IV. THE PERSONALITY AND POWER OF NIKOLAI LENIN
THE PERSONALITY AND POWER OF NIKOLAI
LENIN
A RED GUARD was walking through the Most Holy Gate of the Kremlin,
in Moscow. Walking through it, he took off his hat. Passing a
little shrine, he stooped and kissed the icon in it. He moved
his rifle from his right hand to his left, and crossed himself
with his right.
"Do you believe in God?" said Robins. The Red Guard
seemed not surprised. He answered instantly:
"Yes, yes."
"Do you believe in Christ?"
"Yes, yes."
"Do you believe in the Church?"
The Red Guard clattered his rifle to the ground. "No,
no!" he exclaimed. "No, no!" And he went on to
say emphatically why. He said the Church was the agent of the
Czar. He said the Church was the spy of the Czar. He said the
Church was the police-dog of the police of the Czar.
It bothered Robins. It reminded him too much of an incident
that had happened to him once in Australia.
He had spoken in America for the Men-and-Religion-Forward Movement
in a multitude of cities, and he had spoken in colleges in America,
in North and South and East and West, to a long series of mass-meetings
of students, on the theme always of a serving Church in a serving
state, of a Church and of a state serving the daily work-hour
needs of people. He had gone then on a journey round the world,
still speaking on that theme and on themes like it. He came to
Australia.
There, at Melbourne, a delegation of laborleaders, including
Cabinet Ministers of the Labor government, waited on him and formally
withdrew an invitation they had extended to him to address a labor
meeting. Why? Because they had learned that he was present in
Melbourne as the guest of an organization of clergymen.
Greatly disturbed, Robins went to see the Prime Minister. The
Prime Minister was friendly, but firm. "Brother Robins,"
said he, "you cannot expect it to be any other way in Australia.
When we had our big fight here, the clergy lined up almost solid
with the labor-skinners."
Walking through the Most Holy Gate of the Kremlin, Robins reflected
again on the consequences of a class Church---its consequences
in the surrender of many coming rulers of working-men's parties
and of working-men's governments to influences altogether outside
the Church; and he arrived in the inside of the Kremlin; and he
entered the building that had been the High Court Building of
the Czar; and he went up three flights of stairs to a little room
with velvet hangings and with a great desk of beautiful wood beautifully
worked, where the Czar had been accustomed to sit and sign certain
sorts of papers.
There now sits Lenin, short-built and stanch-built, gray-eyed
and bald-headed and tranquil. He wears a woolen shirt and a suit
of clothes bought, one would think, many years ago and last pressed
shortly afterward. His room is quite still. As he has denounced
"the intoxication of the revolutionary phrase," so he
seems to reject the intoxication of revolutionary excitement.
He busies himself with reports and accounts of departments
on his desk and receives visitors for stated lengths of time----ten
minutes, five minutes, one minute. He is likely to receive them
standing. He speaks to them with the low voice of the man who
does not need to raise his voice.
In his ways of easy authority one may perhaps see his father,
State Councilor of the Government of Simbirsk, hereditary nobleman.
In his ways of thought one certainly sees his brother, executed
as a political offender by the Czar's police when Lenin was seventeen.
Robins could never visit Lenin in the Czar's High Court Building
without thinking of that execution and of the sanction given to
it---and to all such executions---by the Russian State Church.
Back of the gallows, generation after generation, in every part
of Russia, stood the priests, with their vessels of gold and their
vestments of lovely weavings, and with their icons, preaching
obedience to autocracy and giving the word of God to back the
word of the Czar, and blessing the hangman.
Out of that background came Lenin's talk. He talked with no
other assumption than that religion had departed out of the public
life and out of the public policy of Russia, along with the Czar.
He talked of secular effort only, of only material organization.
He said to Robins: "We may be overthrown in Russia, by
the backwardness of Russia or by foreign force, but the idea in
the Russian revolution will break and wreck every political social
control in the world. Our method of social control dominates the
future. Political social control will die. The Russian revolution
will kill it---everywhere."
