Part 3 (1/2)

Comrades, let us do our duty!

Let us close our ranks, comrades! Let us unite, and unite the ma.s.ses!

Let us prepare, and prepare the ma.s.ses for the day of decisive actions!

Let us overlook nothing. Let us leave no power unused for the Cause.

Brave, honest, harmoniously united, we shall march forward, linked by unbreakable bonds, brothers in the Revolution!

EXPLANATORY NOTES

_Osvoboshdenie_ (_Emanc.i.p.ation_) was the name of a liberal magazine published in Stuttgart, Germany, and smuggled into Russia to be distributed among the Zemstvo-liberals and other progressive elements grouped about the Zemstvo-organization. The _Osvoboshdenie_ advocated a const.i.tutional monarchy; it was, however, opposed to revolutionary methods.

_Peter Struve_, first a Socialist, then a Liberal, was the editor of the _Osvoboshdenie_. Struve is an economist and one of the leading liberal journalists in Russia.

_Zemstvo-pet.i.tions_, accepted in form of resolutions at the meetings of the liberal Zemstvo bodies and forwarded to the central government, were one of the means the liberals used in their struggle for a Const.i.tution. The pet.i.tions, worded in a very moderate language, demanded the abolition of ”lawlessness” on the part of the administration and the introduction of a ”legal order,”

i.e., a Const.i.tution.

_Sergius Witte_, Minister of Finance in the closing years of the 19th Century and up to the revolution of 1905, was known as a bureaucrat of a liberal brand.

_The Ukase of December 12th, 1905_, was an answer of the government to the persistent political demands of the ”Spring” time. The Ukase promised a number of insignificant bureaucratic reforms, not even mentioning a popular representation and threatening increased punishments for ”disturbances of peace and order.”

_Trepov_ was one of the most hated bureaucrats, a devoted pupil of Von Plehve's in the work of drowning revolutionary movements in blood.

_George Gapon_ was the priest who organized the march of January 9th. Trotzky's admiration for the heroism of Gapon was originally shared by many revolutionists. Later it became known that Gapon played a dubious role as a friend of labor, and an agent of the government.

_The_ ”_Political illusions_” of George Gapon, referred to in this essay, was his a.s.sumption that the Tzar was a loving father to his people. Gapon hoped to reach the Emperor of all the Russias and to make him ”receive the workingmen's pet.i.tion from hand to hand.”

PROSPECTS OF A LABOR DICTATORs.h.i.+P

This is, perhaps, the most remarkable piece of political writing the Revolution has produced. Written early in 1906, after the great upheavals of the fall of 1905, at a time when the Russian revolution was obviously going down hill, and autocracy, after a moment of relaxation, was increasing its deadly grip over the country, the essays under the name _Sum Total and Prospectives_ (which we have here changed into a more comprehensible name, _Prospects of Labor Dictators.h.i.+p_) aroused more amazement than admiration. They seemed so entirely out of place. They ignored the liberal parties as quite negligible quant.i.ties. They ignored the creation of the Duma to which the Const.i.tutional Democrats attached so much importance as a place where democracy would fight the battles of the people and win. They ignored the very fact that the vanguard of the revolution, the industrial proletariat, was beaten, disorganized, downhearted, tired out.

The essays met with opposition on the part of leading Social-Democratic thinkers of both the Bolsheviki and Mensheviki factions. The essays seemed to be more an expression of Trotzky's revolutionary ardor, of his unshakable faith in the future of the Russian revolution, than a reflection of political realities. It was known that he wrote them within prison walls. Should not the very fact of his imprisonment have convinced him that in drawing a picture of labor dictators.h.i.+p he was only dreaming?

History has shown that it was not a dream. Whatever our att.i.tude towards the course of events in the 1917 revolution may be, we must admit that, in the main, this course has taken the direction predicted in Trotzky's essays. There is a labor dictators.h.i.+p now in Russia. It is a _labor_ dictators.h.i.+p, not a ”dictators.h.i.+p of the proletariat and the peasants.” The liberal and radical parties have lost influence. The labor government has put collective owners.h.i.+p and collective management of industries on the order of the day.

The labor government has not hesitated in declaring Russia to be ready for a Socialist revolution. It was compelled to do so under the pressure of revolutionary proletarian ma.s.ses. The Russian army has been dissolved in the armed people. The Russian revolution has called the workingmen of the world to make a social revolution.

All this had been outlined by Trotzky twelve years ago. When one reads this series of essays, one has the feeling that they were written not in the course of the first Russian upheaval (the essays appeared in 1906 as part of a book by Trotzky, ent.i.tled _Our Revolution_, Petersburg, N. Glagoleff, publisher) but as if they were discussing problems of the present situation. This, more than anything else, shows the _continuity_ of the revolution. The great overthrow of 1917 was completed by the same political and social forces that had met and learned to know each other in the storms of 1905 and 1906. The ideology of the various groups and parties had hardly changed. Even the leaders of the major parties were, in the main, the same persons. Of course, the international situation was different. But even the possibility of a European war and its consequences had been foreseen by Trotzky in his essays.

Twelve years ago those essays seemed to picture an imaginary world.

To-day they seem to tell the history of the Russian revolution. We may agree or disagree with Trotzky, the leader, n.o.body can deny the power and clarity of his political vision.

In the _first_ chapter, ent.i.tled ”Peculiarities of Our Historic Development,” the author gives a broad outline of the growth of absolutism in Russia. Development of social forms in Russia, he says, was slow and primitive. Our social life was constructed on an archaic and meager economic foundation. Yet, Russia did not lead an isolated life. Russia was under constant pressure of higher politico-economical organisms,--the neighboring Western states. The Russian state, in its struggle for existence, outgrew its economic basis. Historic development in Russia, therefore, was taking place under a terrific straining of national economic forces. The state absorbed the major part of the national economic surplus and also part of the product necessary for the maintenance of the people.

The state thus undermined its own foundation. On the other hand, to secure the means indispensable for its growth, the state forced economic development by bureaucratic measures. Ever since the end of the seventeenth century, the state was most anxious to develop industries in Russia. ”New trades, machines, factories, production on a large scale, capital, appear from a certain angle to be an artificial graft on the original economic trunk of the people.

Similarly, Russian science may appear from the same angle to be an artificial graft on the natural trunk of national ignorance.” This, however, is a wrong conception. The Russian state could not have created something out of nothing. State action only accelerated the processes of natural evolution of economic life. State measures that were in contradiction to those processes were doomed to failure. Still, the role of the state in economic life was enormous. When social development reached the stage where the bourgeoisie cla.s.ses began to experience a desire for political inst.i.tutions of a Western type, Russian autocracy was fully equipped with all the material power of a modern European state. It had at its command a centralized bureaucratic machinery, incapable of regulating modern relations, yet strong enough to do the work of oppression. It was in a position to overcome distance by means of the telegraph and railroads,--a thing unknown to the pre-revolutionary autocracies in Europe. It had a colossal army, incompetent in wars with foreign enemies, yet strong enough to maintain the authority of the state in internal affairs.

Based on its military and fiscal apparatus, absorbing the major part of the country's resources, the government increased its annual budget to an enormous amount of two billions of rubles, it made the stock-exchange of Europe its treasury and the Russian tax-payer a slave to European high finance. Gradually, the Russian state became an end in itself. It evolved into a power independent of society. It left unsatisfied the most elementary wants of the people. It was unable even to defend the safety of the country against foreign foes. Yet, it seemed strong, powerful, invincible.