The Crisis in Russia
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Arthur Ransome >> The Crisis in Russia
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9 THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA
by ARTHUR RANSOME
TO WILLIAM PETERS
OF ABERDEEN
INTRODUCTION
THE characteristic of a revolutionary country is that change
is a quicker process there than elsewhere. As the revolution
recedes into the past the process of change slackens speed.
Russia is no longer the dizzying kaleidoscope that it was in
1917. No longer does it change visibly from week to week
as it changed in 19l8. Already, to get a clear vision of the
direction in which it is changing, it is necessary to visit it at
intervals of six months, and quite useless to tap the political
barometer several times a day as once upon a time one used
to do. . . . But it is still changing very fast. My jourrnal of
"Russia in 1919,"while giving as I believe a fairly accurate
pictureof the state of affairs in February and March of
1919, pictures a very different stage in the development of
the revolution from that which would be found by observers
today.
The prolonged state of crisis in which the country has
been kept by external war, while strengthening the ruling
party by rallying even their enemies to their support, has had
the other effects that a national crisis always has on the
internal politics of a country. Methods of government which
in normal times would no doubt be softened or disguised by
ceremonial usage are used nakedly and justified by necessity.
We have seen the same thing in belligerent and non-revolutionary
countries, and, for the impartial student, it has
been interesting to observe that, when this test of crisis is
applied, the actual governmental machine in every country
looks very much like that in every other. They wave
different flags to stimulate enthusiasm and to justify
submission. But that is all. Under the stress of war, "
constitutional safeguards" go by the board "for the public
good," in Moscow as elsewhere. Under that stress it
becomes clear that, in spite of its novel constitution, Russia
is governed much as other countries are governed, the real
directive power lying in the hands of a comparatively small
body which is able by hook or crook to infect with its
conscious will a population largely indifferent and inert. A
visitor to Moscow to-day would find much of the
constitutional machinery that was in full working order in the
spring of 1919 now falling into rust and disrepair. He would
not be able once a week or so to attend All-Russian
Executive and hear discussions in this parliament of the
questions of the day. No one tries to shirk the fact that the
Executive Committee has fallen into desuetude, from which,
when the stress slackens enough to permit ceremonial that
has not an immediate agitational value, it may some day be
revived. The bulk of its members have been at the front or
here and there about the country wrestling with the
economic problem, and their work is more useful than their
chatter. Thus brutally is the thing stated. The continued
stress has made the muscles, the actual works, of the
revolution more visible than formerly. The working of the
machine is not only seen more clearly, but is also more
frankly stated (perhaps simply because they too see it now
more clearly), by the leaders themselves.
I want in this book to describe the working of the machine as
I now see it. But it is not only the machine which is more
nakedly visible than it was. The stress to which it is
being subjected has also not so much changed its character
as become easier of analysis. At least, I seem to myself to
see it differently. In the earlier days it seemed quite simply
the struggle between a revolutionary and non-revolutionary
countries. I now think that that struggle is a foolish,
unnecesary, lunatic incident which disguised from us the
existence of a far more serious struggle, in which the
revolutionary and non-revolutionary governments are
fighting on the same side. They fight without cooperation,
and throw insults and bullets at each other in the middle of
the struggle, but they are fighting for the same thing. They
are fighting the same enemy. Their quarrel with each other
is for both parties merely a harassing accompaniment of the
struggle to which all Europe is committed, for the salvage of
what is left of European civilization.
The threat of a complete collapse of civilization is more
imminent in Russia than elsewhere. But it is clear enough in
Poland, it cannot be disregarded in Germany, there is no
doubt of its existence in Italy, France is conscious of it; it is
only in England and America that this threat is not
among the waking nightmares of everybody. Unless the
struggle, which has hitherto been going against us, takes a
turn for the better, we shall presently be quite unable to
ignore it ourselves.
I have tried to state the position in Russia today: on the one
hand to describe the crisis itself, the threat which is forcing
these people to an extreme of effort, and on the other hand
to describe the organization that is facing that threat; on the
one hand to set down what are the main characteristics of
the crisis, on the other hand to show how the comparatively
small body of persons actually supplying the Russian people
with its directives set about the stupendous task of moving
that vast inert mass, not along the path of least resistance,
but along a path which, while alike unpleasant and extremely
difficult, does seem to them to promise some sort of
eventual escape.
