Montgomery County sentinel. [volume] (Rockville, Md.) 1855-1974, 1928-03-09


books are false. Why? Because
they do not say a word about the
real feeling of the workmen, which
is still a sort of religious, mistaken
faith in Communism.
Let us state the truth as it is.
The Russian workmen have-or, to
be more exact, they have had, up
till nova profound belief that in
spite of tragic receptions, the Lenin-
ist formula, "proletariat's dictator
ship" is the key to the enchanting
world of their hopes.
This formula they find repeated
everywhere they go in a hundred
different forms. At evening meet
ings, at the new free open-air the
aters, at the movies" they are con-
stantly lulled by the same refrain;
as it not the Russian proletariat
alone that rules the destinies of a
great country? Where in the world
except in Russia do the bourgeois
and ex-burgeois tremble and bow be-
fore a real workman? Where out
side of Russia are imperial palaces
turned into homes for old work
men,"
The Russian workman does not yet
seem tired of such courtly flattery.
And, like the old guests of the i'm
perial palaces in the Crimea, now
turned into rest houses for old pro-
letarians, he readily listens to the
pleasant lullaby. He does not deny
that today he is suffering, but he
tightens his belt and hopes that to-
morrow everything will turn out all
right.
There is-and those who are un-
able to see 1t are to be pitied-sohe
moral nobility in their thinking and
saying, as they often do, that it is
for their sons that they wait; that
it is their sons who will be happy
and free-in this life. 1t is the mystic
nature of the Russian soul, with its
longing for suffering, that makes this
possible. 1t is with sort of re-
ligious ardor that the working
classes of Leningrad and Moscow
believe themselves to be the van
guard of new world, of a happier
humanity. When they suffer they
find some consolation in thinking that
through what they are enduring they
advance the blessed days of univer-
sal happiness-the happiness of all
the slaves and pariahs in the west
and in the east.
This feeling may fade; it already
is beginning to fade. But to have
deliberately ignored it, not to have
taken it into account at all, is sim
ply to repeat the errors of the Brit
ish and the Germans during the
French Revolution. They believed
they could dispose Of it with sim
pie Observation-Disclosures.
1t is strange that such a psyche
logical factor should take place in a
country where the historical mate
rialism of Marx should be the official
truth and that this fact has been
denied or not understood in the coun-
tries and among peoples where the
boast of a richer spiritual life is
more frequent.
All the Kremlin Screenings for
Communist propaganda abroa d,
from England to China, probably
have arisen primarily from the
necessity that the Bolshevik lead.
ers feel, for giving some food,
for some hope, some satisfac-
tion to the religiously expectant
troops of the Russian working
classes. All this propaganda abroad
has brought upon the Russians
endless complications and humili-
ations. At the Kremhn they are
shrewd enough to have foreseen all
this, but they were oblig>d to get
into trouble, as they did with the
Chinese last January, in order to
satisfy the workmen.
To satisfy them to the end the
Soviet government would have been
obliged, when faced by cases like
the recent election of all Soviet
consuls from China, to demand apol-
ogies, to threaten reparations.
Nothing Of the kind has been done.
Nothing ever will be done. At most,
few strong diplomatic notes-but
these only for home consumption
DO. What makes the Russian
government feeble and uncertain is
that an opposing force faces the
workman and places the Kremlin be-
tween two a;.tagonistic tendencies.
This powerful element, so antithetic
to the workman, is--the peasant.
The peasants were Communist"
after the revolution; or, to be more
exact, they seemed Communist
when it was a question of driving
the old proprietors out of their
estate. 1t was a repetition of what
has taken place in peasant move
ments in many countries, from GER
tain ancient revolts in China to the
"jacqueries" of old royalist France.
The phenomenon seemed more for
midable' in Russia only because the
peasant movement identified itself
in time and methods-with the Lenin
coup. To tell the truth-and this
is point whose meaning has no
little Importance in the understand
ing Of the Russian revolution-the
Russian peasant had begun, even
before the advent of Bolshevism, to
seize the lands and to Stay his baron,
frequently to Stay him and, in the
Russian way, to weep over him at
the same time. When Lenin grasped
power, he simply put into words
what the peasants had already be-
gun to put into deeds. That is why
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