The experiences of past history make us doubtful of any theory of government ever coming in practice to produce the results which the Constitution-framers had in mind, or of any governmental action ever having the effect which statesmen expected it to have; for the values with which rulers deal fluctuate continually, and missing factors have an awkward habit of turning up unexpectedly and spoiling all the neat equations of Cabinets and Kings. Past history (to vary the metaphor), is largely a record of intense activity on the part of rulers in erecting walls which tumble down on top of them, and digging pits into which they fall themselves. James the First planted Ulster with sturdy Scots who, instead of proving a support to his dynasty, as he had probably expected, helped to drive James the Second from his throne. We supported our settlers in the New World so as to counterbalance French influence in Canada, with the result that our North American Colonies threw us over, while the French Canadians remained faithful to us. And as past history is strewn with falsified predictions, so future history may likewise be paved with the miscalculations of statesmen, and the present activities of European Governments may be found, in fifty years’ time, to have been entirely futile, misdirected, and suicidal. To-day Mr. Lloyd George, for example, is apparently concentrating his immense industry on the task of converting the essentially conservative peasantry of Ireland into Bolsheviks, and Comrade Lenin is equally busy laying the foundations of a great capitalist state in Communistic Russia. I quoted in a previous chapter a strange admission of Lenin to the effect that he did not quite know towards what harbour he was drifting, and at the present moment he is certainly tossing about in uncharted seas which, when he weighed anchor, were the very last places in the political world where he ever expected to find himself. He set out to kill militarism, with the result that he is now almost the only militarist in Europe. He has one of the largest and most enthusiastic armies in the world; schools for officers have been established in every town, and boys from sixteen to twenty years are taught military exercises. What is more important, the Russian people have become, for the first time in their history, bellicose and jingoistic. They write martial poetry which even Kipling could not improve upon, and of which they never before had any specimens in their popular literature. One poem to the “Red Star of Bolshevism” comes from a section of the workmen to which Lermontov’s “Borodino” never made an appeal; and their innumerable rude dramas in praise of militarism are quite a novelty on the Russian stage, where patriotic operas like “A Life for the Tsar” were never popular save on artistic grounds. Their coarse, popular pictures depicting the triumph of Bolshevism in arms arouse enthusiasm amongst a class which Vereshchagin’s heroic Napoleonic canvasses left absolutely cold.

Lenin set out to kill individualism in Russia, as well as militarism, but all he has killed has been the vague Socialistic spirit which tinged the thoughts of most Russians, even those of the middle and upper classes. A harsh, greedy individualism has now mastered most of the Russian people. The old philanthropic landowner has gone, but has been replaced by a hard-fisted muzhik class resembling the most unlovely type of French peasant, and the patriarchal old bureaucrat has been replaced by a violent and ill-mannered Commissar, with all the worst qualities of his predecessor and none of the good.

The Bolsheviks declared that they would extirpate all capitalists, but, judging by innumerable indications to which I have already made allusion, they will, if they last, find themselves largely in the hands of foreign capitalists, of whom the Tsar’s Government was always very distrustful. In March last, an able Lettish forestry expert in Ekaterinburg approached the Soviet forestry department for a post, but was told that most of the forests would be given over for exploitation to foreigners. “They know these things better than we do,” quoth the Forestry Commissar. Moscow I found full of secret or acknowledged representatives of great American, British, and Continental firms, some of whom, I know, got very large concessions. There is now in Copenhagen a great clearing-house scheme for doing trade with Russia, and in Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, and Italy, the “big business” men are equally active. Krassin could, if he would, make some strange disclosures of the anxiety of British firms to “do a deal” with him, and of the way Russified Englishmen and “big business” generally have grovelled before him, as I once knew an obsequious English concessionaire literally to crawl on his belly before a former King of Siam, in accordance with the degrading Court etiquette then prevalent; and the ultimate result will be that the anti-capitalist movement in Russia will end by leaving Russia as much at the mercy of foreign capitalists as China. Whatever may be said of the old Russian bureaucracy, it must be admitted that they never allowed anybody to plunder Russia but themselves. There will now be wholesale plunder by Bolsheviks ready to sell the real gains of the first Revolution, and by capitalists ready to sell their country, their civilization, and their souls.

The Socialistic régime was expected to stop corruption in Russia, but it is a well-known fact that corruption was never so rampant there as it is now. The Food Control at Moscow is a scandal of the first magnitude, 50 per cent. of the food which is handed over to it being sold through speculators and profiteers. An employee of the English Cold Storage Company in Moscow told me that he himself transferred to the Food Control enormous numbers of chickens and sausages, and large quantities of butter, which were never issued to the public on cards, but which he himself saw in the hands of speculators, who offered them for sale at more than extravagant prices. The attempt to extirpate the profiteer has only resulted, therefore, in the enhancement of the profiteer’s earnings by 5,000 per cent., and even the shooting of dishonest Commissars does not reduce the evil.

