase as a result of the Czecho-Slovak coup, and that the masses would rise in revolt against the Bolsheviks. They forgot, however, that when the Russian masses ​rose it would not be against the Bolsheviks, but against the foreign tyrants who were trying to starve them.
But that was not all. The evidence given before the revolutionary tribunal of the Republic in November 1918 went to show that in August of that year the French and British diplomatic representatives in Moscow, M. Grenard and M. Lockart, received in their rooms an officer of the Lettish Soviet regiment and paid him two million roubles for the purpose of securing the support of the Lettish soldiery for the overthrow of the Soviet Government. Further, a letter from M. René Marchand, correspondent of the "Figaro" in Russia, a strong anti-Bolshevik, to President Poincaré was discovered by the Soviet authorities. In this letter M. Marchand describes a meeting at the American Consulate at which he and the French and British diplomatic representatives were present, and at which certain agents of the consulates discussed plans for blowing up bridges over the Volkhova river. The effect of this would have been to reduce Petrograd to complete starvation. As an honest man, M. Marchand protested to the French President against the behaviour of Allied officials in Russia. Some of these plans actually did mature, and food trains destined for Petrograd and Moscow were blown up at Voronesch by these agents.
Now in face of these facts I submit that one can hardly wonder that the Soviet authority replied to the "White Terror" of the Allied agents by the Red Terror of revolutionary Russia. Up till May of 1918 the Soviet Government had only executed murderers or persons caught pillaging. The application of the death penalty for political offences was only reintroduced when the Tsarist officers and the Russian bourgeoisie, encouraged, and as we see, directly employed by the official representatives of the Allies in Russia, commenced a systematic terrorist campaign against the Soviet Government.
The appalling position of Soviet Russia, bound by the German tyrant at Brest-Litovsk on the one hand and treacherously attacked by the Allied Governments on the other, roused the Russian workers and peasants to feats of heroism, which have only been equalled by the French people in their revolutionary war against the European coalition, headed by Austria. "Russian people, rise against the tyrants! We must dare and dare again and dare continually" was written in the hearts of thousands who had never heard the name of Danton. With the energy of despair the nucleus of the Red Army was mobilised, clad in cotton shirts and wooden shoes. Regiments of Petrograd workmen and Kronstadt sailors, who knew they were fighting for their all, marched eastwards and hurled themselves upon the enemy with the cries, "Long live the Social Revolution! Proletariat of all lands unite!" The agents of the foreign tyrants wavered and fell back before the terrific onslaughts of these revolution-inspired ​men. Kazan fell, then Simbirsk, Sizran and Samara. By the autumn "Mother Volga," that artery along which courses the life-blood of Russia, was cleared of the tyrants and their hirelings. But it was too late to bring up food for the starving towns, for the ice had begun to set in.
After the German revolution, the Allied Governments had the field in Russia all to themselves. Their strategy during the winter 1918–1919 aimed at cutting off the industrial part of the country from all its sources of food and raw materials, in order to ruin, through blockade, the Soviet Republic. Money and ammunition was sent to counter-revolutionary generals who were mobilising Tsarist officers on the Don, North Caucasus, and in Siberia. General Krasnov, former editor of the official War Office Gazette under the Tsar, made no secret of his Monarchist leanings. Having pumped the Kaiser's treasury till Kaiserdom fell, he now appealed to his other class allies, the British and French Governments, from whom he received supplies of money and ammunition. General Denikin in the North Caucasus, and Admiral Koltchak in Siberia, more cleverly covered their counter-revolutionary designs by calling themselves "constitutional democrats," and by getting round them a number of intellectuals who called themselves "Socialists," but who were not known in Russia to anyone outside the counter-revolutionary camp. Such was the cynicism of these tactics that even the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party of Russia, hitherto bitter opponents of the Bolsheviks, decided, at the beginning of 1919, to support the latter in their fight against the foreign "liberators." Thus the occupation of the Don by Krasnov's counter-revolutionaries cut off for months all coal supplies from Moscow and Petrograd industrial area. The occupation of the Urals by Koltchak's counter-revolutionaries cut off iron and copper. The occupation of the North Caucasus and the Caspian littoral by Denikin's counter-revolutionaries cut off oil from the railways of Central Russia. But the Allied Governments were not in the least troubled about the misery that this caused the Russian people. If the industries closed and the railways ceased running, if there was no heating in the houses of the Petrograd workmen, so much the better for the "cause of justice."
