The Mind and Face of Bolshevism: An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia

By Rene Fulop-Miller

First published in 1927, this is the English translation of German author René Fülöp-Miller’s account of non-political developments under the Bolshevist regime. It thoroughly examines cultural life in the Soviet Union and illustrates, through rich use of photographs throughout, how the mechanistic theory—freed from the control of individualism and individualistic religion, or what the author calls ‘a collective man’—applies itself to decorative design, literature, monumental art, the theatre, music, and education.

A revealing book which everyone should read.

“The best and most profound book on Bolshevism which has hitherto appeared outside Russia. Fülöp-Miller’s examination is very objective and many-sided.” -NICOLAS BERDYAEV

“The most comprehensive book on the non-political side of Bolshevism which, to our knowledge, has so far been published. It is a serious study of the social, philosophical, artistic, religious, and economic antecedents and consequences of Bolshevism, deriving its value not only from an obviously wide acquaintance with the literature of the Subject, but also from the fact that the writer has fortified his reading by firsthand study of and residence in Soviet Russia.”—The Times [London] Literary Supplement

“This book is a profound psychological and social study of a movement which must be examined historically and scientifically rather than tested by the political tenets and beliefs to which other countries have for centuries been habituated. No one interested in modern Russia can afford to leave this book unread.”—Asiatic Review (London)

“...it treats Bolshevism, not from the standpoint of politics or economics, but in its wider aspect, as a new way of life or a new religion. There is the most praiseworthy attempt at objectivity, and the information in the book is exceedingly interesting.” -BERTRAND RUSSELL

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Release date: Jun 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787205093

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Text originally published in 1927 under the same title.

© Muriwai Books 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MIND AND FACE OF BOLSHEVISM

An Examination of Cultural Life in Soviet Russia

BY

RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER

With a new Epilogue, Changes in Soviet Life and Culture During the Last Decades and a new Bibliography (1962)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7

INTRODUCTION 9

NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES 11

Chapter I — THE COLLECTIVE MAN 13

Chapter II — LENIN 34

Chapter III — THE PHILOSOPHY OF BOLSHEVISM 52

Chapter IV — BOLSHEVISM IN THE LIGHT OF SECTARIANISM 69

Chapter V — THE BOLSHEVIK MONUMENTAL STYLE 84

Chapter VI — THE PROPAGANDIST THEATRE 104

Chapter VII — THEATRICALIZED LIFE 119

Chapter VIII — THE MECHANIZING OF POETRY 134

Chapter IX — BOLSHEVIK MUSIC 153

Chapter X — THE REVOLUTIONIZING OF EVERYDAY LIFE 161

Chapter XI — ILLITERACY AND THE NEW EDUCATION 223

Chapter XII — THE REFORMATION OF THE BYZANTINE CHURCH 240

Chapter XIII — THE REBIRTH OF RUSSIAN MYSTICISM 249

Chapter XIV — THE KATORGA—THEN AND NOW 257

Chapter XV — THE ETHICS OF BOLSHEVISM 267

EPILOGUE — DOSTOEVSKI’S VISION OF BOLSHEVISM 273

Extract from Dostoevski’s novel, The Possessed 273

Extract from The Brothers Karamazov 274

BIBLIOGRAPHY 275

A. GENERAL (POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC) 275

DAILY PAPERS 279

REPORTS 279

B. ART, LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND THE DRAMA 280

PERIODICALS 282

C. PHILOSOPHY, ETHICS, AND SCIENCE 283

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 285

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: THE MASS

(The following illustrations will be found in a group following page 212.)

1. THE GIANT TOYS OF THE COLLECTIVE MAN: figures of Lloyd George, Millerand, Kerenski and Milinkov in front of the Kremlin.

2. Moscow: The Red Square before the Historical Museum, decorated.

3. THE MECHANIZED INDIVIDUAL IS REDUCED TO A MERE COMPONENT PART IN THE MASS WHICH HAS BECOME THE MACHINE. (Constructivistic-symbolical drawing by Krinski).

4. LET US TAKE THE STORM OF THE REVOLUTION IN SOVIET RUSSIA, UNITE IT TO THE PULSE OF AMERICAN LIFE, AND DO OUR WORK LIKE A CHRONOMETER! (Gastev’s appeal for Americanization).

5. A TEMPLE OF THE MACHINE-WORSHIPPERS: A Byzantine Dome. Instead of angels, figures of Communist agitators have been placed in the spandrels (Drawing by Krinski).

