Part 14

Before we attempt to describe the behavior of men in societies in such a crisis, we shall have to go a bit further into the process by which the extremists acceded to power. In a sense, such an analysis will be but pointing out in reverse what we have already said of the moderates: the reasons why the extremists succeeded are but the other side of the reasons why the moderates failed. Where the moderates were weak, the extremists were strong. The actual steps by which the extremists rise to power are, however, too important to be left with this general statement. We must parallel our analysis of moderate weaknesses with an analysis of extremist strengths.

The extremists win out because they secure control of the illegal government and turn it in a decisive coup d’état against the legal government. The problem of the dual sovereignty is solved by the revolutionary acts in which the Independents, the Jacobins, and the Bolsheviks seized power. But the moderates had once shared with them the control of the organizations which they had turned against the government. The key to the success of the extremists lies in their monopoly of these organizations--New Model Army and Independent churches, Jacobin clubs, and soviets.

They obtain this monopoly by ousting, usually in a series of conflicts, any and all opponents from these organizations. The discipline, single-mindedness, and centralization of authority which mark the rule of the triumphant extremists are first developed and brought to perfection in the revolutionary groups. The characteristics which were formed in the growth of the illegal government remain those of the radicals after the illegal government becomes the legal. Indeed, many of these useful characteristics were first molded even further back in the days of the old regime, when the extremists were very small concentrated groups subject to the full “tyranny” of the government. The Independents gained discipline and devotion from a long series of persecutions which began under Elizabeth, whose famed love of tolerance was not extended to Catholics or Brownists. The French radicals were not as badly treated under the old regime as their descendants and historians like to think, but the censorship, the Bastille, and the lettres de cachet were real enough, even if they rarely fell to the lot of the rank and file of the enlightened. As for Russia, its extremists were molded in the most melodramatic traditions of oppression, were backed by almost a century of secret organization, plotting, oaths, and martyrdom.

What emerges from this longer past and from the recent conflict with the moderates is a fighting group with the newly acquired habit of winning. You cannot say exactly why a given football team succeeds in winning most of the time, let alone why an army or a revolutionary party wins. The variables are so many even in the simplest case that no sensible man would make predictions based wholly on the most apparent and perhaps most important variable of all--the quality of the human material. Gamblers know this, if historians and sociologists do not. That our revolutionists were successful and admirably organized groups we know, and we can make some attempt to point out in what ways they succeeded, what particular kinds of strength they exhibited. We cannot give any neat formula for success in building a revolutionary group, cannot measure exactly why these revolutionists succeeded and others failed.

II. Organization of the Extremists

The first thing likely to strike an observer of the successful extremists in the English, French, and Russian revolutions, and indeed, the not quite so radical patriots who put through the American revolution, is their fewness in numbers. The membership of the formal organizations which did the work of beating the moderates was never more than a small minority of the total population. Their active membership was of course always smaller than the membership on the books. It is not easy to get exact figures, whether for membership or for populations, but the following figures are not erroneous enough to be misleading. The New Model Army was created at a membership of 22,000, and was not more than 40,000 in its most obstreperous days. The population of England was somewhere between three and five millions. The Jacobins at the most generous estimate numbered in their struggle with the moderates about 500,000. The population of France was probably over rather than under twenty millions. The Communist party in Russia has always prided itself on its numerical smallness; this is no unwieldy bourgeois party, full of indifferent members who cast a lazy vote, or don’t even vote at all. Figures again are uncertain, but it seems likely that at no time during the revolution did the Communist party number even 1 per cent of a population of well over one hundred million. In America the difficulty of even approximate figures is greater, since the patriots were not organized into a single body. It is clearly not fair to take the relatively small continental armies as exactly measuring the strength of the patriot--or Whig--group. Nevertheless, the best authorities are agreed that if you count out avowed Tories and the very numerous indifferent or neutral, the group which actively engineered, supported, and fought the American revolution is a minority, probably not more than 10 per cent of the population.

It is easy to remark that though the facts clearly show that these revolutionary groups are very small minorities indeed, all politically active groups are minorities, and that in these revolutions the radicals in some way “represented” or “carried out” what the soul, will, genius, of their nations demanded. This may well be so in terms familiar to the metaphysician, but the relation involved is one which at present we cannot pretend to be able to study by the methods we have laid down in this book. Perhaps the Jacobins were the agents of the general will of the French people; but the general will is a metaphysical concept the relation of which with tangible Jacobins we cannot possibly measure here.

