The Inside Story of The Peace Conference 1919

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The Inside Story of The Peace Conference
by
Dr. E.J. Dillon
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

Copyright 1920, by Harper & Brothers

Printed in the United States of America

Published February, 1920
To
C.W. BARRON
in memory of interesting conversations
on historic occasions
These pages are inscribed.
CONTENTS

    FOREWORD
    CHAPTER I   THE CITY OF THE CONFERENCE
    CHAPTER II   SIGNS OF THE TIMES
    CHAPTER III   THE DELEGATES
    CHAPTER IV   CENSORSHIP AND SECRECY
    CHAPTER V   AIMS AND METHODS
    CHAPTER VI   THE LESSER STATES
    CHAPTER VII    POLAND'S OUTLOOK IN THE FUTURE
    CHAPTER VIII   ITALY
    CHAPTER IX    JAPAN
    CHAPTER X   ATTITUDE TOWARD RUSSIA
    CHAPTER XI   BOLSHEVISM
    CHAPTER XII   HOW BOLSHEVISM WAS FOSTERED
    CHAPTER XIII   SIDELIGHTS ON THE TREATY
    CHAPTER XIV   THE TREATY WITH GERMANY
    CHAPTER XV   THE TREATY WITH BULGARIA
    CHAPTER XVI   THE COVENANT AND MINORITIES

FOREWORD

It is almost superfluous to say that this book does not claim to be a history, however summary, of the Peace Conference, seeing that such a work was made sheer impossible now and forever by the chief delegates themselves when they decided to dispense with records of their conversations and debates. It is only a sketch—a sketch of the problems which the war created or rendered pressing—of the conditions under which they cropped up; of the simplicist ways in which they were conceived by the distinguished politicians who volunteered to solve them; of the delegates' natural limitations and electioneering commitments and of the secret influences by which they were swayed; of the peoples' needs and expectations; of the unwonted procedure adopted by the Conference and of the fateful consequences of its decisions to the world.

In dealing with all those matters I aimed at impartiality, which is an unattainable ideal, but I trust that sincerity and detachment have brought me reasonably close to it. Having no pet theories of my own to champion, my principal standard of judgment is derived from the law of causality and the rules of historical criticism.

The fatal tactical mistake chargeable to the Conference lay in its making the charter of the League of Nations and the treaty of peace with the Central Powers interdependent. For the maxims that underlie the former are irreconcilable with those that should determine the latter, and the efforts to combine them must, among other untoward results, create a sharp opposition between the vital interests of the people of the United States and the apparent or transient interests of their associates. The outcome of this unnatural union will be to damage the cause of stable peace which it was devised to further.

But the surest touchstone by which to test the capacity and the achievements of the world-legislators is their attitude toward Russia in the political domain and toward the labor problem in the economic sphere. And in neither case does their action or inaction appear to have been the outcome of statesman-like ideas, or, indeed, of any higher consideration than that of evading the central issue and transmitting the problem to the League of Nations. The results are manifest to all.

The continuity of human progress depends at bottom upon labor, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether the civilized races of mankind can be reckoned on to supply it for long on conditions akin to those which have in various forms prevailed ever since the institutions of ancient times and which alone render the present social structure viable. If this forecast should prove correct, the only alternative to a break disastrous in the continuity of civilization is the frank recognition of the principle that certain inferior races are destined to serve the cause of mankind in those capacities for which alone they are qualified and to readjust social institutions to this axiom.

In the meanwhile the Conference which ignored this problem of problems has transformed Europe into a seething mass of mutually hostile states powerless to face the economic competition of their overseas rivals and has set the very elements of society in flux.

E.J. DILLON.
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This adverse note on Mr. Wilson's pet scheme to have religious equality proclaimed as a means of hindering sanguinary wars brought to its climax the reaction of the Conference against what it regarded as a systematic endeavor to establish the overlordship of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in the world. The plea that wars may be provoked by such religious inequality as still survives was so unreal that it awakened a twofold suspicion in the minds of many of Mr. Wilson's colleagues. Most of them believed that a pretext was being sought to enable the leading Powers to intervene in the domestic concerns of all the other states, so as to keep them firmly in hand, and use them as means to their own ends. And these ends were looked upon as anything but disinterested. Unhappily this conviction was subsequently strengthened by certain of the measures decreed by the Supreme Council between April and the close of the Conference. The misgivings of other delegates turned upon a matter which at first sight may appear so far removed from any of the pressing issues of the twentieth century as to seem wholly imaginary. They feared that a religious—some would call it racial—bias lay at the root of Mr. Wilson's policy. It may seem amazing to some readers, but it is none the less a fact that a considerable number of delegates believed that the real influences behind the Anglo-Saxon peoples were Semitic.

They confronted the President's proposal on the subject of religious inequality, and, in particular, the odd motive alleged for it, with the measures for the protection of minorities which he subsequently imposed on the lesser states, and which had for their keynote to satisfy the Jewish elements in eastern Europe. And they concluded that the sequence of expedients framed and enforced in this direction were inspired by the Jews, assembled in Paris for the purpose of realizing their carefully thought-out program, which they succeeded in having substantially executed. However right or wrong these delegates may have been, it would be a dangerous mistake to ignore their views, seeing that they have since become one of the permanent elements of the situation. The formula into which this policy was thrown by the members of the Conference, whose countries it affected, and who regarded it as fatal to the peace of eastern Europe, was this: "Henceforth the world will be governed by the Anglo-Saxon peoples, who, in turn, are swayed by their Jewish elements."

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XI
BOLSHEVISM

What is Bolshevism? A generic term that stands for a number of things which have little in common. It varies with the countries where it appears. In Russia it is the despotism of an organized and unscrupulous group of men in a disorganized community. It might also be termed the frenzy of a few epileptics running amuck among a multitude of paralytics. It is not so much a political doctrine or a socialist theory as a psychic disease of a section of the community which cannot be cured without leaving permanent traces and perhaps modifying certain organic functions of the society affected. For some students at a distance who make abstraction from its methods—as a critic appreciating the performance of "Hamlet" might make abstraction from the part of the Prince of Denmark—it is a modification of the theory of Karl Marx, the newest contribution to latter-day social science. In Russia, at any rate, the general condition of society from which it sprang was characterized not by the advance of social science, but by a psychic disorder the germs of which, after a century of incubation, were brought to the final phase of development by the war. In its origins it is a pathological phenomenon.