The British and French inspired press could all the better accuse the Socialist system of Soviet Russia of being responsible for the misery which their Governments alone had created.
"WAR ON THE MANSIONS, PEACE TO THE COTTAGES."
Gradually, however, the iron ring round Central Russia began to break. Soviet Russia had allies in all the territories hitherto occupied by the counter-revolution. These allies were found among the working-classes of the town and the poorer peasantry. No greater service has in reality been done to the Soviet Govern​ment than the behaviour of the Allied Governments and their agents in the territories which they occupied. On the Don, in Siberia and Archangel, the whole of the social changes of the Revolution had been reversed. The feudal landlords, who had taken refuge in England and France, returned as soon as they heard that the volunteer White Guards and Allied troops had taken the territory where their land was situated, and with the aid of those foreign bayonets reduced the peasant population to the condition of poverty they were in under Tsarism.
Free sale of and speculation in land was allowed again. Labour organisations were either suppressed or reduced to committees, which had purely nominal power. Wherever the Union Jack or the Tricolour flew along with the old flag of Tsarist Russia there was a restoration of conditions which meant enslavement of the Russian people. The Union Jack, the protector of the social system which flourished under Tsarism! Was this the object for which Englishmen laid down their lives in this war? The Tricolour, the emblem of oppression! Was this the object for which Frenchmen stormed the Bastille a century ago? All this ony aroused the Russian workers and peasants to a hatred of the foreign oppressors which exceeded all bounds. A deputation of peasants recently coming to Lenin from the Volga provinces said to him: "The Allies have taught us a lesson and we shall never again desert the Soviet Republic." Gradually in all the outlying parts of Russia, in the Baltic provinces, the Ukraine, the Don and the Cossack territories, the oppressed people began to come together to decide upon a common action. In Courland, Lithuania, and White Russia, the native workers and peasants formed their own Soviet government, which took power as soon as the German army left. The landlords and rich people fled with the Germans, and in Berlin, Paris, and London started propaganda for military support to "create a sanitary cordon" round Soviet Russia. The touching sympathy between the propertied classes of England and France, with their erstwhile foes, the propertied classes of Germany, was never so clearly seen as now. It is a fact that, during February and March of this year, the German General Staff in East Prussia has been in touch with the British naval authorities in the Baltic, while Prussian junker volunteer corps have received the protection of the British Fleet to carry on operations against the Red Army.
Further south, in the Ukraine, the local Bolsheviks had been organising during the autumn of last year an Ukrainian Red Army. As long as the Germans were there, the soldiers of this army hid in the forest, dug in their rifles and artillery, and contented themselves with propaganda. But, by Christmas, 1918, large numbers of the German troops came over to the Bolshevik side and the rest anarchically demobilised and went home. Then the Red flood was indeed let loose. The 10,000-strong army of ​Ukrainian Bolsheviks came out of their hiding, and marched south to the cry, "War on the mansions, peace to the cottages." They were met everywhere with the wildest enthusiasm. Young men flocked to join them. Old men brought gifts of bread and salt. The landlords' domains became once more the property of the peasants; the sugar factories came again under the control of the workers' committees. Everywhere along the western and southern borders of Muscovite Russia there has come into being a chain of labour republics. They sprang up everywhere like mushrooms, as soon as the artificial force of the foreign bayonets had been dispelled, like an unhealthy miasma before the pure wind of heaven. There has been no invasion of these provinces by the Muscovite Red Army, no Great Russian imperialism spreading west and south in imitation of Tsarist traditions. The change was brought about by the triumphant social revolution within these territories, which took place as soon as the foreign bayonets had gone. The Red armies that have been formed in these border regions of Russia are all recruited from the local population. Soviet governments in the Baltic provinces, Ukraine and the Don are in practice very independent of Moscow, and have only gone into federation with the great Russian Soviet government there because of the common interests and social ideals which inspire both. The Soviet government of Central Russia does not seek to impose its authority on any people in the world. It only seeks allies, which exist in all lands among the labouring population, and is ready at all times to work with them.
THE SOVIET SYSTEM IN PRACTICE.