Trotsky in one of his less realistic moods has a fine time reconciling the fewness of the Bolsheviks in 1917 with the largeness of Russia, and with the various groups clearly hostile to the Bolsheviks. “The Bolsheviks,” he writes, “took the people as preceding history had created them, and as they were called to achieve the Revolution. The Bolsheviks saw it as their mission to stand at the head of this people. Those against the insurrection were ‘everybody’--except the Bolsheviks. But the Bolsheviks were the people.” Here again “everybody” in quotation marks is obviously different from everybody without quotation marks; and though we can as scientists, perhaps, make use of everybody, we can do nothing at all with “everybody.”

We can, however, say that in all our societies these radicals were very conscious, and usually very proud, of their small numbers. They felt definitely set off from their countrymen, consecrated to a cause which their countrymen were certainly not consciously and actively equal to. Some of the radicals may have satisfied themselves that they really represented the better selves of their fellow-countrymen, that they were the reality of which the others were the potentiality. But here and now they were very sure that they were superior to the inert and flabby many. The English saints of the seventeenth century, the elect of a God more exclusive than any poor worldly king, made no attempt to conceal their contempt for the damned masses--and dukes and earls were of course masses for these determined Puritans. The Jacobins inherited from the Enlightenment a belief in the natural goodness or the natural reasonableness of the common man, and this belief put a limit to their expressed scorn for their fellows. But the scorn is there, and the Jacobin was almost as loftily consecrated as was the Independent. The Bolsheviks were brought up to believe that dialectical materialism works through an elite of the laboring classes, and that the peasants in particular were incapable of working out their own salvation. The Bolsheviks therefore took their fewness naturally enough, and their superiority as well.

There is also a good deal of evidence that as the revolutions go on, a very large number of people just drop out of active politics, make no attempt to register their votes. Now it may be that most of these people again are at heart in sympathy with the active radicals; but on the whole it looks as if most of them were cowed conservatives or moderates, men and women not anxious for martyrdom, but quite incapable of the mental and moral as well as physical strain of being a devoted extremist in the crisis of a revolution. We have very clear evidence of this dropping out of the ordinary man in two of our revolutions, and we may assume that it is one of the uniformities we are seeking.

In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At the first elections almost everybody, men and women alike, took the opportunity to vote in various local elections. But very shortly there set in a noticeable decline in the total number of votes cast. In the June, 1917, elections for the Moscow district dumas the Social-Revolutionary groups received 58 per cent of the votes; in the September elections the Bolsheviks received 52 per cent. A clear gain for the Bolsheviks by democratic methods? Not at all. In June the Social-Revolutionaries got 375,000 votes out of 647,000 cast; in September the Bolsheviks got 198,000 out of 381,000 cast. In three months half the electorate dropped out. Trotsky himself has a simple explanation for this; “many small-town people who, in the vapor of the first illusions, had joined the Compromisers fell back soon after into political non-existence.” The same story is graphically recorded in French municipal and national elections between the rosy days of 1789, when everyone who could stagger to the polls voted, and 1793, when in some cases less than a tenth of the qualified voters actually voted. They did not vote for Bolsheviks or Jacobins, and it seems more than likely that if most Englishmen could have voted at all in 1648, they would not have voted for Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, or Millenarians. The great numbers of qualified voters just don’t vote; in Trotsky’s compact phrase, they are politically non-existent.

Their political non-existence is not achieved without a good deal of help from the extremists. The elections are supposedly free and open, but the extremists are not hindered by any beliefs in freedom they may have expressed in other days. They soon take to steps familiar in this country through the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Tammany Hall. They beat up well-known aristocrats and such-like class enemies, they start riots at polling places or in electoral assemblies, they break windows and start street fights, they howl down moderate candidates, they bring to bear good journalists, skilled at libel and innuendo, and in a hundred ways which any realistic student of politics can uncover with a little study, they make it very difficult for ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women to go to the polls and cast their votes for the moderates to whom ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women seem attracted. Not that terrorism alone scares off the ordinary man. Mere laziness, an inability to give to political affairs the ceaseless attention revolutions demand, is also instrumental in keeping the man in the street from expressing himself. He gets fed up with the constant meetings, the deputations, the papers, the elections of dog-catchers, general inspectors, presidents, the committees, the rituals, the ceaseless moil and toil of self-government on a more than Athenian basis. At any rate he quits, and the extremists have the field to themselves.