Four and a half years of an unprecedented campaign which drained to exhaustion the financial and economic resources of the European belligerents upset the psychical equilibrium of large sections of their populations. Goaded by hunger and disease to lawless action, and no longer held back by legal deterrents or moral checks, they followed the instinct of self-preservation to the extent of criminal lawlessness. Familiarity with death and suffering dispelled the fear of human punishment, while numbness of the moral sense made them insensible to the less immediate restraints of a religious character. These phenomena are not unusual concomitants of protracted wars. History records numerous examples of the homecoming soldiery turning the weapons destined for the foreign foe against political parties or social classes in their own country. In other European communities for some time previously a tendency toward root-reaching and violent change was perceptible, but as the state retained its hold on the army it remained a tendency. In the case of Russia—the country where the state, more than ordinarily artificial and ill-balanced, was correspondingly weak—Fate had interpolated a blood-stained page of red and white terror in the years 1906-08. Although fitful, unorganized, and abortive, that wild splutter was one of the foretokens of the impending cataclysm, and was recognized as such by the writer of these pages. During the foregoing quarter of a century he had watched with interest the sowing of the dragon's teeth from which was one day to spring up a race of armed and frenzied men. Few observers, however, even in the Tsardom, gaged the strength or foresaw the effects of the anarchist propaganda which was being carried on suasively and perseveringly, oftentimes unwittingly, in the nursery, the school, the church, the university, and with eminent success in the army and the navy. Hence the widespread error that the Russian revolution was preceded by no such era of preparation as that of the encylopedists in France.

Recently, however, publicists have gone to the other extreme and asserted that Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, and a host of other Russian writers were apostles of the tenets which have since received the name of Bolshevism, and that it was they who prepared the Russian upheaval just as it was the authors of the "Encyclopedia" who prepared the French Revolution. In this sweeping form the statement is misleading. Russian literature during the reigns of the last three Tsars—with few exceptions, like the writings of Leskoff—was unquestionably a vehicle for the spread of revolutionary ideas. But it would be a gross exaggeration to assert that the end deliberately pursued was that form of anarchy which is known to-day as Bolshevism, or, indeed, genuine anarchy in any form. Tolstoy and Gorky may be counted among the forerunners of Bolshevism, but Dostoyevsky, whom I was privileged to know, was one of its keenest antagonists. Nor was it only anarchism that he combated. Like Leskoff, he was an inveterate enemy of political radicalism, and we university students bore him a grudge in consequence. In his masterly delineation[273] of a group of "reformers," in particular of Verkhovensky—whom psychic tendency, intellectual anarchy, and political crime bring under the category of Bolshevists—he foreshadowed the logical conclusion, and likewise the political consummation, of the corrosive doctrines which in those days were associated with the name of Bakunin. In the year 1905-06, when the upshot of the conflict between Tsarism and the revolution was still doubtful, Count Witte and I often admired the marvelous intuition of the great novelist, whose gallery of portraits in the "Devils" seemed to have become suddenly endowed with life, and to be conspiring, shooting, and bomb-throwing in the streets of Moscow, Petersburg, Odessa, and Tiflis. The seeds of social revolution sown by the novelists, essayists, and professional guides of the nation were forced by the wars of 1904 and 1914 into rapid germination.

As far back as the year 1892, in a work published over a pseudonym, the present writer described the rotten condition of the Tsardom, and ventured to foretell its speedy collapse.[274] The French historian Michelet wrote with intuition marred by exaggeration and acerbity: "A barbarous force, a law-hating world, Russia sucks and absorbs all the poison of Europe and then gives it off in greater quantity and deadlier intensity. When we admit Russia, we admit the cholera, dissolution, death. That is the meaning of Russian propaganda. Yesterday she said to us, 'I am Christianity.' To-morrow she will say, 'I am socialism.' It is the revolting idea of a demagogy without an idea, a principle, a sentiment, of a people which would march toward the west with the gait of a blind man, having lost its soul and its will and killing at random, of a terrible automaton like a dead body which can still reach and slay.

"It might commove Europe and bespatter it with blood, but that would not hinder it from plunging itself into nothingness in the abysmal ooze of definite dissolution."

Russia, then, led by domiciled aliens without a fatherland, may be truly said to have been wending steadily toward the revolutionary vortex long before the outbreak of hostilities. Her progress was continuous and perceptible. As far back as the year 1906 the late Count Witte and myself made a guess at the time-distance which the nation still had to traverse, assuming the rate of progress to be constant, before reaching the abyss. This, however, was mere guesswork, which one of the many possibilities—and in especial change in the speed-rate—might belie. In effect, events moved somewhat more quickly than we anticipated, and it was the World War and its appalling concomitants that precipitated the catastrophe.

As circumstances willed it, certain layers of the people of central Europe were also possessed by the revolutionary spirit at the close of the World War. In their case hunger, hardship, disease, and moral shock were the avenues along which it moved and reached them. This coincidence was fraught with results more impressive than serious. The governments of both these great peoples had long been the mainstays of monarchic tradition, military discipline, and the principle of authority. The Teutons, steadily pursuing an ideal which lay at the opposite pole to anarchy, had risked every worldly and well-nigh every spiritual possession to realize it. It was the hegemony of the world. This aspiration transfigured, possessed, fanaticized them. Teutondom became to them what Islam is to Mohammedans of every race, even when they shake off religion. They eschewed no means, however iniquitous, that seemed to lead to the goal. They ceased to be human in order to force Europe to become German. Offering up the elementary principles of morality on the altar of patriotism, they staked their all upon the single venture of the war. It was as the throw of a gambler playing for his soul with the Evil One. Yet the faith of these materialists waxed heroic withal, like their self-sacrifice. And in the fiery ardor of their enthusiasm, hard concrete facts were dissolved and set floating as illusions in the ambient mist. Their wishes became thoughts and their fears were dispelled as fancies. They beheld only what they yearned for, and when at last they dropped from the dizzy height of their castles in cloudland their whole world, era, and ideal was shattered. Unavailing remorse, impotent rage, spiritual and intense physical exhaustion completed their demoralization. The more harried and reckless among them became frenzied. Turning first against their rulers, then against one another, they finally started upon a work of wanton destruction relieved by no creative idea. It was at this time-point that they endeavored to join hands with their tumultuous Eastern neighbors, and that the one word "Bolshevism" connoted the revolutionary wave that swept over some of the Slav and German lands. But only for a moment. One may safely assert, as a general proposition, that the same undertaking, if the Germans and the Russians set their hands to it, becomes forthwith two separate enterprises, so different are the conceptions and methods of these two peoples. Bolshevism was almost emptied of its contents by the Germans, and little left of it but the empty shell.

