THE EDUCATION OF THE PROLETARIAT

In the chapter entitled “Trotsky in Ekaterinburg,” I speak of “butchers’ boys who had qualified for professorships.”

A typical paragraph of this kind, which was headed “A Peasant’s Son,” tells how Ivan Polukarov, the son of a Siberian peasant, entered the Red Academy of the General Staff two years ago when he was twenty-three, and became, at the end of that time, an able Staff officer. The papers are full of news about the opening of new schools for workmen by the Soviet Government and the Professional Unions. There are long descriptions of a school for artists opened recently at Nizhni-Novgorod—free courses in studio work, drawing, painting, and sculpture; school for agricultural experts opened at Tambov—220 students; handicraft schools in Spassky (Ryzansky Government) for bookbinders, coopers, and basket-makers. It is announced that all the Russian factories are working overtime, and that the workmen are giving the money thus earned to the Red Army, which also receives from the Government the articles thus manufactured. I know, however, that the number of Russian factories which are doing any work at all is very negligible. There is certainly a great intellectual ferment, but not much solid work is done owing, as the Reds themselves confessed to me, to the following reasons: (1) There are too many Government departments, and they only get in one another’s way; (2) the departmental machinery is excessively complicated; (3) the departmental chiefs waste their time in letting crowds of people see them, and have consequently no time to do any real work; (4) heads of departments draw up ambitious programmes which are “scrapped” on account of those heads being very frequently changed; (5) a great waste of energy in all directions and a great overlapping of work. Almost everything of technical or scientific value which the Bolsheviks have done is based on plans, specifications, and preparatory work which were carried out under the Old Régime. All the technical reports which I saw the Bolshevik chiefs working on had been compiled in the time of the Tsar.

My eye was once caught by the following headline in a Bolshevik newspaper: “Illiteracy Must No Longer Exist.” The article of which it was the caption told of how the Soviet of Krasnokokshaisky Uyezd, Kazunsky Government, had decided “to abolish illiteracy in the case of all persons of both sexes between the ages of seventeen and fifty.” As there were not enough teachers to carry out this laudable decree, literate peasants were made to teach the illiterates. This “revolt against illiteracy,” as the Bolsheviks call it, is common all over Russia, and it is considered such a disgrace for a soldier in the Red Army to be unable to read and write that comrades able to do so teach him.

A Commissar once described to me the career of Budyonin, the Red cavalry leader who was once an officer’s batman and is now one of the Soviet’s most successful Generals. “There is always,” he added, “at least as much talent in the masses as in an equal number of the classes; and, owing to their great numerical superiority, the whole bulk of the masses have far more talent latent in them than all the bourgeoisie and aristocracy put together. We are basing our whole system of government on that principle, and the facts of life are on our side. Take England. A son of the governing classes there gets an expensive education at Oxford, and may, when he leaves Oxford, enter public life and rise easily, if he has even moderate talent, to the top of the tree. A poor man, though he may have far greater talent, has nothing like the same chance. Ill-educated and handicapped, he struggles till he is forty at making himself financially independent; and at forty his spirit is broken and he cannot do much. There are exceptions, of course, but only a fool will say that in England the son of a poor man has, as a rule, an equal chance with a scion of your ‘great governing families.’ Every revolution proves that what you call ‘the lower classes’ is an inexhaustible reservoir of talent, and that the oligarchs are generally dull, pompous, and selfish old men whose master passion in life is to keep the monopoly of power as much as possible in their own families. The present decay of governmental authority in capitalist countries is partly due to the fact that, under the extreme stress of the war, the various imperialistic Governments were compelled to let outsiders have access to their political and military secrets, and to see the various Grand Lamas hidden away in the recesses of their Courts, Cabinets, and War Offices, with the result that a large number of honest men are disgusted by the fools they met with in high places and by the idiocy of the policies which those fools pursued. The High Priests of the Temple of Capitalism are now trying to replace the veil that hid the faces of those oracles from the profane gaze of the vulgar, but it is too late. The spell is broken; the sordid secrets are revealed; and the end of it all will most certainly be—Bolshevism.

“Compare the disgusting flabbiness of the Romanovs and of the ‘gentry,’ officer, and bourgeois classes in this country with the alertness and resolution of the Russian workmen.

“You English think that a cavalry leader like Haig can only arise in an aristocratic family. The Russian Imperialists thought so too, and therefore they selected Mamontov to lead Denikin’s cavalry. We opposed to him Budyonin, an officer’s batman, who soon swept Mamontov off the face of the earth. You say that Budyonin is no longer one of the people, that he must necessarily develop like Murat, Hector MacDonald, Sir William Robertson, and other talented plebeians, and join a higher class. But he will do nothing of the kind, for he is a strong Bolshevik, and will always be one of the Proletariat. This is the difference between our revolution and all the revolutions that have gone before. Our statesmen and soldiers will always remain with the people, not only because of their own strong Communist principles, but also because, once they ceased to belong to the people, they would be destroyed either by the people or by the old gang, which having, like all emigrés, learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, would come back wanting their old places.”

The utterer of the above tirade was M. Dovgolevsky, a Socialist who has passed most of his life in Western Europe, and who is now trying to reorganize the Russian railways. The weak point in his argument is this: The ruling class in the West may be as weak and foolish as he makes them out to be, but the same number of workmen would prove to be infinitely more corrupt. They have already proved so in Russia. A ruling class must be raised above temptation of corruption by some kind of pride—pride of caste, pride of birth, or pride of intellect; but rule by a Proletariat or by those “Money-bags of Mammon,” whom Carlyle so roundly denounced, and to which, unfortunately, we are all tending, is bound to be a corrupt and despicable kind of rule. Both the English and the German bureaucrat were comparatively honest, because they had one or other of the above kinds of pride, though in many cases they were worse off financially than if they had been in business. For the same reason the British officer at the head of a patrol generally showed more self-sacrifice than a non-commissioned officer would have done. Our British Army probably contains some of the stupidest officers and the smartest N.C.O.’s in the world, yet if the former were all displaced suddenly by the latter, as in Russia, who that knows the army can doubt that the private would suffer by the change?