Their fewness is indeed one of the great sources of the extremists’ strength. Great numbers are almost as unwieldy in politics as on the battlefield. In the politics of revolutions what counts is the ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions. For such a purpose the active political group must be small. You cannot otherwise obtain the single-mindedness and devotion, the energy and the discipline, necessary to defeat the moderates. You cannot in large numbers maintain the fever of fanaticism long enough to secure the ultimate victory. The masses do not make revolutions. They may be enlisted for some impressive pageantry once the active few have won the revolution. Our contemporary revolutions, both of the Right and the Left, have achieved apparent miracles of mass participation. But the impressive demonstrations the camera records in Germany and Russia ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Bolshevik nor Nazi victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; both were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.

Nor at this stage of revolution do the victorious radicals make use of the plebiscite. They do not dare risk anything like a free election. Only later, when the crisis is followed by a convalescence, by a return to normal ways, does the plebiscite stage arrive. This interval may not be a very long one, and in the case of Rightist revolutions may be very brief, since the full fury of the Ideal rarely inspires the men of the Right. But certainly for the revolutions we are here studying, the generalization holds: the plebiscite is absent from the struggle between extremists and moderates, and is not used by the extremists even after their accession to power.

The extremists are not only few; they are fanatically devoted to their cause. Their awareness of being few seems correlated with the intensity of their fanaticism. One feeds upon and strengthens the other. With their objects, with the content of their dreams of a better world, we shall concern ourselves later. For those who think that only in the service of a personal God can feelings properly defined as “fanatical” be aroused, our application of the word to Jacobins and Bolsheviks may seem illegitimate. But this is surely an undue narrowing of a clear and useful word. Bolsheviks and Jacobins were as convinced as any Calvinist that they alone were right, that what they proposed was the only possible course. All of our revolutionary radicals displayed a willingness to work hard, to sacrifice their peace and security, to submit to discipline, to submerge their personalities in the group. They were all aware of the spiritual difficulties of keeping “always at the height of revolutionary circumstances,” as the Jacobins used to put it; but to a surprising extent they overcame these difficulties and maintained on this earth an esprit de corps, an active moral union, that is far beyond the powers of ordinary men in ordinary circumstances to attain and to maintain.

And they are disciplined. Partly, as we have explained, this is an inheritance from their oppressed past. It correlates with their fewness and with their fanatical strength. The New Model Army is an excellent example. It defeated the haphazard aggregations which the ordinary recruiting methods of the Royalists opposed to it; it defeated the cream of the opposing forces, the cavalry recruited from faithful country gentlemen and their dependents. The New Model was recruited from ardent Puritans, vouched for by men who knew them; and it was submitted to a brief but effective course of training incomparably more severe than any that had yet been used in English military history. The result was a fine army--and a compact body of hard revolutionists who could cut through the best intentions and the best rhetoric of the moderates. The discipline of the Jacobins was not military, but it was very rigorous, and indeed resembled the kind of discipline which a militant religious body imposes on its members. The Jacobins were always scrutinizing their own membership, submitting to the ordeal of an épuration, literally a “purification,” perhaps in contemporary terms a “purge.” The slightest deviation from the established order of the day might bring a warning and possible expulsion. With the Spartan ways of the Russian Communist party in the early days of the soviet state most of us are familiar; it is a point on which all reporters, kindly and unkindly, are agreed.

The extremists put their disciplined skill into the realization of the revolutionary ends. There has been worked out in the last few hundred years an elaborate technique of revolutionary action, of which the Russian Communists were the latest heirs. A good deal has been written about this technique, which is in part simply the technique of any successful pressure group: propaganda, electioneering, lobbying, parading, street-fighting, delegation-making, direct pressure on magistrates, sporadic terrorism of the tar-and-feather or castor-oil variety. Jacobins, Communists, and Sons of Liberty did a notably good job at this sort of thing. But it is rather surprising to note how many of these techniques can be found in England, and especially in London, as early as the seventeenth century. In this respect, as in many others, the English revolution is clearly of a modern type. Here is a bit that might have come from the French revolution: during the debate on the Militia Order, a crowd of apprentices “came into the House of Commons and kept the door open, and their hats on ... and called out as they stood ‘Vote, vote,’ and in this arrogant posture stood until the votes passed.” One suspects that these apprentices did not march in spontaneously. This is the kind of thing that takes organization.