Comparisons between the orgasms of collective madness which accompanied the Russian welter, on the one hand, and the French Revolution, on the other, are unfruitful and often misleading. It is true that at the outset those spasms of delirium were in both cases violent reactions against abuses grown well-nigh unbearable. It is also a fact that the revolutionists derived their preterhuman force from historic events which had either denuded those abuses of their secular protection or inspired their victims with wonder-working faith in their power to sweep them away. But after this initial stage the likeness vanishes. The French Revolution, which extinguished feudalism as a system and the nobility as a privileged class, speedily ceased to be a mere dissolvent. In its latter phases it assumed a constructive character. Incidentally it created much that was helpful in substance if not beautiful in form, and from the beginning it adopted a positive doctrine as old as Christianity, but new in its application to the political sphere. Thus, although it uprooted quantities of wheat together with the tares, its general effect was to prepare the ground for a new harvest. It had a distinctly social purpose, which it partially realized. Nor should it be forgotten that in the psychological sphere it kindled a transient outburst of quasi-religious enthusiasm among its partizans, imbued them with apostolic zeal, inspired them with a marvelous spirit of self-abnegation, and nerved their arms to far-resonant exploits. And the forces which the revolution thus set free changed many of the forms of the European world, but without reshaping it after the image of the ideal.

Has the withering blight known as Bolshevism any such redeeming traits to its credit account? The consensus of opinion down to the present moment gives an emphatic, if summary, answer in the negative. Every region over which it swept is blocked with heaps of unsightly ruins, It has depreciated all moral values. It passed like a tornado, spending its energies in demolition. Of construction hardly a trace has been discerned, even by indulgent explorers.[275] One might liken it to a so-called possession by the spirit of evil, wont of yore to use the human organs as his own for words of folly and deeds of iniquity. Bolshevism has operated uniformly as a quick solvent of the social organism. Doubtless European society in 1917 sorely needed purging by drastic means, but only a fanatic would say that it deserved annihilation.

It has been variously affirmed that the political leaven of these destructive ferments in eastern and central Europe was wholesome. Slavs and Germans, it is argued, stung by the bankruptcy of their political systems, resolved to alter them on the lines of universal suffrage and its corollaries, but were carried farther than they meant to go. This mild judgment is based on a very partial survey of the phenomena. The improvement in question was the work, not of the Bolshevists, but of their adversaries, the moderate reformers. And the political strivings of these had no organic nexus with the doctrine which emanated from the nethermost depths in which vengeful pariahs, outlaws, and benighted nihilists were floundering before suffocating in the ooze of anarchism. Neither can one discern any degree of kinship between Spartacists like Eichhorn or Lenin and moderate reformers as represented, say, by Theodor Wolff and Boris Savinkoff. The two pairs are sundered from each other by the distance that separates the social and the anti-social instinct. Those are vulgar iconoclasts, these are would-be world-builders. That the Russian, or, indeed, the German constitutional reformers should have hugged the delusion that while thrones were being hurled to the ground, and an epoch was passing away in violent convulsions, a few alterations in the electoral law would restore order and bring back normal conditions to the agonizing nations, is an instructive illustration of the blurred vision which characterizes contemporary statesmen. The Anglo-Saxon delegates at the Conference were under a similar delusion when they undertook to regenerate the world by a series of merely political changes.

No one who has followed attentively the work of the constitution-makers in Weimar can have overlooked their readiness to adopt and assimilate the positive elements of a movement which was essentially destructive. In this respect they displayed a remarkable degree of open-mindedness and receptivity. They showed themselves avid of every contribution which they could glean from any source to the work of national reorganization, and even in Teutonized Bolshevism they apparently found helpful hints of timely innovations. One may safely hazard the prediction that these adaptations, however little they may be relished, are certain to spread to the Western peoples, who will be constrained to accept them in the long run, and Germany may end by becoming the economic leader of democratic Europe. The law of politico-social interchange and assimilation underlying this phenomenon, had it been understood by the statesmen of the Entente, might have rendered them less desirous of seeing the German organism tainted with the germs of dissolution. For what Germany borrows from Bolshevism to-day western Europe will borrow from Germany to-morrow. And foremost among the new institutions which the revolution will impose upon Europe is that of the Soviets, considerably modified in form and limited in functions.

"In the conception of the Soviet system," writes the most influential Jewish-German organ in Europe, "there is assuredly something serviceable, and it behooves us to familiarize ourselves therewith. Psychologically, it rests upon the need felt by the working-man to be something more than a mere cog in the industrial mechanism. The first step would consist in conferring upon labor committees juridical functions consonant with latter-day requirements. These functions would extend beyond those exercised by the labor committees hitherto. How far they could go without rendering the industrial enterprise impossible is a matter for investigation.... This is not merely a wish of the extremists; it is a psychological requirement, and therefore it necessitates the establishment of a closer nexus between legislation and practical life which unhappily is become so complicated. And this need is not confined to the laboring class. It is universal. Therefore, what is good for the one is meet for the other."[276]

The Soviet system adapted to modern existence is one—and probably the sole—legacy of Bolshevism to the new age.

