World Significance of the Russian Revolution - G. Pitt Rivers |
The bewildering play and interplay of forces which has finally enthroned Lenin in the seat of power may well confuse the casual eye. How is it that Lenin, the neurotic son of a public official and the brother of an assassin, with a small executive consisting chiefly of alien or of Jew internationals, is able to exercise despotic sway over a population (before the revolution) of 148 millions, of which at least 87% are peasants bitterly opposed to communism, and of the remainder consisting of industrial proletariat (less than 3% of the population) intelligentsia, and the parasitic Commissar and public executioner class, the latter class only (at most 2% of the whole) does not loath the regime?
The answer to the riddle can only be understood if we clearly distinguish between the attractiveness of the propaganda, decoy-cries and prospects of unbridled license which hypnotised the masses on the initial "breaking-up" stage, and the bitter realization which came after their dupes had allowed their new masters to establish themselves in power. It is also necessary to distinguish the exotic ruling element from the exploited masses they use, and to trace its rise to power.
The Revolutionary outbreak in Russia in the year 1905 was the direct result of a revolutionary struggle of which the active participants on both sides were confined to an exceedingly small section of the total population. It was in fact a struggle between two sections of the educated classes. The latter consisted of a few million aristocrats, professional men, officials, merchants, journalists, agitators, and land-owners — a mere fraction in a population containing 145 millions of peasants. And within this fraction, the elements of discord on both sides of the struggle were a still more tiny fraction of the nation.
Industrialism is a new factor in Russian life, an importation from Western Europe that had its origin about the end of the nineteenth century; and with the industrial invasion of Russia came the mammonised ideals and values of Commercialism with all their potentialities for strife. In the words of Mr. Stephen Graham: "Intelligentsia, bourgeoisie, and proletariat are all products of the same family; they are westernised Russians; books, commerce, industry, the three boasted instruments of our civilization have not civilized Russians, they have de-civilized them. But, as yet, Russians of this character form only a tiny fragment of the nation."
Between the forties and the sixties, and fostered by the same new forces (i.e., mammonism and industrialism) there set in a revolutionary movement which went by the name of Nihilism, of which Tchernishefski, the novelist, was the leader, and Dobrolinboff, a writer, Micailoff, a professor, Bakunin, Prince Kropotkin, Sophia Perovskaia, a pupil of Dobrolinboff, who like Kropotkin belonged to the higher nobility of Russia, and a host of other neuropathic "intellectuals," and Anarchists, such as Hertzen and Ogareff, who published their propaganda from London, were henchmen.
By 1862 the movement had spread with marvellous rapidity among the morbid and neurotic elements of the literary and student classes, who were as concerned in their anarchical principles to prove their contempt of all control by growing their hair long, neglecting their persons and by an utter chaos and lack of any order in their sexual and matrimonial relations, as they were to promote bloodshed and revolution among the working populations of the towns. In spite of the extensive propaganda campaign in the towns and villages, in spite of the growing inefficiency of an effete bureaucracy tending always to assimilate the ideas and values of Western "Liberalism-cum-Commercialism," they met with little or no response from the agricultural masses, who indeed have small liking for either anarchy or communism — least of all when they have tasted either!
All this, of course, is well known history, but the complete collapse of the Nihilist movement after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, when for a brief spell a better and stronger administrative awoke from the former reign of lethargy and incompetence, serves to illustrate the facts so often ignored, which have an equal bearing upon the Revolutionary movement of 1905 and upon the situation to day.