6. PLAN FOR A MONUMENT TO THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION: THE COLOSSUS OF IRON.

7. LENIN SPEAKING FROM A PLATFORM ON THE MOSCOW THEATRE SQUARE.

8. LENIN IN HIS STUDY.

9. LENIN, BUKHARIN AND ZINOVIEV, THE FOUNDERS OF BOLSHEVIK MARXISM.

10. FESTIVAL TO CELEBRATE THE FRATERNISATION BETWEEN WORKERS, PEASANTS AND SOLDIERS.

11. THE CENTRAL EXECUTIVE OF ALL THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT HOLDS A SESSION IN THE FORMER CORONATION ROOM OF THE MOSCOW KREMLIN.

12. TROTSKI IN HIS STUDY.

13. LEADERS OF SOVIET RUSSIA: Sokolnikov, Piatakov, Bukharin, Kamenev, Kurski.

14. LENIN’S FUNERAL.

15. STALIN AND KALININ.

16. PROPAGANDA CHINA PLATE FROM THE FORMER IMPERIAL FACTORY.

17. SUPREMATIST POTTERY FROM THE FORMER IMPERIAL POTTERY FACTORY.

18. BOLSHEVIK ISMS.

19. ARCHITECTURAL MODEL (by Ladovski).

20. IN A RED WORKERS’ CLUB. Performance of a play by Mayerhold, in which the political questions of the day are discussed.

21. STANISLAVSKI, TAIROV, CHEKHOV (a nephew of the writer), AND EVREINOV.

22. THE CONSTRUCTIVIST STAGE IN THE MAYERHOLD THEATRE.

23. A GROUP FROM A PROLETARIAN PROCESSION.

24. THE STORMING OF THE KREMLIN (drawing by Krinski).

25. LENIN ADDRESSES THE CROWD FROM THE FACTORY CHIMNEYS (drawing by Deni).

26. PART OF A GREAT PROCESSION OF INDUSTRY.

27. A WALKING EXHIBITION OF THE BOOK TRADE DURING AN INDUSTRIAL FESTIVAL.

28. THE MASS ON THE MARCH. (Radek, painting by Kupka).

29. GREAT SOVIET GYMNASTIC DISPLAY.

30. BIRD’S EYE VIEW OF THE WINTER PALACE WITH THE ALEXANDER COLUMN.

31. THE THEATRICALISED STORMING OF THE WINTER PALACE.

32. PORTRAIT OF GORKI (by I. Annenkov).

33. PORTRAIT OF SAMIATION (by I. Annenkov)j

34 & 35. CONCERT OF FACTORY SIRENS AND STEAM WHISTLES.

36. THE PRIVATE CHAPEL OF THE TROITSKOE PODVORE (Church of the Trinity) TRANSFORMED INTO AN ATHEIST’S CLUB.

37. THE CUPOLA OF A LENINGRAD CHURCH.

38. A COMMUNIST SPEAKER AMONG THE PEASANTS.

39. A COMMUNIST PARTY CONFERENCE.

40. INDESTRUCTIBLE SUPERSTITION IN RUSSIA.

41. COMMUNISTIC UNIVERSITY OF THE WESTERN PEOPLES IN MOSCOW READING ROOM.

42. A YOUNG HOUSEKEEPER, BEFORE SHOPPING, GOES WITH HER A B C TO THE SCHOOL FOR ILLITERATES.

43. SCHOOL FOR ILLITERATES.

44. EXTERIOR OF THE CENTRAL INSTITUTE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH INTO HUMAN LABOUR (GASTEV INSTITUTE).

45. CINE-PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE LABOUR PROCESS.

46. THE USPENSKI CATHEDRAL.

47. IN ALEXEI TOLSTOI’S HOME: (from left to right) TIKHONOV, SCHIPATCHEV, TOLSTOI, TVARDOVSKY, ISAKOVSKY, SURKOV.

48. ILYA EHRENBURG ADDRESSING THE PEACE RALLY IN LONDON’S TRAFALGAR SQUARE, 1950.

49. BORIS PASTERNAK AFTER HEARING OF HIS WINNING THE 1958 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE FOR Dr. Zhivago.

50. POET E. YEVTUSHENKO, 1962.

51. FORMER PREMIER KHRUSHCHEV AT TWO DAY MEETING IN KREMLIN’S SVERDLOVSK HALL, WITH (from left to right) FROL, KOSLOV, KHRUSHCHEV, S. MIKHALKOV, GEORGI CHUKHRAY AND PYRIEV.

52. WOODCUT OF VLADIMIR MAIAKOVSKI BY YURI MOGILEVSKY.

INTRODUCTION

HITHERTO Bolshevism has almost always been regarded purely as a political problem; to wrest it from this misleading and superficial judgment is the aim of this book. For what is happening in Russia today is far too significant and fateful for our age to be handed over for acceptance or rejection to a caste of politicians whose attitude and verdict depend entirely on tactical considerations, and who will emphasize or ignore both its defects and its merits as it suits their interest at the moment.