During the Peace Conference Bolshevism played a large part in the world's affairs. By some of the eminent lawgivers there it was feared as a scourge; by others it was wielded as a weapon, and by a third set it was employed as a threat. Whenever a delegate of one of the lesser states felt that he was losing ground at the Peace Table, and that his country's demands were about to be whittled down as extravagant, he would point significantly to certain "foretokens" of an outbreak of Bolshevism in his country and class them as an inevitable consequence of the nation's disappointment. Thus the representative of nearly every state which had a territorial program declared that that program must be carried out if Bolshevism was to be averted there. "This or else Bolshevism" was the peroration of many a delegate's exposé. More redoubtable than political discontent was the proselytizing activity of the leaders of the movement in Russia.

Of the two pillars of Bolshevism one is a Russian, the other a Jew, the former, Ulianoff (better known as Lenin), the brain; the other, Braunstein (called Trotzky), the arm of the sect. Trotzky is an unscrupulous despot, in whose veins flows the poison of malignity. His element is cruelty, his special gift is organizing capacity. Lenin is a Utopian, whose fanaticism, although extensive, has well-defined limits. In certain things he disagrees profoundly with Trotzky. He resembles a religious preacher in this, that he created a body of veritable disciples around himself. He might be likened to a pope with a college of international cardinals. Thus he has French, British, German, Austrian, Czech, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Hindu, Chinese, Buryat, and many other followers, who are chiefs of proselytizing sections charged with the work of spreading the Bolshevik evangel throughout the globe, and are working hard to discharge their duties. Lenin, however, dissatisfied with the measures of success already attained, is constantly stimulating his disciples to more strenuous exertions. He shares with other sectarian chiefs who have played a prominent part in the world's history that indefinable quality which stirs emotional susceptibility and renders those who approach him more easily accessible to ideas toward which they began by manifesting repugnance. Lenin is credibly reported to have made several converts among his Western opponents.

The plenipotentiaries, during the first four months, approached Bolshevism from a single direction, unvaried by the events which it generated or the modifications which it underwent. They tested it solely by its accidental bearings on the one aim which they were intent on securing—a formal and provisional resettlement of Europe capable of being presented to their respective parliaments as a fair achievement. With its real character, its manifold corollaries, its innovating tendencies over the social, political, and ethnical domain, they were for the time being unconcerned. Without the slightest reference to any of these considerations they were ready to find a place for it in the new state system with which they hoped to endow the world. More than once they were on the point of giving it official recognition. There was no preliminary testing, sifting, or examining by these empiricists, who, finding Bolshevism on their way, and discerning no facile means of dislodging or transforming it, signified their willingness under easy conditions to hallmark and incorporate it as one of the elements of the new ordering. From the crimes laid to its charge they were prepared to make abstraction. The barbarous methods to which it owed its very existence they were willing to consign to oblivion. And it was only a freak of circumstance that hindered this embodiment of despotism from beginning one of their accepted means of rendering the world safe for democracy.

Political students outside the Conference, going farther into the matter, inquired whether there was any kernel of truth in the doctrines of Lenin, any social or political advantage in the practices of Braunstein (Trotzky), and the conclusions which they reached were negative.[277] But inquiries of this theoretical nature awakened no interest among the empiricists of the Supreme Council. For them Bolshevism meant nothing more than a group of politicians, who directed, or misdirected, but certainly represented the bulk of the Russian people, and who, if won over and gathered under the cloak of the Conference, would facilitate its task and bear witness to its triumph. This inference, drawn by keen observers from many countries and parties, is borne out by the curious admissions and abortive acts of the principal plenipotentiaries themselves.

In its milder manifestations on the social side Russian Bolshevism resembles communism, and may be described as a social revolution effected by depriving one set of people—the ruling and intelligent class—of power, property, and civil rights, putting another and less qualified section in their place, and maintaining the top-heavy structure by force ruthlessly employed. Far-reaching though this change undoubtedly is, it has no nexus with Marxism or kindred theories. Its proximate causes were many: such, for example, as the breakdown of a tyrannical system of government, state indebtedness so vast that it swallowed up private capital, the depreciation of money, and the corresponding appreciation of labor. It is fair, therefore, to say that a rise in the cost of production and the temporary substitution of one class for another mark the extent to which political forces revolutionized the social fabric. Beyond these limits they did not go. The notion had been widespread in most countries, and deep-rooted in Russia, that a political upheaval would effect a root-reaching and lasting alteration in the forces of social development. It was adopted by Lenin, a fanatic of the Robespierre type, but far superior to Robespierre in will-power, insight, resourcefulness, and sincerity, who, having seized the reins of power, made the experiment.

It is no easy matter to analyze Lenin's economic policy, because of the veil of mist that conceals so much of Russian contemporary history. Our sources are confined to the untrustworthy statements of a censored press and travelers' tales.

But it is common knowledge that the Bolshevist dictator requisitioned and "nationalized" the banks, took factories, workshops, and plants from their owners and handed them over to the workmen, deprived landed proprietors of their estates, and allowed peasants to appropriate them. It is in the matter of industry, however, that his experiment is most interesting as showing the practical value of Marxism as a policy and the ability of the Bolsheviki to deal with delicate social problems. The historic decree issued by the Moscow government on the nationalization of industry after the opening experiment had broken down contains data enough to enable one to affirm that Lenin himself judged Marxism inapplicable even to Russia, and left it where he had found it—among the ideals of a millennial future. That ukase ordered the gradual nationalization of all private industries with a capital of not less than one million rubles, but allowed the owners to enjoy the gratuitous usufruct of the concern, provided that they financed and carried it on as before. Consequently, although in theory the business was transferred to the state, in reality the capitalist retained his place and his profits as under the old system. Consequently, the principal aims of socialism, which are the distribution of the proceeds of industry among the community and the retention of a certain surplus by the state, were missed. In the Bolshevist procedure the state is wholly eliminated except for the purpose of upholding a fiction. It receives nothing from the capitalist, not even a royalty.