We have seen how the Russian Soviets, just as they were setting out to repair the havoc which the old régime had left behind, were attacked first by the German, then by Allied Imperialisms, and how they have so far come victoriously through the terrible ordeal. Now, what are the Soviets as they exist in Russia to-day? We have seen that in the first days of the Revolution they were formed out of the thousands of informal gatherings of workers and peasants throughout the land which came together to decide what next to do. The original Soviets were economic bodies, for it was natural to expect that people connected with one another by common work and common material interests should meet at a time when the old order was dissolving. A factory workman's immediate interests are more closely bound up with the interests of his comrades in the same factory than they are with workers in another industry. Ever since man first began to divide the work of civilisation among his fellows he has shown a tendency to associate on the basis of guilds or special trades. All the more natural is it now, in a highly-developed society in a state of temporary flux, that metal workers, railwaymen, and peasants should meet together in convenient district unions and discuss the subject that ​most affects their lives. The informal enonomic unions, which sprang up in the first days of the Russian Revolution became thus the basis of the Soviet system. The most important point, however, to observe about them is that they were industrial and had no relation to territorial division of society, except in so far as geographical and climatic conditions imposed a certain limit to the industrial organisation.
The Russian Revolution, therefore, brought Soviets to life on an economic basis and for an economic purpose. In their original form these Soviets were anarchic and without any common plan of action. During the first few weeks of the Revolution one Soviet knew nothing of what another was doing. Only after the first months was it possible to talk of an organisation which was gradually uniting and co-ordinating the actions of all the Soviets scattered about the country. This co-ordination became most imperative for the safety of the Revolution, because the forces of the old social order which had been overthrown soon began to gather strength again. Only organised Soviets could raise the necessary barrier to reaction. Only if they expanded their activities to broad political action could they possibly safeguard those local economic interests to protect which they were originally created. Only by becoming political bodies could they guarantee the new social order. Thus in every town in Russia the factory committees and informal workers' unions united into a Central Soviet, which at once took upon itself the task of fighting the counter-revolution and controlling whatever authority the middle classes had set up. Soon the question was raised, whether this Central Soviet, which was already exercising a sort of control over the middle-class government, should not take all political authority into its hands. The controversy that raged about this question marked the second stage of the Revolution, which ended in October, 1917, in the victory of the Soviets, and the expansion of their power from that of indirect control into that of direct political responsibility. Thus, in every town in Russia after October, the central committee of all the Soviets of that district became responsible for public order, for the militia, for public works, and for the local finances. The same thing took place in the villages, where the union of peasant communes, or later the committees of the poorer peasantry which came from the former, replaced the local "democratically" elected bodies. The latter, for the most part, were controlled by people who got into power in the first days of the Revolution, and had stuck to that power ever since. Finally, these central urban Soviets and the unions of provincial Soviets sent their representatives to a great State Congress of the whole country. This Congress now meets every six months and elects a Central Soviet Executive which is empowered to act with authority in the period between the Congresses. This body has now become the supreme political authority in the Soviet Republic. ​It controls the Red Army and Navy, the foreign policy, the economic intercourse with other states. Thus, beginning with informal gatherings of workers bound by economic interests, the Russian Soviet has developed into a great political power, which is to be reckoned with in international politics.
But that is only half the story. We have seen that the original anarchically formed committees were the seed from which the green shoot of the centralised political Soviet grew. But it soon began to put forth another shoot—the organised economic syndicate. And it came about in this way. The workers' factory committees that elect the local political Soviet for managing the militia, also sent their delegates to conferences representing all the workers, divided according to professions, in particular districts. This movement was in complete antagonism to the old trade-union movement, which sought, under Tsarism, to divide the workers into a number of craft unions within the industries. The essential feature of this new economic Soviet or syndicate is that it is organised on the basis of industry and not on the basis of guild. Only in this way is it possible to prevent the economic power of the workers, the unity of which is so essential in the struggle against capitalism, from being broken into jarring craft unions, all working at cross purposes. Under the new system the wood-workers and book-keepers in the metal industry must choose their representatives to look after their economic interests along with the actual metal-workers themselves, and all three grades of labour must be represented in the economic Soviet. Thus a united front is created within the industry.
