Evening star., 1935-04-21

yards of life where for years they
had been storing up bile and envy.
But the first new man was not
necessarily a member Of the party.
Supporting the Communists and
blending with them. great variety
OF all sorts OF malcontentS flocked to
Lenin's banners. Denauonalized
Poles, "Europeanized" Asiatics and in
ternationalized Jews, Germans and
Hungarians; young university students
and. occasionally, stray university
professor: declaSsed noblemen who
long since had gambled away their
estates: futurist poets with their faces
painted green and yellow as a gesture
of protest whom no one had taken in
earnest before, and, finally. men with
admitted criminal records, such as A.
Kotovsky, who before the revolution
had been notorious bandit in South
ern Russia and, after it, became a
prominent Red commander. Such was
the racial and social extraction of the
collective first new man.
Loyalty Founded in Hatred.
The new man of this formation
knew no loyalty but the loyalty to the
revolution Tor, if he were a Commu-
mist. to his party. Hatred-the hatred
of the old ruling classes. old culture.
old morals, etc.-was his inspiration
land he would prove that this hatred,
no less than faith, can move noun
tainS). Observation-Disclosures OF
the entire Old World-was his passion.
To have no patriotism and to regard
Russia as merely a temporary office"
from which 1t was convenient to start
the world conflagration (for that was
the thing that really mattered) was
one of the chief dogmas of the early
Communism. Finally, wild and some
times heroic adventurism and no
madic internationalism" were the first
new mans forms of life.
Today he was the commissar of q
regiment fighting against Admiral
Kolchaks Whites in Siberia; tomor-
row, with a false passport in his
pocket, he would rush to Hungary
or to China to organize the com
radeS" there. Take the late M. Pc
troSian-Kamo. an outstanding Boil
shevik and an intimate friend of
Stain. From robbing the Tif1is
treasury in 1907 to get money for the
Bolshevist party and trying to rob
Mendelssohn, the banker, in Berlin
some time later, to secretly working
in the rear of the White Armies in
1919-what had he not gone through!
incidentally, these facts are taken
from his official biography, published
in Moscow
As rule. the first new man was
free of all bourgeois moral restraint. u
True. some of his leaders-Lenin, for
instance-were clean and conservative
in their private life and disapproved
Of debauch But the prevailing type
OF the first new man lived amid fam
tastic sexual promiscuity. That, how
ever, was due at least as much to his
mode of life as to the philosophy of
sexual emancipation" For under
what terrific nervous strain he lived
While working days and nights with.
out sleep, directing the trial and
shooting of .'counter-revolutioni in
the Tche-ka or addressing the roar
ing crowds of workmen who had risen
against the Soviets. he knew that a
week later he himself might be hanged
or torn to pieces. Oenin still thought
that Bolsheviks eventually would be
Kicked out of power.') And so he
doped himself with vodka and cocaine
with sexual excesses and often with
pathological cruelty to his prisoners.
Such was the first new man, old
Russia's executioner and himself a
nerve-wracked, crazed, blood -smeared
victim of his lugubrious work. In their
catastrophe stage. all revolutions
have such men for their leading
actors.
After 1921 the first new man be-
gan to fade out. Yet he continued to
remain the predominating figure
until, roughly speaking, 1926. Since
then he rapidly began to give place to
Cor to transform himself into) the
second new man, who became Rus
Sia's full master in the years 1927
1932-that Is to say, in the epoch Of
"industrialization" and of the five
year plan.
This vanishing Of one species and
appearance of another was due chiefly
to the following causes: By 1926 or
1927 it began to be obvious that the
world revolution which the early Boil
sheviks had been expecting almost
any day was, to say the least, very
uncertain possibility.
That meant that tie temporary
Office" reduced to a heap of smoking
ruins by the zeal Of the first new man,
was not only to be repaired and, put
in order, but also to be transformed
into 'the most highly industrahzed
country in the world" But the essen
TALLY destructive psychology of the
first new man obviously was not
adapted to constructive work. And
so the ruling circles Of the Communist
party began to impose upon their rank
and file and upon Russia's population
in general the social ideal of the Sec
ond new man.
These were the years when millions
(Oonttnu1d on Ninth Pase)