THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA(俄国危机)

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THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

by ARTHUR RANSOME

TO WILLIAM PETERS OF ABERDEEN

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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.

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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,

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

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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,

THE CRISIS IN RUSSIA

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

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THECRISISINRUSSIA1THECRISISINRUSSIAbyARTHURRANSOMETOWILLIAMPETERSOFABERDEENTHECRISISINRUSSIA2INTRODUCTIONTHEcharacteristicofarevolutionarycountryisthatchangeisaquickerprocesstherethanelsewhere.Astherevolutionrecedesintothepasttheprocessofchangeslackensspeed.Russiaisnolongerthedizzyingkaleidoscopetha...

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