The same process of organising the proletariat industrially has taken place among the rural peasantry. After the October Revolution, the latter sent their delegates to a rural political Soviet, whose duty it was to organise the rural Red Guard and keep revolutionary order in the villages. Somewhat later they began to form purely economic unions as the peasants themselves began to split up into classes, and; the conflict between them began to develop. Western Europeans imagine that the Russian peasant is a peculiar creation, with habits and customs of his own, living apart from the rest of the world in dirt and ignorance. My experiences in the Russian villages have taught me that the same social divisions are to be found there, in perhaps slightly different forms, as exists in the more industrialised rural districts of Western Europe. The idea that it is possible to separate the peasants from the urban population of Russia and thereby mobilise an anti-Bolshevik force within the country, is a fantasy, for the following reasons. In the Russian village there are to be found three classes, all possessing more or less antagonistic interests. There are first of all the rich peasants, known as the "Kulacks." These are for the most part men who have made use of the Stolypin land law to demand that the land, hitherto allotted to ​them every five or six years in rotation under the commune, should become their permanent property. This law was made for the express purpose of breaking the power of the commune and establishing a rich peasant proprietor class, which should rally to support the landlords. Among this class also are found peasants, who, while not possessing private property, are engaged in dealing or speculating in corn or other necessaries of life. For them any public control of distribution, any establishing of fixed prices, means an end to their livelihood.
The second class in the village is the poor peasants. These consist for the most part of men who find that the little land allotment which they receive from the village commune is insufficient to support their families. They have therefore chosen to supplement their income from the land by earning wages for a part of the year either in one of the big towns or in one of the factories scattered about the rural districts of Central Russia. They have become thus a half-peasant, half-proletarian element, absorbing the urban workers' psychology but not losing touch with the village. They are essentially poor, because, being compelled to spend a part of their time on the land, they cannot become proficient in any technical branch of urban industry. The poor peasants, for the most part, form the unskilled labourers of the factories of North and Central Russia—a floating population, drifting from one place to another in search of the slender means which enable them to make both ends meet. During their absence from the village, moreover, they are compelled to leave their land to be looked after by their womenfolk. They are always short-handed, and generally have not more than one horse. Thus they frequently have to call in the help of the rich neighbour, to whom they are not infrequently in debt.
The third-class in the Russian village is known as the "middle peasantry." These are peasants who, like the poorest element just described, have remained loyal to the commune, redistribute their land among themselves every few years, and do not engage in dealing or speculation. Unlike them, however, they remain fixed to the soil, and do not seek the hazards that beset the urban wage-earner. They therefore attempt to supplement their scanty income from the land by forming little guilds among themselves for running peasant industries, like basket making, wood work, engraving, bootmaking, etc. To reduce their household expenses and free themselves from the village speculator, they have developed to a high degree the consumers' Co-operative Societies.
Now these three village classes are found in varying proportions in different parts of Russia. In the Moscow industrial region, in the forested Upper Volga and Northern Dvina provinces, the poor half-peasant, half-proletarian element is perhaps 40 per cent. of the whole rural population; the rich "kulack" element here is ​small, while the "middle peasant" makes up the remainder. In the richer land of Central Russia further South and in the lower Volga provinces, the rich "kulack" element forms a large percentage, perhaps 30 per cent., the poor, half-proletarians not more than 20 per cent., leaving the balance again to the "middle peasantry." In the Ukraine, the rich peasant proprietors number a large section of the rural population, particularly in its Western territories, while the "middle peasantry" here is a small one. On the other hand the landless peasants and agricultural wage labourers more than counter-balance in the social scale the richer elements of the rural population. This is a very important fact to be borne in mind, because the hopes of the Russian counter-revolutionaries and their foreign instigators have so often been based on the Ukraine, in the belief that, with the breakdown of the communal land system in large parts of this region, the new peasant proprietor class will assist them to create a political "Vendee." The people who think this, however, fail to see that what has happened in the Ukraine is a more rapid industrialisation of agriculture than in the North and Central Russia, and that this industrialisation, if it has created a rich and reactionary proprietor class and has almost abolished the "middle peasantry," has also created an agricultural proletariat, which is no less revolutionary than its half-proletarian comrades in the villages of Muscovite Russia.
The question now arises, which of these rural classes has assimilated the idea of the economic Soviet and in what form? Needless to say, the rich "kulack" class only supported the Soviet idea as long as the mansions remained occupied by the landlords. As soon as the estates began to be divided, their first desire was to secure the best part of the latifundia to add on to their private holdings. But the commune stood in their way, and immediately a struggle began between them and the other two classes in the village. These "kulacks," who were foreign to all ideas of communal ownership and of collective farming through syndicates of labourers, became the bulwarks of the Right Socialist-Revolutionary Party. The latter, though it gave lip-service to the idea of "socialisation of land," nevertheless went over to the Allies when the latter intervened in Russia. Under the protection of the Czecho-Slovaks, they set up their Constituent Assembly at Ufa and tried to establish "democratic government." One fine day, however, Admiral Kotchak, the hireling of the Allies, by arresting their leaders and establishing himself as "supreme ruler," demonstrated to them that "high finance" of London and Paris would not tolerate the liquidation of landlordism, even if peasant proprietorship stood in its place. Thus the rich peasant elements have been virtually extinguished as a class. They have been made to serve as agents of foreign Imperialists in the ​Eastern territories, and have been completely dispossessed in the districts controlled by the Soviets.