"But," said Robins, "my government is a democratic
government. Do you really say that the idea in the Russian revolution
will destroy the democratic idea in the government of the United
States?"
"The American government," said Lenin, "is corrupt."
"That is simply not so," said Robins. "Our national
government and our local governments are elected by the people,
and most of the elections are honest and fair, and the men elected
are the true choices of the voters. You cannot call the American
government a bought government."
"Oh, Colonel Robins," said Lenin, "you do not
understand. It is my fault. I ought not to have said corrupt.
I do not mean that your government is corrupt in money. I mean
that it is corrupt and decayed in thought. It is living in the
political thinking of a bygone political age. It is living in
the age of Thomas Jefferson. It is not living in the present economic
age. Therefore it is lacking in intellectual integrity. How
shall I make it clear to you? Well, consider this:
"Consider your states of New York and Pennsylvania. New
York is the center of your banking system. Pennsylvania is the
center of your steel industry. Those are two of your most important
things---banking and steel. They are the base of your life. They
make you what you are. Now if you really believe in your banking
system, and respect it, why don't you send Mr. Morgan to your
United States Senate? And if you really believe in your steel
industry, in its present organization, why don't you send Mr.
Schwab to the Senate? Why do you send men who know less about
banking and less about steel and who protect the bankers and the
steel manufacturers and pretend to be independent of them? It
is inefficient. It is insincere. It refuses to admit the fact
that the real control is no longer political. That is why
I say that your system is lacking in integrity. That is why our
system is superior. That is why it will destroy yours."
"Frankly, Mr. Commissioner," said Robins, "I
don't believe it will."
"It will," said Lenin. "Do you know what ours
is?"
"Not very well yet," said Robins. "You've just
started."
"I'll tell you," said Lenin. "Our system will
destroy yours because it will consist of a social control which
recognizes the basic fact of modern life. It recognizes the fact
that real power to-day is economic and that the social
control of to-day must therefore be economic also. So what
do we do? Who will be our representatives in our national legislature,
in our national Soviet, from the district of Baku, for instance?
"The district of Baku is oil. Oil makes Baku. Oil rules
Baku. Our representatives from Baku will be elected by the oil
industry. They will be elected by the workers in the oil industry.
You say, Who are workers? I say, The men who manage and the men
who obey the orders of managers---the superintendents, the engineers,
the artisans, the manual laborers---all the persons who are actually
engaged in the actual work of production, by brain or hand---they
are workers. Persons not so engaged---persons who are not at labor
in the oil industry, but who try to live off it without labor,
by speculation, by royalties, by investment unaccompanied by any
work of management or by any work of daily toil---they are not
workers. They may know something about oil, or they may not. Usually,
they do not. In any case, they are not engaged in the actual producing
of oil. Our republic is a producers' republic.
"You will say that your republic is a citizens' republic.
Very well. I say that man as producer is more important than man
as citizen. The most important citizens in your oil districts---who
are they? Are they not oil men? We will represent Baku as oil.
"Similarly, we will represent the Donetz coal-basin as
coal. The representatives from the Donetz basin will be representatives
of the coal industry. Again, from the country districts, our representatives
will be representatives chosen by peasants who grow crops. What
is the real interest of the country districts? It is not storekeeping.
It is not money-lending. It is agriculture. From our country districts
our Soviets of peasants will send representatives chosen by agriculture
to speak for agriculture.
"This system is stronger than yours because it admits
reality. It seeks out the sources of daily human work-value and,
out of those sources, directly, it creates the social control
of the state. Our government will be an economic social
control for an economic age. It will triumph because it
speaks the spirit, and releases and uses the spirit, of the age
that now is.
"Therefore, Colonel Robins, we look with confidence at
the future. You may destroy us in Russia. You may destroy the
Russian revolution in Russia. You may overthrow me. It will make
no difference. A hundred years ago the monarchies of Britain,
Prussia, Austria, Russia, overthrew the government of revolutionary
France. They restored a monarch, who was called a legitimate monarch,
to power in Paris. But they could not stop, and they did not stop,
the middle-class political revolution, the revolution of middle
class democracy, which had been started at Paris by the
men of the French Revolution of 1789. They could not save feudalism.
