W.W.--has entered
the plea, "Yes, but it is for the good of the people!"
If the Bolsheviki had wanted to see the realization of the ideals of the
Revolution, they would have found in the conditions existing immediately
prior to their insurrection a challenge calling them to the service of the
nation, in support of the Provisional Government and the Preliminary
Parliament. They would have permitted nothing to imperil the success of the
program that was so well advanced. As it was, determination to defeat that
program was their impelling motive. Not only did they fear and oppose
_political_ democracy; they were equally opposed to democracy in
_industry_, to that democracy in the economic life of the nation which
every Socialist movement in the world had at all times acknowledged to be
its goal. As we shall see, they united to political dictatorship industrial
dictatorship. They did not want democracy, but power; they did not want
peace, even, as they wanted power.
The most painstaking and sympathetic study of the Russian Revolution will
not disclose any great ideal or principle, moral or political, underlying
the distinctive Bolshevik agitation and program. Nothing could well be
farther from the truth than the view taken by many amiable people who,
while disavowing the actions of the Bolsheviki, seek to mitigate the
judgment which mankind pronounces against them by the plea that, after
all, they are extreme idealists, misguided, of course, but, nevertheless,
inspired by a noble ideal; that they are trying, as John Brown and many
others have tried, to realize a great ideal, but have been made incapable
of seeing their ideal in its proper perspective, and, therefore, of making
the compromises and adjustments which the transmutation of ideals to
reality always requires.
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