The "middle peasantry," on the other hand, were not in principle opposed to the economic Soviet, and seemed during the summer of 1918 to be working out a land system in which the extension of co-operation would play an important rôle, and would thereby raise the land commune to that level of efficiency, which would enable a place to be found for it in the Soviet system. But the process of organising the "middle peasantry" into syndicates or economic Soviets was arrested by an untoward development. The Brest-Litovsk peace and the intervention of the Allies brought the pangs of hunger to the towns of Northern and Central Russia. The sole source of supply for the starving urban workers now came from those provinces of Central Russia, where small surpluses were still left. The industries of the North had nothing to send to the villages because the blockade had deprived Soviet Russia of certain necessary raw materials and technical appliances. It became necessary to ask the "middle peasantry" to sacrifice their surplus stocks on the altar of the Revolution. But the "middle peasantry" failed to rise to the occasion, and held on to their stocks of corn. Their public spirit and sense of responsibility to the Revolution had not yet risen above their personal interests. Not realising the danger, they deserted the urban workers and, with their Co-operative Societies and other Soviets in embryo, went over to the rich "kulaks." The urban proletariat now, through the medium of that class in the village with whom they were in closest contact—namely the half-peasant, half-proletarian elements, began a campaign against the "kulaks" and the "middle peasantry." Expeditions were sent out and requisitions made. As always happens in times of crises, excesses were committed. Wholesale attacks were made upon the Co-operative Societies of the "middle peasantry," whose members were arrested and stores confiscated. The German and the Allied Imperialists in these dark days Of the summer of 1918 nearly succeeded in causing a terrible civil war within the territories of the Soviet Republic.
But the crisis had at least one advantage, for it brought forth the first economic Soviet or labour syndicate in the Russian village, organised on strictly class lines. The poor peasants and half urban proletarians began in July, 1918, to organise themselves into committees. These "Committees of the Poorest Peasants," as they were called, took charge of the requisitions for their class allies in the towns, and also created a new form of the commune, which took over the landlords' domain farms in many places and began to work them on behalf of the urban supply departments. When at last normal economic relations began to open up between the Volga, Ukraine, and Northern Russia, the Committees of the Poorer Peasantry began to drop their requisitioning functions for ​the towns, and confined themselves only to the working of the new type of land communes. With a number of urban workers, who had left the towns during the winter 1918–19, they re-organised themselves into "Professional Alliances of Agricultural Workers." To this syndicate has now fallen the task of establishing the principle oi collective farming in the Russian village, and of creating a food reservoir in the Northern and Central provinces, which will make the population of the industrial regions independent of other classes of the peasantry.
The transference of the "middle peasantry" to the ranks of the counter-revolution was of short duration. As soon as the crisis of the autumn of 1918 passed, the Central Soviet Executive (political authority) offered its service as a mediator between the economic Soviets of the urban population (professional alliances of railwaymen, metallists, etc.) and the co-operative societies of the "middle peasantry." This resulted in the decrees of the Central Soviet Executive during the winter of 1918–19, which established the rural co-operatives as an integral part of the State distribution apparatus. The only condition laid down by the central political authority was that the co-operative societies of the "middle peasantry" should, before March 1st, 1919, re-elect their managers, and that the elections should take place on the basis of the Soviet Constitution, which provides that no peasant can elect or be elected if he owns more land than he can work himself or hires another man's labour. Thus two out of the three classes of the rural population of Russia have now been organised into economic Soviets, one for collective farming and the other for collective distribution. These economic Soviets are working in close contact with similar syndicates among the urban workers. Contact between the class-conscious proletariat in town and village has in this way been established.