"Every system of feudal aristocratic social control
in Europe was destined to be destroyed by the political democratic
social control worked out by the French Revolution. Every
system of political democratic social control in the world
to-day is destined now to be destroyed by the economic producers'
social control worked out by the Russian revolution.
"Colonel Robins, you do not believe it. I have to wait
for events to convince you. You may see foreign bayonets parading
across Russia. You may see the Soviets, and all the leaders of
the Soviets, killed. You may see Russia dark again as it was dark
before. But the lightning out of that darkness has destroyed political
democracy everywhere. It has destroyed it not by physically striking
it, but simply by one flash of revealment of the future."
This utter assumption of the inevitability of things was naturally
appalling to Robins. It was a denial of the essence of Americanism.
The essence of Americanism is an utter assumption of human free
will---of human free will determining human fate by its own visions
of its own moral preferences. It follows in complete Americanism
that we have to consult the conscience of every citizen, irrespective
of economic or other status, and that we have to proceed in the
light of the accumulated consciences of the nation, as revealed
roughly in majorities.
Lenin's philosophy could not convince any American like Robins.
Robins came back from Russia more anti-Socialist than when he
went. But he also came back knowing that Lenin's philosophy is
indeed a philosophy and that it cannot be countered by pretending
that it is nothing but blood and wind. It challenges Americanism
with a genuine challenge. It does not merely reject the basis
of Americanism. It brings forward a strongly competitive basis
of its own.
Lenin, of course, frankly, was not talking about consciences
or about majorities. But neither was he talking about nothing.
He was talking about vitalities, economic vitalities. He was saying:
The working-class is to-day the vital economic class in Russia.
Through that class we will make a Russian government better than
the Czar's or Kerensky's, because it will be more vital, and better
than any political government anywhere, because it will be economic.
And this system, by example, will penetrate and saturate the world.
Such was Lenin in talk.
One day, back in Petrograd, when the Germans were advancing,
Robins went out from his hotel to walk along the Nevsky Prospekt.
He made toward the Neva. There was a crowd of people gathering
there at a corner. Robins saw that they were reading a placard
spread on a dead wall, and that they were greatly excited by it.
He joined them. This placard, in purport, said:
Lenin has absconded to Finland with 30,000,000 rubles in gold
from the state bank. The Russian revolution has been betrayed
by false leaders. But there is hope now for Holy Russia. The Little
Father is coming back. The Grand-Duke Nicholas Nickolaievitch
is advancing from the Crimea with 200,000 brave, true Russian
soldiers who will save Russia from the Bolshevik traitors.
Robins turned and hurried back to his hotel to get his sleigh.
He drove to Smolny, and waved his card at the doorkeepers and
ran up-stairs. In the corridors were crowds of commissioners and
clerks and guards, running, shouting, and running again, getting
ready for something very immediate. Machine guns were being unhooded.
Their cartridges were being run into them. The crowds, with the
guns, surged over to one side of the building. Robins looked out
from that side across the yard of Smolny, toward the Viborg---the
Viborg workmen's quarter.
Two streets came from there toward Smolny. They were black
with two streams of armed workmen flowing against Smolny. They
would overwhelm Smolny and clean it out and then flow to the front
against the Germans. Such was the cry.
Robins drew back from his window and worked his way along a
corridor of dense panic toward Lenin's private office. He looked
in.
Lenin was there. He was receiving telephone messages from the
front. He was receiving personal reports from couriers. He was
writing orders and sending them out. He was working without pause,
as usual, and, as usual, without haste. He seemed quite unaware
of any crisis.
Robins was thrust into the room by shouting men behind him,
who cried to Lenin,
"The order to fire!"
Lenin jumped to his feet. For just one moment he, too, was
excited. "No! No!" he said. And again he said, "No!