Finally, the extremists follow their leaders with a devotion and a unanimity not to be found among the moderates. Theories of democratic equality, which crop up at the start of all our revolutions, prove no obstacle to the development among the extremists of something very like the “Führer” principle we associate with Fascist movements. Here it is the moderates who live up to their theories, and in the early stages of the revolutions it is not uncommon to find complaints that So-and-so is arrogating to himself powers no good man would want to possess. Mirabeau and Kerensky, to take neat examples, were accused by moderates and extremists alike of aiming at a personal dictatorship. Yet Robespierre and Lenin followed in their footsteps--almost literally--and this time only the cheering could be heard. This magnifying of the principle of leadership runs right through the organization, from the subalterns up to the great national heroes--Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin.

On the whole, this leadership is effective, and especially so at the very top. Now if they are seen as full and rounded human beings, there are unquestionably differences among the men who make up the general staffs of the extremists. The psychologist and the novelist--indeed the historian as well--could not lump them all together. Yet they have in common one aspect which is of great importance to the sociologist; they combine, in varying degrees, very high ideals and a complete contempt for the inhibitions and principles which serve most other men as ideals. They present a strange variant of Plato’s pleasant scheme: they are not philosopher-kings but philosopher-killers. They have the realistic, the practical touch very few of the moderate leaders had, and yet they have also enough of the prophet’s fire to hold followers who expect the New Jerusalem around the next corner. They are practical men unfettered by common sense, Machiavellians in the service of the Beautiful and the Good.

A bit from Lenin will make the point clear. At a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party just before the October revolution, Lenin was urging insurrection on the more tender-minded of his colleagues, who thought that the Bolsheviks ought to respect the will of the majority of Russians, which was clearly against them. “We are inclined to consider the systematic preparation of an uprising as something in the nature of a political sin,” said he. “To wait until the Constituent Assembly, which will clearly not be with us, is senseless.” There is the practical Lenin, unworried by a democratic dogma that stands in his way. After the October revolution he writes in Pravda of “the crisis which has arisen as a result of the lack of correspondence between the elections to the Constituent Assembly and the will of the people and the interests of the toiling and exploited classes.” Here the will of the people is somehow at bottom the will of the minority party of Bolsheviks. We are back again in the midst of democratic dogma. Parallel cases could readily be drawn from Robespierre, Cromwell, and even, one fears, from Jefferson.

Hypocrisy? To those of little imagination or experience of the world, such acts must always seem hypocritical. But, on a less heroic scale, they are far too much a part of normal human action to deserve so opprobrious a label. The Robespierre who, as an enlightened young man, had held capital punishment wrong did not hypocritically send his enemies to the guillotine. He had convinced himself that his enemies were scarcely men at all; they were sinners, corrupt souls, agents of a worse-than-Satan, and their removal from this earth wasn’t really capital punishment in the conventional sense at all. You could still treat ordinary criminals in full accord with the most humanitarian principles of jurisprudence. Most of us make this sort of compromise with ourselves often enough in daily life. But with us comfort, convenience, habit, even common sense, determine the limits of compromise. For the revolutionary extremist such limits are off; in the delirium, in the crisis, there is an extraordinary reversal of the roles played in normal times by the real and the ideal. Here briefly and at last the blind--or the seer--is king; plain earthly seeing, the kind that concerns the oculist, is for once of very little use. The seers have just enough of it to keep their positions of leadership. Cromwell, indeed, had a good deal of what seems an English sense of the contingent, and Lenin was certainly no academic idealist. Robespierre is in some ways the most unadulterated seer of the lot.