Thus the Soviet, as the organ of the labouring classes, has assumed both in town and rural districts an industrial as well as political aspect. These economic Soviets, arising spontaneously throughout the whole land, as the result of the revolutionary regrouping of the social units, are now gravitating towards a common point. For just as the political Soviets centre in State Congresses for the control of foreign policy, so the economic Soviets or syndicates of metal workers, cotton operatives, accountants, and labouring peasants, centre in a State Congress for managing the internal affairs of the different branches of industry. At the present moment there is the All-Russia Union of Professional Alliances, which is the top of the pyramid toward which all the workers' economic syndicates converge. This is the real labour parliament, where the internal affairs of the different industries are attended to and reconciled to the public interest. Here in numerous committees are worked out the wage tariffs, the hours of labour, and the capacity of output of each amalgamated syndicate.
​Thus two great social institutions have sprung up in revolutionary Russia—the political Soviet and the economic Soviet. The duty of the former is to protect the Republic from internal and external counter-revolution. The duty of the latter is to build up under the protection of the former the new social order. Once the danger of foreign intervention is removed it is possible that in Russia the political Soviet will reduce its functions and that the power in the land will pass to huge economic syndicates, working under some new form of central control. When the new social order is really guaranteed from foreign counter-revolution, the political conflicts which have been raging in Russia since the Revolution will gradually die down. The struggle between the Bolshevik theory of "Immediate World Revolution" and the Menshevik theory of "Labour Coalition with the Bourgeoisie" will give way to others. Then will arise the delicate problem of how to adjust the interests of the whole community to the claims of the different industrial syndicates, so that private capitalism, conquered in the October Revolution and in the war of 1918 against the Allied Imperialists, shall not reappear again in a more insidious form. All this, however, belongs to the future.
SOVIET SYSTEM VERSUS DEMOCRACY.
Russia has advanced by giant steps along the new road in spite of all the wounds inflicted on her by the war and the foreign intervention. Young and energetic, untrammelled with the century-old conventions and traditions of an older, more archaic civilisation, she has a clear field in which to begin the work of reconstruction.
Everywhere in Russia now the organs of the new form of society are found in the two types of Soviets. For these political and industrial unions can elect and be elected only those who labour by muscle and brain. In order to obtain a vote therefore a man or woman must be organised in some sort of industrial syndicate, and in order to be organised he must do some form of productive work. This is the first essential of the Soviet system. The second essential is that the Soviet should be elected not territorially but industrially. This is the real difference between a Soviet State and a Democratic State. A democratic State recognises no economic division in the electorate. Everyone 1s regarded as a part of what is vaguely called "the people." How impracticable a "democratic" parliament is for the modern industrially-specialised form of society the following example may show:—
A metal worker, let us say, lives next to a railwayman on one side and an accountant on the other. All three have special economic interests which require exact professional knowledge to understand. Each of them, if they were to draw up a programme of their demands at a given moment would have different claims to make for the protection of their particular economic interest. ​In a Soviet State each of these types of workers put forward their demands through the economic syndicate, of which they must be a member, and the central union of the syndicate considers them in relation to the whole economic production of the country. In times like the present, when the fight with the counter-revolution is still going on, the syndicates have to consult with the political Soviet and obtain its sanction. But the point is that a Soviet State provides the economic apparatus for representing the special interests of all its workers and for reconciling them with the interests of the whole community.
A Democratic State, on the other hand, cannot provide this, for here the workers' industrial organisations have no political power, and can only advise a Parliament, which is brought into existence by the votes of an unorganised working class. Thus the three types of workers that I take above are, in a Democratic State, only able to elect representatives for one district, in which their economic interests are swamped in thousands of others' interests. Candidates are put up by party caucuses who work on a territorial basis, and these candidates cannot possibly represent all the interests on that territory at the same time. Supporters of the Soviet system regard the democratic election to a parliament as nothing more than a device to deceive the workers, by dividing them into artificial constituencies, on the basis of which they cannot unite to draw up a common social and economic policy. This can only be done through the development of the industrial unions, as described above. The superiority of the Soviet as a political and economic organ is well seen in the fact that it is capable of being continually elected. For the workers can withdraw their delegates and elect again at will. Thus the Soviets are always a reflection of the opinion of the workers at the given moment. This was most clearly seen in the case of the All-Russia Congress of Soviets in January 1918, and of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly, which met in that same month. The former, elected only a short time after the election for the Constituent Assembly, gave a large Bolshevik and Left Socialist-Revolutionary majority. The Constituent Assembly, however, was elected on a candidates' list made up in the autumn of that year, when quite different parties were in the political arena, and at a time when the important split between the left and the right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary party had not vet taken place. The result of the Constituent Assembly election was a majority for the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, in which the left wing was hardly represented at all. For in the few weeks that elapsed between the drawing up of the candidates' list for the Constituent Assembly and the elections for it, an entirely new political situation had arisen, which the Soviet Congress reflected and the Constituent Assembly did not.