No!" angrily. "Shoot them? We will talk to them. Tell
their leaders to come in."
Somebody went to tell them. Lenin went back to his messages
and his orders. The leaders of the mob began to come in and began
to fill Lenin's office---workmen, in workmen's clothes, each with
a bayoneted rifle in his hands and with a magazine pistol at his
waist---workmen---soldiers---the men Lenin had to rely on---the
armed revolutionary proletariate---the nucleus of the future Red
Army of Lenin's Russia. They grounded their rifles. Somebody said
to Lenin: "They are here." The outer door was closed.
Lenin rose and walked toward his visitors.
"Comrades," he said, "you see I have not run
away. Comrades, I was fighting for the revolution before some
of you were born. I shall be fighting for the revolution when
some of you are dead. I stand always in danger. You stand in more
danger. Let us talk frankly."
He put his hands in his pockets and walked up and down, and
meditated and spoke:
"Comrades, I do not blame you for not always trusting
your leaders. There are so many voices in Russia to-day! I wonder
that you have trusted us as much as you have.
"Among honest revolutionists to-day there are two voices.
One of them is right. One is wrong.
"Many comrades say:
"'You must go to the front and fight the Germans and die
fighting. You must die fighting for the revolution.'
"They do not pretend, these comrades, that you are willing
to fight for anything except the revolution. But they say, and
they say truly, that the Germans are against the revolution. And
so they say, 'Go and fight the Germans.'
"I do not say so. I say:
"'You are the new army. You are the only army of the revolution.
You are the beginning of it. What will happen if you fight the
Germans? The old army is not fighting. It cannot fight. It is
exhausted. Only you, with the revolution in you, want to fight.
You know what will happen. You will fight. You will die. And the
soldiers of the revolution will be dead, and the Czar will come
back.'
"Would that be dying for the revolution? Comrades, when
we die, let us die really for the revolution. Let us die when
by dying we can win victory for the revolution.
"Comrades, my voice is right. They tell you I will make
a shameful peace. Yes. I will make a shameful peace. They tell
you I will surrender Petrograd, the imperial city. Yes, I will
surrender Petrograd, the imperial city. They tell you I will surrender
Moscow, the holy city. I will. I will go back to the Volga, and
I will go back behind the Volga to Ekaterinburg; but I will save
the soldiers of the revolution and I will save the revolution.
"Comrades, what is your will?
"I will give you now a special train to the front. I will
not stop you. You may go. But you will take my resignation with
you. I have led the revolution. I will not share in the murder
of my own child.
"Comrades, what is your will?"
"Lenin! Lenin! Lenin!" The room held no other sound.
"Comrade Lenin! Comrade Lenin!" It was a judgment delivered.
Having delivered it, the judges picked up their rifles and
marched out of the room and down the corridor, still delivering
their judgment. "Comrade Lenin."
Such was Lenin face to face with his followers. Such was Lenin
the personal leader.
On the very night on which he came into power, at Petrograd,
Lenin spoke in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets on the decree
regarding land. He said, in effect:
"You will notice, comrades, that in many ways this is
not our decree. In many ways this is the decree of some of our
political opponents. But we have noticed the answers given by
the peasants to the questions sent out to them. We cannot settle
the problem of the land without regard for the ideas of the peasants.
Time alone can tell, life alone can tell, whether we are right
or they are right. In the mean time we must remember that we cannot
impose our ideas when it is impossible to impose them. We must
keep our ideas to put into force when we can, not when we can't."
Some months later, when Lenin was reproached for not carrying
out the nationalization of all industries more rapidly, he expressed
himself to his critics about as follows:
"What would you have? The other day a delegation of comrades
came to see me to nationalize their factory. I said:
"'Well, here is the form for nationalization. All that
remains is to fill out the blanks, and your factory is nationalized.
But tell me,' I said, 'where do you get your raw materials?'
"'Raw materials?' they said. 'Why, we don't know.'
"'Well,' I said, 'where do you sell your product? Who
are your customers?'