Every Commissar’s train which visits the provinces returns to Moscow with loads of food on which much money is made. There is a soldier at every railway station to prevent this, but the Commissar invariably gives a paper to his subordinates entitling them to bring home as much foodstuff as they like. When Bolshevik Missions return from abroad, they will have similar cargoes; hence there is a keen desire on the part of Red officials to go abroad in some official capacity. This also leads to instances of favouritism and corruption, such as no other Government in the world could parallel. Theoretically the most competent man is chosen, but in practice it is a matter of intrigue, family influence, and money to a much greater extent than in the worst days of Imperialism. The selection of bureaucrats for important posts is accompanied by an amount of “wire-pulling” which would shock even the city of Washington. The relatives of Commissars get appointments which they would never obtain under the laxest Parliamentary system of government, and the children of Trotsky and of the other Commissars will be sure of high positions in the Bolshevik Oligarchy.

I am sometimes tempted to think that the outcome of it all will be the establishment of a powerful Russian bureaucracy allied to a powerful German bureaucracy, and the conversion of anti-capitalist Russia into a sort of Petropavlovsk Fortress-prison, with capitalists and bureaucrats in the fortress, and an enslaved Labour class in the prison. Why, indeed, should not the handful of desperate adventurers, who have conquered Russia by their ideas, evolve, with the support of international capital, into a ruling caste, even as the disreputable freebooters who conquered England in 1066 by their swords evolved into perfectly respectable people? But the conclusion at which I have invariably arrived, when engaged in such surmises, is that the ideas of the Bolsheviks will not keep their edge so long as did the swords of the Normans, and that the feudal system, with its roots stretching down to the humblest of the people, contained far greater promise of stability than does the Bolshevik theory which has no hold on the peasants and no hold on most of the workmen. There are, as I have already pointed out, 125,000,000 people in Russia, and, according to Trotsky, the Bolsheviks number only 604,000, of whom not more than 70,000 are workmen. All the rest are bureaucrats, and, from personal investigations which I conducted in Moscow, I discovered that at least half of these 70,000 workmen are engaged on what they call “political work,” though they are paid by the factories, are inscribed on the books of the factories, and are supposed to be working in the factories. The Bolsheviks are losing touch with the manual workers at a very rapid rate indeed, and, in a short time, every member of the party will be a bureaucrat. Obsessed by their impracticable theories, they will be carried further and further from the realities of life and of human nature, until finally they are tripped up by something very simple and very small, as the Tsar, who had survived the Japanese War and the revolution of 1905, was ignobly tripped up at length by a drunken pilgrim and a shortage of bread. Wars have been caused by diphthongs, and the heirs of the Byzantines may be overthrown by their own misinterpretation of the one word “worker.” To that word their leaders, who certainly know better, have consistently and dishonestly given the meaning “manual worker,” so that when, in 1905, Count Witte claimed, and with very good reason, to be also a worker, the deputation of Workmen’s Deputies, which by the way included Trotsky, laughed him to scorn. Yet now there are in Moscow alone 230,000 Bolshevik officials who do not work with their hands, against 100,000 manual workers, of whom considerably less than half are members of the Communist party. A Menshevik recently asked in the Pravda why so few skilled workmen are Bolshevik, and the editor replied that he needed time before he could answer that difficult question. “If any will not work, neither let him eat”: out of their own mouths shall the Bolsheviks be confounded. They misapplied that text in order to ruin others, and now it will be misapplied by others in order to ruin them.

History has frequently furnished the spectacle of rough barbarians descending from the hills to conquer a great pacific people, and to found a ruling caste which in course of time becomes corrupted by luxury and is swept away. The empire-smashing barbarians of the future will come from the mines and workshops of nations which brutalize the lower classes and lose at the same time their own ancient virtue; but in these rapid days the degeneration of the conquerors will be swift, and in Russia it shows every sign of being already complete.

A probable outcome of the present Russian experiment will be a military reaction involving the extermination of half a million Reds, and perhaps another half-million of more or less inoffensive Jews, and the persecution by the Whites, for twenty years, of those Socialists and Liberals whom Lenin hated, and who will probably have done most towards bringing about Lenin’s fall. Then the pendulum will swing from right to left and from left to right, until finally it settles at a federated bourgeois republic.

Of my own personal adventures there is little more to be said save that, curiously enough, they ended on a cheerful and even comic note.