​When the Allied Governments, therefore, say that there must be in Russia a body which represents all the Russian people in a Constituent Assembly before they can recognise the Russian Government, they are really saying that they want a government which will be put in power by scattering all the economic forces of the Russian workers, and which will become an empty shell within a short time of its election.
In another respect also the Soviet system is claimed by its supporters to be superior to the Democratic. Under the latter system the legislative and executive departments of the State are kept strictly separate. As a result there is created a permanent official caste, which soon becomes more or less impervious to influence from without. If, for instance, a majority in a democratic parliament passes a resolution or decrees a certain act, it is very easy to raise obstruction in the government offices. In a country where the propertied classes control the press and the party caucuses, it is an easy matter to keep this sharp distinction between legislative and executive functions, and so raise a bulwark against any possible flooding of the democratic parliament with elements hostile to its class.
In the Soviet State, on the other hand, where authority springs directly from the workers organised in industrial units, the legislative and executive functions are to a large degree merged. The carrying out of the laws passed by the State Congresses or their interim Executive Committees is put into the hands of Commissariats, which are made up partly out of experts, partly out of delegates appointed by the above-mentioned supreme legislative authority or supreme political Soviet, and partly out of the representatives of the different economic Soviets which are directly affected. Thus on the Railway Commissariat sit technical advisers, a commission sent from the All-Russia Central Soviet Executive, and another appointed by the All-Russia Railwaymen's Professional Alliance. Thus the actual administration of the laws is under the direct control of the legislators.
I would add one final word of appeal to the working classes of England, France, and America. Do not listen to the tales of horror which the inspired press of Western Europe tells about the Russian revolution. I say this because I know that the starvation and misery from which the Russian people are suffering is not due to those who are building up the new Socialist form of society, but to those who, for three years, drove Russia in an exhausting Imperialist war, and then sent armed forces to invade her territory and cut off her food supplies and the raw materials of her industries. The Russian people appeal to all the world for peace. They long to establish the normal economic exchange between Eastern and Western Europe and America, which alone can make good the destruction of the four years' war. "Raise the blockade," they say; "send us the technical advisers, without whom we ​cannot restore our industries shattered by the war." Soviet Russia is ready to pay handsomely for the services rendered. If the workers of England, France, and America are still content to leave private financiers to control the relations between their countries and Russia, the Soviet Government will raise no objection, but will treat with their financiers and satisfy their demands in so far as they do not involve the reduction of the Russian workers and peasants to the slavery that they lived in under Tsarism. If, on the other hand, the English, French, and American workers take these matters into their own hands they will find in Soviet Russia a friend and ally. Their delegates will at all times be welcome in the territories of the Republic, which are as safe for those engaged in honest labour as are those of any state of Western Europe or America. An immense field will be open to them to assist their Russian comrades with the technical advice which only they can give. On the other hand they can learn many things! which will be new to them in that wonder-land that lies between Europe and Asia.
Here they can see for themselves the working out of this new social order, which their Russian comrades firmly believe can alone guarantee the world against Imperialist wars and their root cause, the exploitation of man by man. Here they can compare the Federation of Soviet States based on Moscow, with the League of Nations based on Paris, and can judge for themselves whether any international system, which is not accompanied by a complete revolution in the whole fabric of modern society, can ever guarantee the world’s peace.
The Russian people with the courage of lions have dared to face a world in arms against them and to cry aloud to all mankind across the frontiers of the censors: "Oh! Ye conventionalities and insincerities, ye crowns of Emperors and Kings, 'democratic' parliaments, hypocrisies of the churches, respectable mediocrities, intriguing profiteers! Ye, who have brought all this misery upon mankind! Behold! Ye are one and all a Gigantic Lie! But our life, our hunger and wretchedness is not a lie. Therefore we call all nations of the earth to witness that in Russia at any rate ye shall be abolished, and, naked and starving, isolated and spurned, pariahs though we are, we shall begin the search for those realities—those new forms of human society which alone can make life worth living."
M. PHILIPS PRICE.
April, 1919
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