No book is entirely objective, so I do not in the least mind
stating my own reason for writing this one (which has taken
time that I should have liked to spend on other and very
different things). Knowledge of this reason will permit the
reader to make allowances for such bias I have been
unable to avoid, and so, by judicious reading, to make my
book perhaps nearly as objective as I should myself wish it
to be.
It has been said that when two armies face each other across
a battle front and engage in mutual slaughter, they may be
considered as a single army engaged in suicide. Now it
seems to me that when countries, each one severally doing
its best to arrest its private economic ruin, do their utmost to
accelerate the economic ruin of each other, we are
witnessing something very like the suicide of civilization
itself. There are people in both camps who believe that
armed and economic conflict between revolutionary and
non-revolutionary Europe, or if you like between Capitalism
and Communism, is inevitable. These people, in both camps,
are doing their best to make it inevitable. Sturdy pessimists,
in Moscow no less than in London and Paris, they go so far
as to say "the sooner the better," and by all means in their
power try to precipitate a conflict. Now the main effort in
Russia to-day, the struggle which absorbs the chief attention
of all but the few Communist Churchills and Communist
Millerands who, blind to all else, demand an immediate
pitched battle over the prostrate body of civilization, is
directed to finding a way for Russia herself out of the
crisis, the severity of which can hardly be realized by people
who have not visited the country again and again, and to
bringing her as quickly as possible into a state in which she
can export her raw materials and import the manufactured
goods of which she stands in need. I believe that this struggle
is ours as well as Russia's, though we to whom the threat is
less imminent, are less desperately engaged. Victory or
defeat in this struggle in Russia, or anywhere else on the
world's surface, is victory or defeat for every one. The
purpose of my book is to make that clear. For, bearing that
in mind, I cannot but think that every honest man, of
whatever parity, who cares more for humanity than for
politics, must do his utmost to postpone the conflict which a
few extremists on each side of the barricades so fanatically
desire. If that conflict is indeed inevitable, its consequences
will be less devastating to a Europe cured of her wounds
than to a Europe scarcely, even by the most hopeful, to be
described as convalescent. But the conflict may not be
inevitable after all. No man not purblind but sees that
Communist Europe is changing no less than Capitalist
Europe. If we succeed in postponing the struggle long
enough, we may well succeed in postponing it until the
war-like on both sides look in vain for the reasons of their
bellicosity.
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Shortage of Things
The Shortage of Men
The Communist Dictatorship
A Conference at Jaroslavl
The Trade Unions
The Propaganda Trains
Saturdayings
Industrial Conscription
What the Communists Are Trying to do in Russia
Rykov on Economic plans and on the Transformation of the Communist Party
Non-Partyism
Possibilities
***I am indebted to the editor of the "Manchester Guardian" for
permission to make use in some of the chapters of this book of material
which has appeared in his paper.
THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA
THE SHORTAGE OF THINGS
Nothing can be more futile than to describe conditions in
Russia as a sort of divine punishment for revolution, or
indeed to describe them at all without emphasizing the fact
that the crisis in Russia is part of the crisis in Europe, and
has been in the main brought about like the revolution itself,
by the same forces that have caused, for example, the crisis
in Germany or the crisis in Austria.
No country in Europe is capable of complete economic
independence. In spite of her huge variety of natural
resources, the Russian organism seemed in 1914 to have
been built up on the generous assumption that with Europe
at least the country was to be permanently at peace, or at the
lost to engage in military squabbles which could be reckoned
in months, and would keep up the prestige of the
autocracy without seriously hampering imports and exports.
Almost every country in Europe, with the exception of
England, was better fitted to stand alone, was less
completely specialized in a single branch of production.