The Slav is a dreamer whose sense of the real is often defective. He loses himself in vague generalities and pithless abstractions. Thus, before opening a school he will spin out a theory of universal education, and then bemoan his lack of resources to realize it. True, many of the chiefs of the sect—for it is undoubtedly a sect when it is not a criminal conspiracy, and very often it is both—were not Slavs, but Jews, who, for the behoof of their kindred, dropped their Semitic names and adopted sonorous Slav substitutes. But they were most unscrupulous peculators, incapable of taking an interest in the scientific aspect of such matters, and hypnotized by the dreams of lucre which the opportunity evoked. One has only to call to mind some of the shabby transactions in which the Semitic Dictator of Hungary, Kuhn, or Cohen, and Braunstein (Trotzky) of Petrograd, took an active part. The former is said to have offered for sale the historic crown of St. Stephen of Hungary—which to him was but a plain gold headgear adorned with precious stones and a jeweled cross—to an old curiosity dealer of Munich,[278] and when solemnly protesting that he was living only for the Soviet Republic and was ready to die for it, he was actively engaged in smuggling out of Hungary into Switzerland fifty million kronen bonds, thirty-five kilograms of gold, and thirty chests filled with objects of value.[279] His colleague Szamuelly's plunder is a matter of history.

To such adventurers as those science is a drug. They are primitive beings impressible mainly to concrete motives of the barest kind. The dupes of Lenin were people of a different type. Many of them fancied that the great political clash must inevitably result in an equally great and salutary social upheaval. This assumption has not been borne out by events.

Those fanatics fell into another error; they were in a hurry, and would fain have effected their great transformation as by the waving of a magician's wand. Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away all hindrances regardless of consequences. In this spirit of absolutism they abolished the services of the national debt, struck out the claims of Russia's creditors to their capital or interest, and turned the shops and factories over to labor boards. That was the initial blunder which the ukase alluded to was subsequently issued to rectify. But it was too late. The equilibrium of the forces of production had been definitely upset and could no longer be righted.

One of the basic postulates of profitable production is the equilibrium of all its essential factors—such as the laborer's wages, the cost of the machinery and the material, the administration. Bring discord into the harmony and the entire mechanism is out of gear.

The Russian workman, who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his neighbor and none at all for his employer. "God Himself commands us to despoil such gentry," is one of his sayings. He is in a hurry to enrich himself, and he cares about nothing else. Nor can he realize that to beggar his neighbors is to impoverish himself. Hence he always takes and never gives; as a peasant he destroys the forests, hewing trees and planting none, and robs the soil of its fertility. On analogous lines he would fain deal with the factories, exacting exorbitant wages that eat up all profit, and naïvely expecting the owner to go on paying them as though he were the trustee of a fund for enriching the greedy. The only people to profit by the system, and even they only transiently, were the manual laborers. The bulk of the skilled, intelligent, and educated artisans were held up to contempt and ostracized, or killed as an odious aristocracy. That, it has been aptly pointed out,[280] is far removed from Marxism. The Marxist doctrine postulates the adhesion of intelligent workers to the social revolution, whereas the Russian experimenters placed them in the same category as the capitalists, the aristocrats, and treated them accordingly. Another Marxist postulate not realized in Russia was that before the state could profitably proceed to nationalization the country must have been in possession of a well-organized, smooth-running industrial mechanism. And this was possible only in those lands in which capitalism had had a long and successful innings, not in the great Slav country of husbandmen.

By way of glozing over these incongruities Lenin's ukase proclaimed that the measures enacted were only provisional, and aimed at enabling Russia to realize the great transformation by degrees. But the impression conveyed by the history of the social side of Lenin's activity is that Marxism, whether as understood by its author or as interpreted and twisted by its Russian adherents, has been tried and found impracticable. One is further warranted in saying that neither the visionary workers who are moved by misdirected zeal for social improvement nor the theorists who are constantly on the lookout for new and stimulating ideas are likely to discover in Russian Bolshevism any aspect but the one alluded to above worthy of their serious consideration.

A much deeper mark was made on the history of the century by its methods.

Compared with the soul-searing horrors let loose during the Bolshevist fit of frenzy, the worst atrocities recorded of Deputy Carrier and his noyades during the French Revolution were but the freaks of compassionate human beings. In Bolshevist Russia brutality assumed forms so monstrous that the modern man of the West shrinks from conjuring up a faint picture of them in imagination. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands were done to death in hellish ways by the orders of men and of women. Eyes were gouged out, ears hacked off, arms and legs torn from the body in presence of the victims' children or wives, whose agony was thus begun before their own turn came. Men and women and infants were burned alive. Chinese executioners were specially hired to inflict the awful torture of the "thousand slices."[281] Officers had their limbs broken and were left for hours in agonies. Many victims are credibly reported to have been buried alive. History, from its earliest dawn down to the present day, has recorded nothing so profoundly revolting as the nameless cruelties in which these human fiends reveled. One gruesome picture of the less loathsome scenes enacted will live in history on a level with the noyades of Nantes. I have seen several moving descriptions of it in Russian journals. The following account is from the pen of a French marine officer:

"We have two armed cruisers outside Odessa. A few weeks ago one of them, having an investigation to make, sent a diver down to the bottom. A few minutes passed and the alarm signal was heard. He was hauled up and quickly relieved of his accoutrements. He had fainted away. When he came to, his teeth were chattering and the only articulate sounds that could be got from him were the words: 'It is horrible! It is awful!' A second diver was then lowered, with the same procedure and a like result. Finally a third was chosen, this time a sturdy lad of iron nerves, and sent down to the bottom of the sea. After the lapse of a few minutes the same thing happened as before, and the man was brought up. This time, however, there was no fainting fit to record. On the contrary, although pale with terror, he was able to state that he had beheld the sea-bed peopled with human bodies standing upright, which the swaying of the water, still sensible at this shallow depth, softly rocked as though they were monstrous algæ, their hair on end bristling vertically, and their arms raised toward the surface.... All these corpses, anchored to the bottom by the weight of stones, took on an appearance of eerie life resembling, one might say, a forest of trees moved from side to side by the wind and eager to welcome the diver come down among them.... There were, he added, old men, children numerous beyond count, so that one could but compare them to the trees of a forest."[282]

From published records it is known that the Bolshevist thugs, when tired of using the rifle, the machine-gun, the cord, and the bayonet, expedited matters by drowning their victims by hundreds in the Black Sea, in the Gulf of Finland, and in the great rivers. Submarine cemeteries was the name given to these last resting-places of some of Russia's most high-minded sons and daughters.[283] It is not in the French Revolution that those deeds of wanton destruction and revolting cruelty which are indissolubly associated with Bolshevism find a parallel, but in Chinese history, which offers a striking and curious prefiguration of the Leninist structure.[284] Toward the middle of the tenth century, when the empire was plunged in dire confusion, a mystical sect was formed there for the purpose of destroying by force every vestige of the traditional social fabric, and establishing a system of complete equality without any state organization whatever, after the manner advocated by Leo Tolstoy. Some of the dicta of these sectarians have a decidedly Bolshevist flavor. This, for example: "Society rests upon law, property, religion, and force. But law is injustice and chicane; property is robbery and extortion; religion is untruth, and force is iniquity." In those days Chinese political parties were at strife with each other, and none of them scorned any means, however brutal, to worst its adversaries, but for a long while they were divided among themselves and without a capable chief.