"'We're sorry,' they said, 'but we can't tell you.'
"'I'm sorry, too,' I said, 'but, comrades,' I said, 'don't
you think you'd better go home and look up those raw materials
and look up those customers? Then come back and see me again.'
"I know that many things are done in haste in a revolution.
I know they must be. I cannot make a revolution anything but a
revolution. But our task has changed. It has changed with success.
A few months ago we had to bring the revolution in. Now we have
to make the revolution work. The formula then was, 'All Power
to the Soviet.' The formula now is, 'Labor Discipline.'"
He went on then to the writing of his message, in which he
said that all persons not working must be obliged to work and
that middle-class specialists must be hired, at any salaries necessary,
to give technical direction to the factories of Soviet Russia.
His critics took him to task at a great meeting of Soviet representatives.
The hall was filled for hours with cries of "Bourgeois Lenin"
and "Czar Lenin" from the extremists of the Left and
with serious hostile arguments from speakers moderate but alarmed.
At the end, when the night was far spent, Lenin rose to reply.
He said that all the arguments made against him could be divided
into a certain number of classes. He would answer them class by
class. He proceeded to do so. He spoke for perhaps half an hour.
He got a vote of confidence as unmistakable as the vote from the
Red Guards in his office at Petrograd. He returned to the Kremlin
and continued to pursue his policy of "Labor Discipline."
He said, "I will cause a sufficient number of men to work
a sufficient number of hours at a sufficient rate of speed to
produce what Russia requires."
It was a sufficiently Russian remark.
One day a man---an American---came to Robins in a great emergency
of trouble. "I'm going to be ruined," he said.
"How? Where?" said Robins.
"My factory."
"Won't your men work?"
"Certainly they work. We're getting ten to twenty per
cent. more product per man under Lenin than we did under Kerensky."
"Well, what's your complaint?"
"Listen! This workers' control may be all right in the
factory. But now they're going to put it into the buying and selling.
They're going to put it into the office. It's all wrong in the
office. It won't go. But they've sent us an ultimatum. I tell
you it'll kill us."
"I agree with you," said Robins. "What do you
want me to do?"
"Well, they say you can see Lenin. See him."
Lenin listened while Robins told him that this American company
certainly has a lot of manufacturing knowledge, and that it is
willing to go on using that knowledge in Russia and giving Russia
the benefit of it if only the Bolshevik government will compromise
and not insist on putting workers' control into the office.
The compromise was made. Lenin wrote out an order stopping
the putting of workers' control into the office.
Robins met the manager of that factory again, some time later,
and asked him how he was getting on.
"All right," said he. "First rate."
"Going to keep on?"
"Sure."
"Tell me. If you get out of Russia, who will take your
place making harvesters for Russia? "
"Why, some German!
"Of course," says Robins. Robins' view was:
"Stay in Russia. Stick. Russia has a revolution. Lenin
did not make it. He has led it, but he did not make it. Yet he
does lead it. And he leads it all the time, as much as he can,
toward work---toward the task of actually earning a living in
a living world. He is calling for engineering advisers now, for
factory managers. To get them he is willing to negotiate, and
he has tried to negotiate with foreign 'bourgeois' governments,
and especially with the United States. To get them he is willing
to compromise, just as he has compromised with my American business
man. If we break with him altogether he will find it more and
more difficult to make his government compromise with American
business men. If we go away altogether, and leave Russia, he will
make his compromises and get his factory managers where he can---and
the quickest and easiest place is Germany. To fight Lenin is to
play the German game."
Lenin, by April of 1918, had two immediate aims: work and order.
Along about the middle of April Robins went to see Lenin and said:
"About this May-day parade, on the first of May. My men
tell me there is going to be a lot of trouble. Why do you have
the parade? It will cost a lot of money; and Russia is hungry,
and poor; and there will be shooting and murdering. Besides, what
has it got to do with work?"
Lenin looked really quite surprised.