Yet all of them, including even Robespierre, were what the world calls men of action. They could and did get things done, were administrators and executives, ran organizations for which tradition and routine had not yet been able to build up much that worked automatically. If they have left behind them a reputation for unusual ruthlessness, this may be in part a reflection of the ill repute terrorism has for most of us. And the ruthlessness, in the proper service of the ideal, went while they were alive into the making of their leadership. Cromwell gained credit among the Saints for his Irish massacres. The guillotine in France was for a few months the “holy guillotine.” Trotsky, early in his famous rallying of the Bolshevik troops in the Civil War, ordered shot the commander, commissar, and one soldier out of ten in a Petrograd workers’ regiment that had fled the enemy, and to the dismay of gentler colleagues showed no hesitation about continuing the policy of discipline through bloodshed. Trotsky became briefly a savior and a hero. We are a long way from Order Number One!

For most men, there is a gap between their deeds and their professions, between what they are and what they would like to be, between what they are and what they think they are. Normally, however, they manage to keep the gap small enough, or turn their attention away from one side of it or the other, so that they are not unduly troubled by it. For the leaders of the extremists in times of revolution the gap looks to an outside observer enormous, bigger than it ever is in normal times. A few men, like Fouché, seem to have been terrorists to save their own skins. But, in general, only a sincere extremist in a revolution can kill men because he loves man, attain peace through violence, and free men by enslaving them. Such contrasts in action would paralyze a conventionally practical leader, but the extremist seems quite undisturbed by it. Where the ordinary man would be troubled by something like a split personality, where his conscience or his sense of reality, or both, would be haunted, the extremist goes boldly ahead. Wide though the gap between the real and the ideal is in the crisis period, he can cross it at his own convenience. He has, for the moment, the best of both worlds. He can manipulate with equal skill the concrete and complex human beings on committees, deputations, bureaus, ministries, all the unsettling problems of administration, and yet use gracefully and convincingly the abstract, indispensable, haunting words which have in revolutions such magic power over large groups of men.

It is this last gift that seems to lie all but wholly beyond the capacity of the most ambitious hypocrite. The great leaders of the Terrors are fitted for their task by a genuine vocation, a vocation which in ordinary times would exclude them from political power. Their belief in the Absolute is not assumed, and is as real as their ability to handle the contingent. And for once the Absolute is practical politics. F. W. Maitland has a passage, suggested by Coleridge, which puts the point neatly: “Coleridge has remarked how, in times of great political excitement, the terms in which political theories are expressed become, not more and more practical, but more and more abstract and impractical. It is in such times that men clothe their theories in universal terms.... The absolute spirit is abroad. Relative or partial good seems a poor ideal. It is not of these, or those men that we speak, of this nation or that age, but of Man.”

III. Fitness of the Extremists

The transition from opposition to power is not a sudden one for the extremists. The whole point about the dvoevlastie, the dual sovereignty, is that it is not a struggle between government and opposition, between ins and outs, but between two governments within the same state. Under the old regime perhaps no more than a pressure group, the revolutionists’ organization gradually takes over, in the confusion of the first stages of actual revolution, governmental powers which are never thereafter wholly subordinated to the provisional government, the almost legal heir of the old regime. The process is especially clear in Russia, though it is substantially uniform in all our revolutions.

Practically all the soviets, even in the market towns, did administrative work from the very beginning. Trotsky, here in his role of historian, gives some good succinct examples: “The soviet in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians, introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned factories.... In the Urals the soviets frequently instituted courts of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured goods and established a wage-scale. In certain districts of the Urals, the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social cultivation.” Obviously, in parts of Russia the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had become a bit superfluous even before the October revolution.

In France the “Societies of Friends of the Constitution,” at their formation in 1789 hardly more than pressure groups, or possibly French variants of the Yankee caucus, had by June 2, 1793, taken over a good many functions normally carried out by governmental bodies. When the “constituted authorities,” as the Jacobins respectfully called governing councils and legislatures, failed to do what the Jacobins wanted, the Jacobins went ahead and did it themselves. Notably the whole repressive legislation on the non-juring (Catholic) clergy was anticipated in practice by the Jacobin clubs in the provinces. The clubs were organized like parliamentary bodies, with elaborate rules on debating, with committees, officers, minutes, and indeed all the apparatus of a proper legislature. Sometimes a club would overawe or persuade municipal or departmental officers into an approved Jacobin policy; sometimes, failing in this, a club would almost openly pass laws and decrees. Those of the members who protested against this shocking interference with authorities chosen by popular election--and many did protest on just such grounds--were thereby ticketed as moderates, and were lucky if they avoided the guillotine later.