At last the Socialist party unexpectedly produced a leader, Wang Ngan Shen, a man of parts, who possessed the gift of drawing and swaying the multitude. Of agreeable presence, he was resourceful and unscrupulous, soon became popular, and even captivated the Emperor, Shen Tsung, who appointed him Minister. He then set about applying his tenets and realizing his dreams. Wang Ngan Shen began by making commerce and trade a state monopoly, just as Lenin had done, "in order," he explained, "to keep the poor from being devoured by the rich." The state was proclaimed the sole owner of all the wealth of the soil; agricultural overseers were despatched to each district to distribute the land among the peasants, each of these receiving as much as he and his family could cultivate. The peasant obtained also the seed, but this he was obliged to return to the state after the ingathering of the harvest. The power of the overseer went farther; it was he who determined what crops the husbandman might sow and who fixed day by day the price of every salable commodity in the district. As the state reserved to itself the right to buy all agricultural produce, it was bound in return to save up a part of the profits to be used for the benefit of the people in years of scarcity, and also at other times to be employed in works needed by the community. Wang Ngan Shen also ordained that only the wealthy should pay taxes, the proceeds of which were to be employed in relieving the wants of the poor, the old, and the unemployed. The theory was smooth and attractive.

For over thirty years those laws are said to have remained in force, at any rate on paper. To what extent they were carried out is problematical. Probably a beginning was actually made, for during Wang's tenure of office confusion was worse confounded than before, and misery more intense and widespread. The opposition to his régime increased, spread, and finally got the upper hand. Wang Ngan Shen was banished, together with those of his partizans who refused to accept the return to the old system. Such would appear to have been the first appearance of Bolshevism recorded in history.

Another less complete parallel, not to the Bolshevist theory, but to the plight of the country which it ruined, may be found in the Chinese rebellion organized in the year 1850 by a peasant[285] who, having become a Christian, fancied himself called by God to regenerate his people. He accordingly got together a band of stout-hearted fellows whom he fanaticized, disciplined, and transformed into the nucleus of a strong army to which brigands, outlaws, and malcontents of every social layer afterward flocked. They overran the Yangtse Valley, invaded twelve of the richest provinces, seized six hundred cities and towns, and put an end to twenty million people in the space of twelve years by fire, sword, and famine.[286] To this bloody expedition Hung Sew Tseuen, a master of modern euphemism, gave the name of Crusade of the Great Peace. For twelve years this "Crusade" lasted, and it might have endured much longer had it not been for the help given by outsiders. It was there that "Chinese" Gordon won his laurels and accomplished a beneficent work.

There were politicians at the Conference who argued that Russia, being in a position analogous to that of China in 1854, ought, like her, to be helped by the Great Powers. It was, they held, quite as much in the interests of Europe as in hers. But however forcible their arguments, they encountered an insurmountable obstacle in the fear entertained by the chiefs of the leading governments lest the extreme oppositional parties in their respective countries should make capital out of the move and turn them out of office. They invoked the interests of the cause of which they were the champions for declining to expose themselves to any such risk. It has been contended with warmth, and possibly with truth, that if at the outset the Great Powers had intervened they might with a comparatively small army have crushed Bolshevism and re-established order in Russia. On the other hand, it was objected that even heavy guns will not destroy ideas, and that the main ideas which supplied the revolutionary movement with vital force were too deeply rooted to have been extirpated by the most formidable foreign army. That is true. But these ideas were not especially characteristic of Bolshevism. Far from that, they were incompatible with it: the bestowal of land on the peasants, an equitable reform of the relations between workmen and employers, and the abolition of the hereditary principle in the distribution of everything that confers an unfair advantage on the individual or the class are certainly not postulates of Lenin's party. It is a tenable proposition that timely military assistance would have enabled the constructive elements of Russia to restore conditions of normal life, but the worth of timeliness was never realized by the heads of the governments who undertook to make laws for the world. They ignored the maxim that a statesman, when applying measures, must keep his eye on the clock, inasmuch as the remedy which would save a nation at one moment may hasten its ruin at another.

The expedients and counter-expedients to which the Conference had recourse in their fitful struggles with Bolshevism were so many surprises to every one concerned, and were at times redolent of comedy. But what was levity and ignorance on the part of the delegates meant death, and worse than death, to tens of thousands of their protégées. In Russia their agents zealously egged on the order-loving population to rise up against the Bolsheviki and attack their strong positions, promising them immediate military help if they succeeded. But when, these exploits having been duly achieved, the agents were asked how soon the foreign reinforcements might be expected, they replied, calling for patience. After a time the Bolsheviki assailed the temporary victors, generally defeated them, and then put a multitude of defenseless people to the sword. Deplorable incidents of this nature, which are said to have occurred several times during the spring of 1919, shook the credit of the Allies, and kindled a feeling of just resentment among all classes of Russians.

FOOTNOTES:

[273] In the Biessy (Devils).

[274] Russian Characteristics, by E.B. Lanin (Eblanin, a Russian word which means native of Dublin, Eblana).

[275] Educational reforms have been mentioned among its achievements and attributed to Lunatcharsky. That he exerted himself to spread elementary instruction must be admitted. But this progress and the effective protection and encouragement which he has undoubtedly extended to arts and sciences would seem to exhaust the list of items in the credit account of the Bolshevist régime.

[276] Frankfurter Zeitung, February 28, 1919.