"We have to have work," he said, "but we have
to have May-day. On every May-day past, for many years, we marched
in honor of the revolution to come. Now, on the first May-day
of the Soviet republic, we march for the first time in honor of
the revolution accomplished. It has to be. We may march without
shoes, but we have to march."
But Robins was persistent about it. He went to see Lenin again,
later in the month. and said:
"It's just as I told you. There's going to be trouble.
I'll give you just one case. My men saw a coffin being carried
into a building on the line of march. Then they saw another coffin
going into that same building. They kept on watching, and the
coffins kept on coming; and now there are seven coffins in that
building. And my men have taken a look at them inside. They're
not coffins. They're machine guns. That's what's going to happen."
Lenin, rather wearily, scratched some words on a piece of paper.
Robins thought it was an order to capture and confiscate the machine
guns. It turned out to be quite more.
On the afternoon of the 30th of April Robins was in his room
in the Hotel Europe. Some men came in. They closed the windows
and sealed the fastenings of the windows. They warned Robins against
breaking the seals till the parade next day was over. A regulation
had been issued. It had been issued to the legally responsible
"house committee" of every house along the line of march.
If from that house there should be a shot fired at the parade
by anybody, then the whole "house committee" would be
arrested and tried.
Next day forty-two thousand people marched nine miles through
a city filled with revolutionists and counter-revolutionists,
and not a shot was fired, and not one man or woman was hurt.
It was a holiday; it was a workless day; but Lenin, after all,
had not been able to forget work. He had caused certain words
to be displayed conspicuously everywhere. They met Robins' eyes
all day long. To Moscow celebrating the joyous overthrow of capitalism,
these words everywhere said: "Labor Discipline," "Labor
Discipline," "Labor Discipline."
Such is the temperament of Lenin the ruler, in working pursuit
of his economic social-control state.
The reviewing-stand of the Moscow May-day parade of 1918 was
in the Red Square, just outside the Kremlin. Along the Kremlin
wall were two rows of trees. Paralleling them ran a trench-the
trench in which the men who died for the Soviet revolution in
Moscow lay buried.
The parade, in detachments, marched along by that trench and
approached the reviewing-stand---a tall stand, almost like a monument---draped
in red and black. Each detachment arriving at that point stood.
It turned toward the long grave of its fallen comrades. Every
soldier was at attention. Every civilian's hat was raised. The
"Marseillaise" was sung. It was sung by everybody and
it was sung through. Then this detachment went on, and the next
detachment came, and again the "Marseillaise" rose,
and again the revolutionary dead were summoned to the memory of
the revolution.
<A HREF="images/Robins07.jpg"><IMG
SRC="thumbnails/Robins07tn.jpg" WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="81" ALIGN="LEFT"
BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig. 7.
COLONEL ROBINS STANDING IN FRONT OF THE CAR THAT CARRIED THE AMERICAN
FLAG EVERY DAY THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY PETROGRAD AND MOSCOW
Next to him, with the rosette on his coat, stands Jacob Peters,
who has received a bloody fame throughout the world as a second
Robespierre. Peters signed the death papers of the Bolshevik government.
Next to Peters is Karakhan, who was secretary of the Brest-Litovsk
Conference. Behind the boy soldier is Vasili Likhachev, Police
and Fire Chief of Moscow, at one time a stationary fireman in
New York. Between Peters and Karakhan is Capt. D. Heywood Hardy,
in Red Cross uniform. At the extreme right of the picture is Charles
Stevenson Smith, head of the Associated Press in Russia. Next
to Smith, wearing the leather coat, is Alexander Gumberg, interpreter
and secretary to Colonel Robins.
Robins watched from his motor, near the
reviewing-stand. He was in his American uniform, and his motor
carried the American flag. He was standing beside it. Suddenly
he was conscious of a stir in the crowd near him. Something was
coming along, breaking through the crowd. In a moment Robins saw
it. It was a motor carrying a red flag on each side of the hood
and a red streamer floating from the folded top and soldiers with
bayoneted rifles on the running-boards and on the front seat with
the driver. In the back seat was Count Mirbach, the German ambassador.
