The Russian Revolution

Part 1

Produced by David Starner, David Widger and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

By Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup, Harper Frank,And Alfred Golder

THE JUGO-SLAV MOVEMENT

By Robert Joseph Kerner

PREFACE

Whatever may be its final outcome the Russian Revolution of 1917 bids fair to remain one of the great events of modern history. Its consequences are still immeasurable and today to many they appear as fraught with menace as with hope. They have within less than a year led a mighty empire to the brink of dissolution and no man can foretell where and how the process will end for worse or for better. The Russian Revolution saved the Central Powers at the moment when their prospect looked darkest, but on the other hand it facilitated the entrance of the United States into the war as one for liberty and democracy. Time has yet to show whether the loss or the gain has been the greater for the Allied cause and for mankind. It will be paid for at a heavy price but our hope cannot easily be shaken that sooner or later an event so full of promise for the misruled millions of the autocratic empire of the Tsar will mark a step forward, not backward, in the progress of the world. The whole story of the sudden out-break in Petrograd which in little more than a day swept away the fabric of imperial government will not soon be told, if ever. All real information on the subject is timely and valuable. We need such studies as those contained in the present volume, in order that we may understand what has happened, and why it has happened.

The rise of the modern Jugo-Slav movement offers us a very different picture. The subject and even the name are new to most people, the scale is much smaller; the events have been less dramatic. But the unconquerable resistance which a small disjointed nationality has offered throughout the ages to ill fortune, oppression, and to attempts to obliterate it entirely arouses our admiration. The movement too was intimately connected with the outbreak of the present world war which cannot be understood without taking it into account. It still represents only an ardent hope for the future but when the day of peace and justice comes no permanent allotment can be made of the lands east of the Adriatic that shall not give it at least some satisfaction.

ARCHIBALD CARY COOLIDGE.

MARCH 18, 1918. THE ROLE OF THE INTELLECTUALS IN THE LIBERATING MOVEMENT IN RUSSIA

By Alexander Petrunkevitch

In an interview dated November 21, and published in the New York Times in a special cable from Petrograd, Leon Trotzky in defending the attitude of the people toward the Bolsheviki coup d'etat is reported to have said substantially the following: "All the bourgeoisie is against us. The greater part of the intellectuals is against us or hesitating, awaiting a final outcome. The working class is wholly with us. The army is with us. The peasants, with the exception of exploiters, are with us. The Workmen's and Soldiers' government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants against the capitalists and landowners."

On the other hand my father, Ivan Petrunkevitch, floorleader of the Constitutional Democratic party in the first Duma and since that time owner and publisher of the Petrograd daily Rech writes in a private letter dated June 12: "... the present real government, i. e., the Council of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies, whose leaders are neither soldiers nor workmen, but intellectuals, etc." Nothing has happened during the months intervening between the letter and the interview to change the composition of the Council appreciably. It is true that Kerensky who was vice-president of the Council has been meanwhile deposed; that Tshcheidze had to relinquish the presidency in the Council to Trotzky long before Kerensky's downfall; but the leaders of the Council still are intellectuals, are well educated men, some of them well known writers on political and economic questions and withal very different from the masses which they lead and which they purport to represent. In justice to those who had to give way to the Lenine-Trotzky crowd of supporters, I wish to state emphatically that I do not want to put them on the same plane. Tseretelli, Plekhanov, Tshcheidze, and their co-workers are men of great courage, high ideals, and personal integrity. On the other hand their successors in power are men of a totally different type. The integrity of many of their number has been openly questioned, the accusations, published & broadcast, remained unanswered, and no suit for libel was brought by the men thus accused. Lenine was put under suspicion of having accepted German help and of having planned with Germany's agents the disorganization of the Russian army. It has been even charged on apparently good evidence that the leaflets distributed at the front were printed with German money. Trotzky was accused by Miliukov in the Rech (June 7) of having received $10,000 from German-Americans for the purpose of organizing the attack on Kerensky's government. Ganetsky was forced to leave Denmark by an order of the Danish government, having been convicted of dishonest dealings in a Danish court. Zinoviev is accused of forgery. Others are also under suspicion which has been only increased by the arrest and imprisonment of Burtzev who is known for his untiring efforts to hunt down traitors to the cause of the Russian Revolution and who had important evidence in his possession. It is also a remarkable fact that the majority of the present leaders are known broadly only under assumed names. Lenine's true name is Uljanov, Trotzky's--Bronstein, Zinoviev's--Apfelbaum, Sukhanov's--Gimmer, Kamenev's--Rosenfeld, Steklov's--Nakhamkis, and a number of others whose identity is not even always known. Trotzky's assertion that the Workmen's and Soldiers' Government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants is therefore nothing but a perversion of facts.

There is, however, nothing extraordinary in the fact itself that intellectuals are the real leaders of all Russian parties. Better education and wider knowledge of the affairs of the world have always appealed to the dark masses who realize only dimly their own desires and grasp at any concrete formulation of reforms which contains a tangible promise or seems to express those desires. At the same time they often put their own meaning into the words of their leaders, which is true even of factory workers in the larger cities. As for the peasants, representing about 90 per cent of the entire population, they are still very poorly educated, questions of national import remain outside their horizon, and even their language is not the language of the educated Russian, inasmuch as it lacks the rich vocabulary of modern life and is devoid of the very conceptions to which this vast treasury of words applies. Their mind, great as it is in its potentialities, still moves in the furrows of familiar ideas abhorring things too much at variance with inherited traditions or actual experience. Yet in the turmoil of revolutionary activity the peasants are going to have their say and may become the decisive factor, because they are voters and are casting their votes for those leaders whose words they believe to contain the greatest promise and the least menace of a general disruption of their accustomed mode of life.

We are thus brought back, for the present at least, to the necessity of recognizing that even the state of anarchy under which Russia is laboring, even the rule of the renowned proletariat so much trumpeted about by Lenine and Trotzky, is in reality the work of intellectuals, an answer of the masses to the call of their leaders, a groping for principles beyond their perception.

It suffices a very casual examination of the programs and resolutions of various political parties to see the truth of this statement. They are expressive of the opinions of the leaders, not of the masses; are couched in the language of the educated Russian, not in that of the workman or peasant and, except for the concluding slogans like "Peace, Bread, and Land," are alien to the very spirit of the masses. In this respect all parties are confronted with the same difficulty since all strive to get the support of the masses, yet have to express principles evolved through careful and extensive study of national, political, and economic problems, strange to the uneducated mind. For the same reason the methods of surmounting the difficulty differ in many respects and are characteristic of each party.

The Conservative Intellectuals of Russia early realized the necessity of meeting the peasant on his own ground and the advantage of appealing to him in his own language. The idea of a benevolent ruler, an all-suffering motherland, and an all-unifying church exercised a powerful appeal upon the imagination, for a long time superseding and forcing into the background the growing, elemental, and unfulfilled longing for more land. The ideology of a perfect monarchy is so simple and its shortcomings so easily attributable to dishonesty of officials, that it answered the peasant's thoughts as long as he was not able to see the folly of distinguishing between the system and its realization, but separated in his mind the image of his loving monarch from the cruel reality of everyday life as he still distinguishes between the faith and the priest. The great mistake of all conservatives is that they seek to bring about a state of perfect justice by improving only the quality of the ruling body without changing the conditions of life of the ruled mass. Yet even so the Conservatives had quite a following among the peasants up to the time of the revolution of 1917 and in a way may still have a future before them.

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