The Crisis in Russia, Arthur Ransome [classic book list .TXT] 📗

village where I had spent the preceding night was in the possession of the Reds. It is largely an affair of scouting parties, of patrols dodging each other through the forest tracks, of swift raids, of sudden conviction (often entirely erroneous) on the part of one side or the other, that it or the enemy has been “encircled.” The actual number of combatants to a mile of front is infinitely less than during the German war. Further, since an immense proportion of these combatants on both sides have no wish to fight at all, being without patriotic or political convictions and very badly fed and clothed, and since it is more profitable to desert than to be taken prisoner, desertion in bulk is not uncommon, and the deserters, hurriedly enrolled to fight on the other side, indignantly re-desert when opportunity offers. In this way the armies of Denikin and Yudenitch swelled like mushrooms and decayed with similar rapidity. Military events of this kind, however spectacular they may seem abroad, do not have the political effect that might be expected. I was in Moscow at the worst moment of the crisis in 1919 when practically everybody outside the Government believed that Petrograd had already fallen, and I could not but realize that the Government was stronger then than it had been in February of the same year, when it had a series of victories and peace with the Allies seemed for a moment to be in sight. A sort of fate seems to impel the Whites to neutralize with extraordinary rapidity any good will for themelves which they may find among the population. This is true of both sides, but seems to affect the Whites especially. Although General Baron Wrangel does indeed seem to have striven more successfully than his predecessors not to set the population against him and to preserve the loyalty of his army, it may be said with absolute certainty that any large success on his part would bring crowding to his banner the same crowd of stupid reactionary officers who brought to nothing any mild desire for moderation that may have been felt by General Denikin.

If the area he controls increases, his power of control over his subordinates will decrease, and the forces that led to Denikin’s collapse will be set in motion in his case also.*

[(*)On the day on which I send this book to the printers news comes of Wrangel’s collapse and flight. I leave standing what I have written concerning him, since it will apply to any successor he may have. Each general who has stepped into Kolchak’s shoes has eventually had to run away in them, and always for the same reasons.

It may be taken almost as an axiom that the history of great country is that of its centre, not of its periphery.

The main course of English history throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was never deflected from London. French history did not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or at Quiberon Bay.

And only a fanatic could suppose that Russian history would run away from Moscow, to begin again in a semi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea. Moscow changes continually, and may so change as to make easy the return of the “refugees.”

Some have already returned. But the refugees will not return as conquerors. Should a Russian Napoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts) appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of a revolutionary war-cry. He will have to fight some one, or he will not be a Napoleon. And whom will he fight but the very people who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbed Aladdin’s ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no means kindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avenge the breaking of his sleep?]

 

And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polish frontier, should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, no miracles of diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows. For all these reasons a military collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time, even a concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely.

 

It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely to be worse this winter than it has yet been. Forcible attempts to get food from the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town and country. There has been a very bad harvest in Russia. The bringing of food from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make that impossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequate transport. Yet I think internal collapse unlikely. It may be said almost with certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no one left to defend them. That moment had arrived in the case of the Tsar. It had arrived in the case of Kerensky. It has not arrived in the case of the Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons. For one thing, a collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time would be disconcerting, if not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies. It would, of course, open the way to a practically unopposed military advance, but at the same time it would present its enemies with enormous territory, which would overwhelm the organizing powers which they have shown again and again to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Nor would collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into a good one. Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of all existing organizations, and would intensify the horrors of famine for every town dweller. Consequently, though the desperation of hunger and resentment against inevitable requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and there throughout the country, the men who, in other circumstances, might coordinate such events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort. I do not say that collapse is impossible. I do say that it would be extremely undesirable from the point of view of almost everybody in Russia.

Collapse of the present Government would mean at best a reproduction of the circumstances of 1917, with the difference that no intervention from without would be necessary to stimulate indiscriminate slaughter within. I say “at best” because I think it more likely that collapse would be followed by a period of actual chaos. Any Government that followed the Communists would be faced by the same economic problem, and would have to choose between imposing measures very like those of the Communists and allowing Russia to subside into a new area for colonization.

There are people who look upon this as a natural, even a desirable, result of the revolution. They forget that the Russians have never been a subject race, that they have immense powers of passive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea that they understand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is difficult not to understand. Any country that takes advantage of the Russian people in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later, first that it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given all Russians a single and undesirable view of the history of the last three years. There will not be a Russian who will not believe that the artificial incubation of civil war within the frontiers of old Russia was not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of so far weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy.

Those who look with equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe of a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign nations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum will set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a struggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will have done for Russia.

 

It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolution may prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a stricken civilization. My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russia will not die without infecting us with its disease. It seems to me that our own civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, and liable, like a man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravate the malady. I think that the whole of the Russian war, waged directly or indirectly by Western Europe, is an example of this sort of dementia, but I cannot help believing that sanity will reassert itself in time. At the present moment, to use a modification of Gusev’s metaphor, Europe may be compared to a burning house and the Governments of Europe to fire brigades, each one engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of the building. It seems a pity that these fire brigades should be fighting each other, and forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact that some of them wear red uniforms and some wear blue. Any single room to which the fire gains complete control increases the danger of the whole building, and I hope that before the roof falls in the firemen will come to their senses.

 

But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculations as to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to the changes in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely to happen supposing it does not collapse. I have already said that I think collapse unlikely. Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carry out their programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrelling of the firemen as to make that task impossible?

 

I think that there is still a hope. There is as yet no sign of a general improvement in Russia, nor is such an improvement possible until the Russians have at least carried out the first stage of their programme. It would even not be surprising if things in general were to continue to go to the bad during the carrying out of that first stage. Shortages of food, of men, of tools, of materials, are so acute that they have had to choose those factories which are absolutely indispensable for the carrying out of this stage, and make of them “shock”

factories, like the “shock” troops of the war, giving them equipment over and above their rightful share of the impoverished stock, feeding their workmen even at the cost of letting others go hungry. That means that other factories suffer. No matter, say the Russians, if only that first stage makes progress. Consequently, the only test that can be fairly applied is that of transport. Are they or are they not gaining on ruin in the matter of wagons and engines!

Here are the figures of wagon repairs in the seven chief repairing shops up to the month of June: December 1919…………475 wagons were repaired.

January 1920………….656

February……………..697

March……………….1104

April……………….1141

May…………………1154

June………………..1161

 

After elaborate investigation last year, Trotsky, as temporary Commissar of Transport, put out an order explaining that the railways, to keep up their present condition, must repair roughly 800 engines every month. During the first six months of 1920 they fulfilled this task in the following percentages:

 

January………………32 per cent

February……………..50

March………………..66

 

April………………..78

May………………….98

June………………..104

 

I think that is a proof that, supposing normal relations existed between Russia and ourselves, the Russian would be able to tackle the first stage of the problem that lies before them, and would lie before them whatever their Government might be. Unfortunately there is no proof that this steady improvement can be continued, except under conditions of trade with Western Europe. There are Russians who think they can pull through without us, and, remembering