[277] A succinct but interesting study of this question appeared in the Handels-Zeitung of the Berliner Tageblatt, over the signature of Dr. Felix Pinner, July 20, 1918.

[278] Cf. Bonsoir, July 29, 1919. The price was not fixed, but the minimum was specified. It was one hundred thousand kronen.

[279] Cf. Der Tag, Vienna, August 13, 1919. L'Echo de Paris, August 15, 1919.

[280] By Dr. F. Pinner, H. Vorst, and others.

[281] The condemned man is tied to a post or a cross, his mouth gagged, and the execution is made to last several hours. It usually begins with a slit on the forehead and the pulling down of the skin toward the chin. After the lapse of a certain time the nose is severed from the face. An interval follows, then an ear is lopped off, and so the devilish work goes on with long pauses. The skill of the executioner is displayed in the length of time during which the victim remains conscious.

[282] Cf. Le Figaro, February 18, 1919.

[283] I do not suggest that these crimes were ordered by Lenin. But it will not be gainsaid that neither he nor his colleagues punished the mass murderers or even protested against their crimes. Neither can it be maintained that massacres were confined to any one party.

[284] This pre-Bolshevist movement is described in an interesting study on the socialist movement and systems, down to the year 1848, by El. Luzatto. Cf. Der Bund, August 16, 1918.

[285] Hung Sew Tseuen. The rebellion lasted from 1850 to 1864.

[286] The superb city of Nankin, with its temples and porcelain towers, was destroyed.
XII
HOW BOLSHEVISM WAS FOSTERED

The Allies, then, might have solved the Bolshevist problem by making up their minds which of the two alternative politics—war against, or tolerance of, Bolshevism—they preferred, and by taking suitable action in good time. If they had handled the Russian tangle with skill and repaid a great sacrifice with a small one before it was yet too late, they might have hoped to harvest in abundant fruits in the fullness of time. But they belonged to the class of the undecided, whose members continually suffer from the absence of a middle word between yes and no, connoting what is neither positive nor negative. They let the opportunity slip. Not only did they withhold timely succor to either side, but they visited some of the most loyal Russians in western Europe with the utmost rigor of coercion laws. They hounded them down as enemies. They cooped them up in cages as though they were Teuton enemies. They encircled them with barbed wire. They kept many of them hungry and thirsty, deprived them of life's necessaries for days, and in some cases reduced the discontented—and who in their place would not be discontented?—to pick their food in dustbins among garbage and refuse. I have seen officers and men in France who had shed their blood joyfully for the Entente cause gradually converted to Bolshevism by the misdeeds of the Allied authorities. In whose interests? With what helpful results?

I watched the development of anti-Ententism among those Russians with painful interest, and in favorable conditions for observation, and I say without hesitation that rancor against the Allies burns as vehemently and intensely among the anti-Bolshevists as among their adversaries. "My country as a whole is bitterly hostile to her former allies," exclaimed an eminent Russian, "for as soon as she had rendered them inestimable services, at the cost of her political existence, they turned their backs upon her as though her agony were no affair of theirs. To-day the nation is divided on many issues. Dissensions and quarrels have riven and shattered it into shreds. But in one respect Russia is still united—in the vehemence of her sentiment toward the Allies, who first drained her life-blood and then abandoned her prostrate body to beasts of prey. Some part of the hatred engendered might have been mitigated if representatives of the provisional Russian government had been admitted to the Conference. A statesman would have insisted upon opening at least this little safety-valve. It would have helped and could not have harmed the Allies. It would have bound the Russians to them. For Russia's delegates, the men sent or empowered by Kolchak and his colleagues to represent them, would have been the exponents of a helpless community hovering between life and death. They could and would have gone far toward conciliating the world-dictators, to whose least palatable decisions they might have hesitated to offer unbending opposition. And this acquiescence, however provisional, would have tended to relieve the Allies of a sensible part of their load of responsibility. It would also have linked the Russians, loosely, perhaps, but perceptibly, to the Western Powers. It would have imparted a settled Ententophil direction to Kolchak's policy, and communicated it to the nation. In short, it might have dispelled some of the storm-clouds that are gathering in the east of Europe."

But the Allies, true to their wont of drifting, put off all decisive action, and let things slip and slide, for the Germans to put in order. There were no Russians, therefore, at the Conference, and there lies no obligation on any political group or party in the anarchist Slav state to hold to the Allies. But it would be an error to imagine that they have a white sheet of paper on which to trace their line of action and write the names of France and Britain as their future friends. They are filled with angry disgust against these two ex-Allies, and of the two the feeling against France is especially intense.[287]

It is a truism to repeat in a different form what Messrs. Lloyd George and Wilson repeatedly affirmed, but apparently without realizing what they said: that the peace which they regard as the crowning work of their lives deserves such value as it may possess from the assumption that Russia, when she recovers from her cataleptic fit, will be the ally of the Powers that have dismembered her. If this postulate should prove erroneous, Germany may form an anti-Allied league of a large number of nations which it would be invidious to enumerate here. But it is manifest that this consummation would imperil Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Jugoslavia, and sweep away the last vestiges of the peace settlement. And although it would be rash to make a forecast of the policy which new Russia will strike out, it would be impolitic to blink the conclusions toward which recent events significantly point.

In April a Russian statesman said to me: "The Allied delegates are unconsciously thrusting from them the only means by which they can still render peace durable and a fellowship of the nations possible. Unwittingly they are augmenting the forces of Bolshevism and raising political enemies against themselves. Consider how they are behaving toward us. Recently a number of Russian prisoners escaped from Germany to Holland, whereupon the Allied representatives packed them off by force and against their will to Dantzig, to be conveyed thence to Libau, where they have become recruits of the Bolshevist Red Guards. Those men might have been usefully employed in the Allied countries, to whose cause they were devoted, but so exasperated were they at their forcible removal to Libau that many of them declared that they would join the Bolshevist forces.

"Even our official representatives are seemingly included in the category of suspects. Our Minister in Peking was refused the right of sending ciphered telegrams and our chargé d'affaires in a European capital suffered the same deprivation, while the Bolshevist envoy enjoyed this diplomatic privilege. A councilor of embassy in one Allied country was refused a passport visa for another until he declared that if the refusal were upheld he would return a high order which for extraordinary services he had received from the government whose embassy was vetoing his visa. On the national festival of a certain Allied country the chargé d'affaires of Russia was the only member of the diplomatic corps who received no official invitation."