England, fortunately for herself, was not isolated during the
war, and will not become isolated unless the development of
the crisis abroad deprives her of her markets. England
produces practically no food, but great quantities of coal,
steel and manufactured goods. Isolate her absolutely, and
she will not only starve, but will stop producing
manufactured goods, steel and coal, because those who
usually produce these things will be getting nothing for their
labor except money which they will be unable to use to buy
dinners, because there will be no dinners to buy. That
supposititious case is a precise parallel to what has happened
in Russia. Russia produced practically no manufactured
goods (70 per cent. of her machinery she received from
abroad), but great quantities of food. The blockade isolated
her. By the blockade I do not mean merely the childish
stupidity committed by ourselves, but the blockade, steadily
increasing in strictness, which began in August, 1914,
and has been unnecessarily prolonged by our stupidity. The
war, even while for Russia it was not nominally a blockade,
was so actually. The use of tonnage was perforce restricted
to the transport of the necessaries of war, and these were
narrowly defined as shells, guns and so on, things which do
not tend to improve a country economically, but rather the
reverse. The imports from Sweden through Finland were no
sort of make-weight for the loss of Poland and Germany.
The war meant that Russia's ordinary imports practically
ceased. It meant a strain on Russia, comparable to that
which would have been put on England if the German
submarine campaign had succeeded in putting an end to our
imports of food from the Americas. From the moment of
the Declaration of War, Russia was in the position of one
"holding out," of a city standing a siege without a water
supply, for her imports were so necessary to her economy
that they may justly be considered as essential irrigation.
There could be no question for her of improvement, of
strengthening. She was faced with the fact until the war
should end she had to do with what she had, and that the
things she had formerly counted on importing would be
replaced by guns and shells, to be used, as it turned out, in
battering Russian property that happened to be in enemy
hands. She even learned that she had to develop
gun-making and shell-making at home, at the expense of those
other industries which to some small extent might have
helped her to keep going. And, just as in England such a
state of affairs would lead to a cessation of the output of iron
and coal in which England is rich, so in Russia, in spite of
her corn lands, it led to a shortage of food.
The Russian peasant formerly produced food, for which he
was paid in money. With that money, formerly, he was able
to clothe himself, to buy the tools of his labor, and further,
though no doubt he never observed the fact, to pay for the
engines and wagons that took his food to market. A huge
percentage of the clothes and the tools and the engines and
the wagons and the rails came from abroad, and even those
factories in Russia which were capable of producing such
things were, in many essentials, themselves dependent upon
imports. Russian towns began to be hungry in 1915. In
October of that year the Empress reported to the
Emperor that the shrewd Rasputin had seen in a vision that it
was necessary to bring wagons with flour, butter and sugar
from Siberia, and proposed that for three days nothing else
should be done. Then there would be no strikes. "He
blesses you for the arrangement of these trains." In 1916 the
peasants were burying their bread instead of bringing it to
market. In the autumn of 1916 I remember telling certain
most incredulous members of the English Government that
there would be a most serious food shortage in Russia in the
near future. In 1917 came the upheaval of the revolution, in
1918 peace, but for Russia, civil war and the continuance of
the blockade. By July, 1919, the rarity of manufactured
goods was such that it was possible two hundred miles south
of Moscow to obtain ten eggs for a box of matches, and the
rarity of goods requiring distant transport became such that
in November, 1919, in Western Russia, the peasants would
sell me nothing for money, whereas my neighbor in the train
bought all he wanted in exchange for small quantities of salt.
It was not even as if, in vital matters, Russia started the
war in a satisfactory condition. The most vital of all
questions in a country of huge distances must necessarily be
that of transport. It is no exaggerationto say that only by
fantastic efforts was Russian transport able to save its face
and cover its worst deficiencies even before the war began.
The extra strain put upon it by the transport of troops and
the maintenance of the armies exposed its weakness, and
with each succeeding week of war, although in 19l6 and
1917 Russia did receive 775 locomotives from abroad,
Russian transport went from bad to worse, making inevitable
a creeping paralysis of Russian economic life, during the
latter already acute stages of which the revolutionaries
succeeded to the disease that had crippled their precursors.