Mirbach had just arrived in Moscow. He seemed, if one might
judge from his flags and guards, to feel some need of protection
in Moscow. Robins had been offered a red flag for his car. He
had refused it. He was carrying only an American flag. Where was
Mirbach's German flag? And why so many bayonets?
Perhaps Count Mirbach had read the editorial with which Karl
Radek, in the official Bolshevik party paper Pravda, had
welcomed him to Moscow. Most certainly he had read it. Everybody
in public station read Pravda.
In Pravda, on April 28th, Carl' Radek, recognized chief
journalist of the Bolshevik party, had welcomed Mirbach to Moscow
in these words:
The Ambassador of the German government has arrived in Moscow. He has arrived in the revolutionary capital. But he does not come as the representative of the laboring classes of a friendly people.
He comes as the representative of a military clique which kills and robs and violates wherever its bloody imperialistic bayonets can reach.
Simultaneously with this bourgeois robbery from the west, comes bourgeois robbery from the east. A reinforced Japanese detachment is landed in Vladivostok.
Whining intellectuals among us, bourgeois hirelings among us, are convinced that there is no salvation for us from the tusks of imperialism approaching us from both sides. They have never believed in the strength of the revolutionary government of workers and peasants. Now they are in favor of "capitulation."
They are mistaken. The revolution is only beginning to discover its forces. The liberated class has not yet risen to its full height. But it is rising even now.
The problem of the government of workers and peasants becomes the problem of organizing the resistance of workers and peasants to bourgeois slavery re-entering Russia on foreign wheels.
The representatives of German imperialism have entered Moscow; but, in order to get a ticket for Moscow, they have to admit the Red embassy of revolutionary Russia to Berlin. Our comrades go there as the representatives of a country which is the weakest of all countries in the military sense; but they go there as the representatives of a country morally victorious. Not one workman in Berlin will greet the ambassador of the Russian Socialist republic with the hate with which every workman in Moscow to-day greets the representative of German capital.
The Red banner has been raised over the Red Embassy at Berlin. It floats there not as the banner of Russia, but as the bannerof the rebellion of the labor of the world.
Perhaps this editorial may have been a bit upsetting to Mirbach.
Yet, in his motor, on the 1st of May, in the Red Square, he began
by showing great composure---even gaiety. He watched the show
with pleasure. He chatted. He showed his teeth, smiling.
Then, as detachment after detachment passed, and as the exhalations
of the spirit of the music and of the spirit of the summoning
of the revolutionary dead began to reach him, he grew silent.
He looked on with eyes fixed. After a while he seemed to rouse
himself at least to resentment. He grew scornful. He seemed to
sneer. His lips were pressed together in lines that said: "This
beaten people! This broken people! Let them parade. We will beat
them some more and break- them some more when we want to."
The "Marseillaise" was sounding. Hats were off. But
Mirbach's hat was on. He could not stop these Russians from parading,
perhaps. But he could insult them. He could keep his hat on and
throw himself back in his car.
In a second, though, he was standing. He was looking intently.
A great banner was approaching him. On it were Socialist words.
But they were not in Russian. They were in German. In German,
in great letters, they said:
"Working-men of all countries, unite! German comrades,
throw off your Kaiser, as the Russian comrades have thrown off
their Czar."
Mirbach leaned forward to stare at the men carrying this banner.
How did these Russians dare to carry it? They were the vanquished.
He was the victor. He leaned forward as if to meet them and stop
them, and they came close to him; and he could see them now plainly;
and he showed his teeth now again, but not to smile.
These men were his own countrymen. They were Germans. With
a German step they came and with a German order and wearing German
uniforms. They were German Imperial troops serving the Russian
revolution, the German revolution, the International revolution.
In their procession there was the face of their new master in
a picture on a float---the face of a Jew---of a Jew once more
declaring that all nations are of one blood-the face of Karl Marx.