One day in January, when a crowd had gathered on the Quai d'Orsay, watching the delegates from the various countries—British, American, Italian, Japanese, Rumanian, etc.—enter the stately palace to safeguard the interests of their respective countries and legislate for the human race, a Russian officer passed, accompanied by an illiterate soldier who had seen hard service first under the Grand Duke Nicholas, and then in a Russian brigade in France. The soldier gazed wistfully at the palace, then, turning to the officer, asked, "Are they letting any of our people in there?" The officer answered, evasively: "They are thinking it over. Perhaps they will." Whereupon his attendant blurted out: "Thinking it over! What thinking is wanted? Did we not fight for them till we were mowed down like grass? Did not millions of Russian bodies cover the fields, the roads, and the camps? Did we not face the German great guns with only bayonets and sticks? Have we done too little for them? What more could we have done to be allowed in there with the others? I fought since the war began, and was twice wounded. My five brothers were called up at the same time as myself, and all five have been killed, and now the Russians are not wanted! The door is shut in our faces...."

Sooner or later Russian anarchy, like that of China, will come to an end, and the leaders charged with the reconstitution of the country, if men of knowledge, patriotism, and character, will adopt a program conducive to the well-being of the nation. To what extent, one may ask, is its welfare compatible with the status quo in eastern Europe, which the Allies, distracted by conflicting principles and fitful impulse, left or created and hope to perpetuate by means of a parchment instrument?

The zeal with which the French authorities went to work to prevent the growth of Bolshevism in their country, especially among the Russians there, is beyond dispute. Unhappily it proved inefficacious. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that it defeated its object and produced the contrary effect. For attention was so completely absorbed by the aim that no consideration remained over for the means of attaining it. A few concrete examples will bring this home to the reader. The following narratives emanate from an eminent Russian, who is devoted to the Allies.

There were scores of thousands of Russian troops in France. Most of them fought valiantly, others half-heartedly, and a few refused to fight at all. But instead of making distinctions the French authorities, moved by the instinct of self-preservation, and preferring prevention to cure, tarred them all with the same brush. "Give a dog a bad name and hang him," says the proverb, and it was exemplified in the case of the Russians, who soon came to be regarded as a tertium quid between enemies of public order and suspicious neutrals. They were profoundly mistrusted. Their officers were deprived of their authority over their own men and placed under the command of excellent French officers, who cannot be blamed for not understanding the temper of the Slavs nor for rubbing them against the grain. The privates, seeing their superiors virtually degraded, concluded that they had forfeited their claim to respect, and treated them accordingly. That gave the death-blow to discipline. The officers, most of whom were devoted heart and soul to the cause of the Allies, with which they had fondly identified their own, lost heart. After various attempts to get themselves reinstated, their feelings toward the nation, which was nowise to blame for the excessive zeal of its public servants, underwent a radical change. Blazing indignation consumed whatever affection they had originally nurtured for the French, and in many cases also for the other Allies, and they went home to communicate their animus to their countrymen. The soldiers, who now began to be taunted and vilipended as Boches, threw all discipline to the winds and, feeling every hand raised against them, resolved to raise their hands against every man. These were the beginnings of the process of "bolshevization."

This anti-Russian spirit grew intenser as time lapsed. Thousands of Russian soldiers were sent out to work for private employers, not by the War Ministry, but by the Ministry of Agriculture, under whom they were placed. They were fed and paid a wage which under normal circumstances should have contented them, for it was more than they used to receive in pre-war days in their own country. But the circumstances were not normal. Side by side with them worked Frenchmen, many of whom were unable physically to compete with the sturdy peasants from Perm and Vyatka. And when propagandists pointed out to them that the French worker was paid 100 per cent. more, they brooded over the inequality and labeled it as they were told. For overwork, too, the rate of pay was still more unequal. One result of this differential treatment was the estrangement of the two races as represented by the two classes of workmen, and the growth of mutual dislike. But there was another. When they learned, as they did in time, that the employer was selling the produce of their labor at a profit of 400 and 500 per cent., they had no hesitation about repeating the formulas suggested to them by socialist propagandists: "We are working for bloodsuckers. The bourgeois must be exterminated." In this way bitterness against the Allies and hatred of the capitalists were inculcated in tens of thousands of Russians who a few months before were honest, simple-minded peasants and well-disciplined soldiers. Many of these men, when they returned to their country, joined the Red Guards of Bolshevism with spontaneous ardor. They needed no pressing.

There was one young officer of the Guards, in particular, named G——, who belonged to a very good family and was an exceptionally cultured gentleman. Music was his recreation, and he was a virtuoso on the violin. In the war he had distinguished himself first on the Russian front and then on the French. He had given of his best, for he was grievously wounded, had his left hand paralyzed, and lost his power of playing the violin forever. He received a high decoration from the French government. For the English nation he professed and displayed great affection, and in particular he revered King George, perhaps because of his physical resemblance to the Tsar. And when King George was to visit Paris he rejoiced exceedingly at the prospect of seeing him. Orders were issued for the troops to come out and line the principal routes along which the monarch would pass. The French naturally had the best places, but the Place de l'Étoile was reserved for the Allied forces. G——, delighted, went to his superior officer and inquired where the Russians were to stand. The general did not know, but promised to ascertain. Accordingly he put the question to the French commander, who replied: "Russian troops? There is no place for any Russian troops." With tears in his eyes G—— recounted this episode, adding: "We, who fought and bled, and lost our lives or were crippled, had to swallow this humiliation, while Poles and Czechoslovaks, who had only just arrived from America in their brand-new uniforms, and had never been under fire, had places allotted to them in the pageant. Is that fair to the troops without whose exploits there would have been no Polish or Czechoslovak officers, no French victory, no triumphal entry of King George V into Paris?"

FOOTNOTE:

[287] It is right to say that during the summer months a considerable section of the anti-Bolshevists modified their view of Britain's policy, and expressed gratitude for the aid bestowed on Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenitch, without which their armies would have collapsed.