In 1914 Russia had in all 20,057 locomotives, of which
15,047 burnt coal, 4,072 burnt oil and 938 wood. But that
figure of twenty thousand was more impressive for a
Government official, who had his own reasons for desiring
to be impressed, than for a practical railway engineer, since
of that number over five thousand engines were more than
twenty years old, over two thousand were more than thirty
years old, fifteen hundred were more than forty years
old, and 147 patriarchs had passed their fiftieth birthday. Of
the whole twenty thousand only 7,108 were under ten years
of age. That was six years ago. In the meantime Russia has
been able to make in quantities decreasing during the last
five years by 40 and 50 per cent. annually, 2,990 new
locomotives. In 1914 of the locomotives then in Russia
about 17,000 were in working condition. In 1915 there
were, in spite of 800 new ones, only 16,500. In 1916 the
number of healthy locomotives was slightly higher, owing
partly to the manufacture of 903 at home in the preceding
year and partly to the arrival of 400 from abroad. In 1917 in
spite of the arrival of a further small contingent the number
sank to between 15,000 and 16,000. Early in 1918 the
Germans in the Ukraine and elsewhere captured 3,000.
Others were lost in the early stages of the civil war. The
number of locomotives fell from 14,519 in January to 8,457
in April, after which the artificially instigated revolt of the
Czecho-Slovaks made possible the fostering of civil war on a
large scale, and the number fell swiftly to 4,679 in
December. In 1919 the numbers varied less markedly,
but the decline continued, and in December last year 4,141
engines were in working order. In January this year the
number was 3,969, rising slightly in February, when the
number was 4,019. A calculation was made before the war
that in the best possible conditions the maximum Russian
output of engines could be not more than1,800 annually.
At this rate in ten years the Russians could restore their
collection of engines to something like adequate numbers.
Today, thirty years would be an inadequate estimate, for
some factories, like the Votkinsky, have been purposely
ruined by the Whites, in others the lathes and other
machinery for building and repairing locomotives are worn
out, many of the skilled engineers were killed in the war with
Germany, many others in defending the revolution, and it
will be long before it will be possible to restore to the
workmen or to the factories the favorable material
conditions of 1912-13. Thus the main fact in the present
crisis is that Russia possesses one-fifth of the number of
locomotives which in 1914 was just sufficient to maintain
her railway system in a state of efficiency which to English
observers at that time was a joke. For six years she has
been unable to import the necessary machinery for making
engines or repairing them. Further, coal and oil have been,
until recently, cut off by the civil war. The coal mines are
left, after the civil war, in such a condition that no
considerable output may be expected from them in the near
future. Thus, even those engines which exist have had their
efficiency lessened by being adapted in a rough and ready
manner for burning wood fuel instead of that for which they
were designed.
Let us now examine the combined effect of ruined transport
and the six years' blockade on Russian life in town and
country. First of all was cut off the import of manufactured
goods from abroad. That has had a cumulative effect
completed, as it were, and rounded off by the breakdown of
transport. By making it impossible to bring food, fuel and
raw material to the factories, the wreck of transport makes it
impossible for Russian industry to produce even that
modicum which it contributed to the general supply of
manufactured goods which the Russian peasant was
accustomed to receive in exchange for his production of
food. On the whole the peasant himself eats rather
more than he did before the war. But he has no matches, no
salt, no clothes, no boots, no tools. The Communists are
trying to put an end to illiteracy in Russia, and in the villages
the most frequent excuse for keeping children from school is
a request to come and see them, when they will be found, as
I have seen them myself, playing naked about the stove,
without boots or anything but a shirt, if that, in which to go
and learn to read and write. Clothes and such things as
matches are, however, of less vital importance than tools, the
lack of which is steadily reducing Russia's actual power of
food production. Before the war Russia needed from
abroad huge quantities of agricultural implements, not only
machines, but simple things like axes, sickles, scythes. In
1915 her own production of these things had fallen to 15.1
per cent. of her already inadequate peacetime output. In
1917 it had fallen to 2.1 per cent. The Soviet Government
is making efforts to raise it, and is planning new factories
exclusively for the making of these things. But, with
transport in such a condition, a new factory means
merely a new demand for material and fuel which there are
neither engines nor wagons to bring. Meanwhile, all over
Russia, spades are worn out, men are plowing with burnt
staves instead of with plowshares, scratching the surface of
the ground, and instead of harrowing with a steel-spiked
harrow of some weight, are brushing the ground with light
constructions of wooden spikes bound together with wattles.