After my release by the Bolshevik Inquisition I applied for permission to leave Russia with the British refugees who were due to leave under the Litvinov-O’Grady agreement for the exchange of prisoners, and this permission was granted. I could have remained as a correspondent on very favourable terms if I had consented to write for the Bolsheviks; I could have visited Petrograd, the South, and the Polish Front, and accumulated a mass of material about Red Russia, but there was danger in carrying out that programme. The fact that I was an officer might leak out at Krasnoyarsk or at Moscow, might be disclosed by treacherous interpreters who had been attached to us, by military documents which had been captured, or simply by reference to the British Army List. Even if it did not leak out, the Bolsheviks, who were anxious that I should stay, and willing to make it worth my while to stay, would certainly try to cut off my retreat and place me entirely at their mercy by publishing something which I had not said, or garbling something which I had said, with the result that, owing to my inability to contradict this, and to the British Government’s intense suspicion of everything Bolshevik, I might be refused admittance into England. Those who are inclined to doubt all this do not know the Bolsheviks, and do not know the morbid tension which Bolshevism has produced outside Russia, and of which I had a most unpleasant personal experience as soon as I crossed the Finnish frontier.

I always told the Reds that it was absolutely necessary for me to go home, since (as I put it) everything I wrote from Russia would be regarded in England as having been written under duress. At the same time, I always made it clear to them that I was no Socialist, that I did not believe their experiment would succeed, and that when I returned to England I would put down everything without fear or favour, what told against them as well as what told for them.

Their answer to this was characteristic. They said in effect: “Russia is the only country in the world where you can write with perfect freedom. Here you can denounce King George, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and all the Generals, Cabinet Ministers, clergymen, and capitalists that you can think of. There is no limit to the violence of the language you can use against them, and no matter what mismanagement, fraud, and debauchery you accuse them of, you need fear no action for libel here. What greater freedom do you want? You could never do that in England. You could never publish in England anything that tells in favour of Bolshevism, no matter how true it be, and no matter what denunciations of Bolshevism you publish along with it.”

My answer to that is the foregoing narrative, in which absolutely everything is published, and in the composition of which no suggestion has been made to me to omit or alter a single word. That is what I call freedom.

The last days spent in Moscow by the British party were enlivened by the efforts of certain young Russian ladies to get married to the fugitives, so that they themselves could leave as British subjects, for it is as difficult for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle as for a Russian “citizen” to leave Russia. Most of the British officer-prisoners, married and unmarried, could have brought out with them charming Russian brides of good family, and in some cases with ample fortunes awaiting them outside in Paris or London banks; and I do not think that, since the Rape of the Sabines, soldiers have ever had such an embarrassing abundance of youth and beauty to choose from. The officers resisted heroically, though perhaps some of them, demobilized and out of work, now regret that gran rifiuto; but, alas! some of the civilians fell. It was not a serious matter, however, for the unions were contracted in accordance with the Soviet marriage-law (which is anything but serious, and has no legal validity outside Russia), and were only nominal unless the parties wished to supplement them by a regular marriage on the other side of the frontier. Some amusing situations arose in consequence of these marriages. One aristocratic lady who had “married” an English youth of half her age dropped him and the name he had given her as soon as she got aboard the boat for England; another English bridegroom had, on the contrary, considerable difficulty in getting disentangled from his Muscovite “bride.” But no English wife need be in the least uneasy. The whole masquerade was as innocent and delightful as a dance, and, in the gay jingling of marriage bells mixed with the silvery laughter of Russian girls, I read a prophecy of a day when the masculine energy of the Briton will combine on equal terms with the delicate feminine genius of the Slav to reorganize a shattered world and to save our Christian civilization.

Up to this time an ice-bound sea, void of life, had stretched away like a Siberian steppe to the horizon, but now the mighty waters had burst their chains, and the humble craft of the fisherman went freely to and fro on the rippling surface. I thanked God for the passing away of that dreadful winter which I had often thought would be my last, and I prayed that the great Russian people might soon be freed in like manner from the frozen, life-destroying immobility of Communism.

For five long months the only news I had had from home were the tidings of discontent, disorder, mutiny, and revolution published in the Bolshevik newspapers, but all these shapes of horror faded away when I went aboard the British naval transport which lay awaiting us in Helsingfors Bay with a British destroyer alongside. An armed bluejacket saluted briskly at the gangway, and the interior of the great ship presented the same impressive picture of ordered freedom as the Kent had presented at Vladivostock seven thousand miles away. The bugles were as merry and confident as ever; the “Aye, aye, sir!” of the sailors as ready and cheerful as of yore. Amid these reassuring sights and sounds I close this narrative of captivity.