In his sign and in his service they brushed by the hood of the
car of the ambassador of the Kaiser and came to a halt and grounded
their banner and turned toward the grave of the revolutionary
dead and stood at attention; and once more Mirbach heard the "Marseillaise";
and then once more, as the song ceased and as the procession resumed
its march, that banner flung its swaying words at him:
<A HREF="images/Robins08.jpg"><IMG SRC="thumbnails/Robins08tn.jpg"
WIDTH="144" HEIGHT="114" ALIGN="LEFT" BORDER="1" NATURALSIZEFLAG="3"></A>Fig. 8. MAY-DAY
PARADE, Moscow. Picture of Karl Marx carried on float.
"Working-men of all countries, unite! German comrades,
throw off your Kaiser, as the Russian comrades have thrown off
their Czar."
Mirbach sat down again in his car and threw himself back again
in it; and his face took on the look of a man who sees a black
gulf ahead of him, but who will drive on into it rather than not
drive. "Let all these slaves march! " he seemed to say.
"Let them all march, Russians and Germans and all. We will
break them all."
But, somehow, he could not look at them any more. He turned
his eyes away and sat brooding. There was pride on him still,
but there was also the mark of a great doubt. A half-hour ago
he had been so confident, so suave. Now he was sullen, suspicious,
angry. Against what he had seen in front of him he was hurling
the answer of hate---his only answer; and he was meditating it
unhappily, uneasily. To all who watched him he was sinister now---sinister
and insecure. To Robins he was the image of the power of privilege,
triumphant for century after century of human history, and brought
now to the brink of a bottomless questioning and looking over
that brink, and down into that questioning, and wondering if here
indeed is the abyss, here the end.
The rulers of all western Europe are now gazing into that same
abyss, and gazing with precisely Mirbach's headlong hate, followed
by precisely Mirbach's quaking wonder. Both the hate and the wonder,
both the reckless resort to force and the helpless inward panic
of fear, are the offspring, Robins thinks, of thorough misinformation,
sometimes innocent and sometimes deliberate, regarding the Soviet
republic.
Robins came back from Russia in June of 1918, and said that
in the Soviet republic there was great strength and great capacity
for resistance. Other persons, much more in the confidence of
the administration at Washington, came back and said that the
Soviet republic was nothing but a street corner soap-box stuffed
out with a German subsidy. For month after month, then, the Allies
and the anti-Bolshevik Russians attacked the Soviet republic by
arms on all fronts; and the Soviet republic, blockaded, starving,
sick, with no conceivable help any longer from the Kaiser and
with no possible access to the imported machine-materials on which
Russian industrial life had always depended, for month after month
held out. Tested by life, the Soviet republic was not a feeble
thing. It was a powerful thing, generating its own power out of
its own power-house, somewhere, somehow.
Robins' antagonists claimed that this native internal power-house
did not exist. Robins claimed that it did exist. It has been proved
to exist.
So far, Robins has tried to describe certain leading characteristics
of Bolshevik power and intention. He has shown the actual authority
of the Soviets even in the days before the Bolsheviks controlled
them; he has shown the ruinous effect of the diplomacy of Trotzky
on the morale of the German Eastern army and on the morale of
the proletarian element in the German population; he has shown
the willingness of Trotzky and of Lenin to seek economic co-operation
and to seek military co-operation with America and America's rejection
of their offers; he has shown the carefully-thought-out theory
of Lenin for an economic state; he has shown Lenin's willingness
to concede, to compromise, in order to make some sort of state
in Russia stand---stand with organization and with orderliness;
and he has shown the personal and public devotion and the utter
confidence which Lenin's followers give to Lenin and to Lenin's
program.
Robins holds the view that no effort to combat Bolshevism can
ever be successful unless it is directed against what Bolshevism
is, instead of against what Bolshevism is not; and therefore he
has first tried to describe what Bolshevism is, in its internal
going power; and if people call him a Socialist for doing so,
he can afford to be patient. Paraphrasing Lenin and rather reversing
him, Robins can say to such people: "I was fighting Socialism
before some of you ever thought of it, and I shall be fighting
Socialism when some of you have quit."