The actual agricultural productive powers of Russia are
consequently sinking. But things are no better if we turn from
the rye and corn lands to the forests. Saws are worn
out. Axes are worn out. Even apart from that, the shortage
of transport affects the production of wood fuel, lack of
which reacts on transport and on the factories and so on in a
circle from which nothing but a large import of engines and
wagons will provide an outlet. Timber can be floated down
the rivers. Yes, but it must be brought to the rivers. Surely
horses can do that. Yes, but, horses must be fed, and oats
do not grow in the forests. For example, this spring (1920)
the best organized timber production was in Perm
Government. There sixteen thousand horses have been
mobilized for the work, but further development is
impossible for lack of forage. A telegram bitterly reports,
"Two trains of oats from Ekaterinburg are expected day by
day. If the oats arrive in time a considerable success will be
possible." And if the oats do not arrive in time? Besides, not
horses alone require to be fed. The men who cut the wood
cannot do it on empty stomachs. And again rises a cry for
trains, that do not arrive, for food that exists somewhere, but
not in the forest where men work. The general effect of the
wreck of transport on food is stated as follows: Less than 12
per cent. of the oats required, less than 5 per cent. of the
bread and salt required for really efficient working, were
brought to the forests. Nonetheless three times as much
wood has been prepared as the available transport has
removed.
The towns suffer from lack of transport, and from the
combined effect on the country of their productive weakness
and of the loss of their old position as centres through which
the country received its imports from abroad. Townsfolk
and factory workers lack food, fuel, raw materials and much
else that in a civilized State is considered a necessary of life.
Thus, ten million poods of fish were caught last year, but
there were no means of bringing them from the fisheries to
the great industrial centres where they were most needed.
Townsfolk are starving, and in winter, cold. People living in
rooms in a flat, complete strangers to each other, by general
agreement bring all their beds into the kitchen. In the
kitchen soup is made once a day. There is a little warmth
there beside the natural warmth of several human beings in a
small room. There it is possible to sleep. During the whole
of last winter, in the case I have in mind, there were no
means of heating the other rooms, where the temperature
was almost always far below freezing point. It is difficult to
make the conditions real except by individual examples. The
lack of medicines, due directly to the blockade, seems to
have small effect on the imagination when simply stated as
such. Perhaps people will realize what it means when
instead of talking of the wounded undergoing operations
without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, a
Bolshevik, working in a Government office, who suffered
last summer from a slight derangement of the stomach due
to improper and inadequate feeding. His doctor
prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen different
apothecaries were unable to make up the prescription for
lack of one or several of the simple ingredients required.
Soap has become an article so rare (in Russia as in Germany
during the blockade and the war there is a terrible absence of
fats) that for the present it is to be treated as a means of
safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washing
after and during their work, and in preference to miners,
chemical, medical and sanitary workers, for whose
efficiency and health it is essential. The proper washing of
underclothes is impossible. To induce the population of
Moscow to go to the baths during the typhus epidemic, it
was sufficient bribe to promise to each person beside the
free bath a free scrap of soap. Houses are falling into
disrepair for want of plaster, paint and tools. Nor is it
possible to substitute one thing for another, for Russia's
industries all suffer alike from their dependence on the West,
as well as from the inadequacy of the transport to bring to
factories the material they need. People remind each other
that during the war the Germans, when similarly hard put to
it for clothes, made paper dresses, table-cloths, etc. In
Russia the nets used in paper-making are worn out. At last,
in April, 1920 (so Lenin told me), there seemed to be a hope
of getting new ones from abroad. But the condition of the
paper industry is typical of all, in a country which, it should
not be forgotten, could be in a position to supply wood-pulp
for other countries besides itself. The factories are able to
produce only sixty per cent. of demands that have
previously, by the strictest scrutiny, been reduced to a
minimum before they are made. The reasons, apart from
the lack of nets and cloths, are summed up in absence of
food, forage and finally labor. Even when wood is brought
by river the trouble is not yet overcome. The horses are
dead and eaten or starved and weak. Factories have to cease
working so that the workmen, themselves underfed, can drag
the wood from the barges to the mills. It may well be
imagined what the effect of hunger, cold, and the
disheartenment consequent on such conditions of work and
the seeming hopelessness of the position have on the
productivity of labor, the fall in which reacts on all the
industries, on transport, on the general situation and so again
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