The problem of Bolshevism extends far beyond the narrow horizon of political sympathies or antipathies. Its acceptance or rejection is the rejection or acceptance of the whole of European culture. The claim made for Bolshevism is that it can immediately and without delay realize all the immemorial aims of human endeavour, all those things for which the thinkers of all times have striven, to which martyrs have testified by their example in life and in death—I mean, the redemption and happiness of mankind. Its doctrines offer not the vague hope of consolation in another and better world of the future, but precepts for the immediate and concrete realization of this better world.

Such a colossal claim demands more earnest consideration than is generally accorded to political and social reforms; but it also calls for more serious and conscientious criticism. No body of men has ever before had the audacity to try to give a practical demonstration of redemption, that never yet attained vision of the future; and no one who enters upon so bold an undertaking can expect to escape rigorous criticism.

The ordinary methods of objective criticism break down before the vastness of the subject, and it cannot be exhausted by political and economic abstractions. Bolshevism stands for a radical change of the whole of human life in all its fundamental aims and interests, in every one of its manifestations. But you cannot get to the heart of reality by impersonal theories, a dry array of facts, and an uncritical reproduction of expressions of opinion, pro and con. Only by experience can you obtain a truthful picture of men and their actions, words and ideas, and only a concrete representation of what has been experienced can communicate to others a true picture of living reality.

By objectivity, I mean a sincere way of looking at things, a lack of bias in personal impressions, an impartial attitude to what is seen and heard, so that what is really great will be recognized as great even when it alienates and wounds, and what is mere sham and pretentiousness is ridiculed, however emotional its appeal. To be objective is not to abstain from any critical estimate, but rather to approach life without prejudice and to form a just judgment on it.

In any attempt to give a vivid and faithful picture of present-day Russia, it is necessary to invoke the aid of photography, an important ally. Its unerring reliability serves as documentary support to the text; it preserves for all time the whole world of Bolshevism: the daily life of the period, its great festivals, its works of art, and its men and women. Much of what is fixed on the plates is unique and can never happen again; in all its extraordinariness it is already a part of history. In this sense, many of the illustrations in this book can be regarded as priceless historical documents.

Where necessary to illustrate personal experience, I have quoted from the speeches, writings, and other utterances of the friends and foes of Bolshevism; but only persons have been unreservedly allowed to speak whose statements had been verified by ocular evidence. On the other hand, the empty talk of phrase makers has been ruthlessly exposed.

The limits of objective criticism are laid down automatically by the nature of every historical process; in the criticism of Bolshevism, however, these restrictions are even more clearly felt. We are dealing here with a revolution which maintains that with it and through it the old world ceases and a new humanity begins. But the dominance of this system, the effects of which will extend to the most distant future, will have lasted barely ten years when this book is published.

Can any fair estimate be made, after such a brief experience, of a principle whose consequences may endure for thousands of years? Yes and no: it is true that it is not at present possible to draw a final picture of the nature and prospects of Bolshevism, since many beginnings will be dropped and much that is new will be added. Nevertheless, it is already possible to give expression to much that is important regarding the mind and face of Bolshevism, for a section of a curve often permits us to draw weighty conclusions about its further course.

While this book, therefore, does not presume to give a final verdict on events in Russia, it does, by the manner of its treatment, claim to save Bolshevism from a narrow, utilitarian, political criticism, and to show it in its true light as a momentous problem of civilization as a whole.

I have to express my very grateful thanks to all the Russian artists, politicians, and scholars who so unselfishly aided me in my work in Russia. I must also acknowledge that the authorities put no check on my activities, although my attitude was entirely unbiassed, open, and critical. Finally, special thanks are due to my friend, Percy Eckstein, for his valuable assistance in the completion of my book.

RENÉ FÜLÖP-MILLER.

VIENNA, April 1926.

NOTE ON THE PRONUNCIATION OF RUSSIAN NAMES

No Englishman can hope to pronounce Russian correctly without tuition from a native teacher. The following hints on the pronunciation of the Russian names in this book are, therefore, offered only as rough approximations:

а = ah

e = yeh or eh

ë = yaw or aw

é = eh

I = ee or yee

o = aw (or ă)

u = oo

ia = yah

iia = ee-yah

ie = ee-yeh

ii = ee or yee

iu = you

y{1} = y in pity

g = g in get

s =‘s in sat

v = f at the end of words (elsewhere, as in vat)

kh = ch in loch

zh =‘s in pleasure (French j)

ch = ch in chat

sh = sh in ship

shch = shch in fish cheap

ts = ts in cats

All other consonants as in English.

The apostrophe after a consonant in or at the end of a Russian word denotes the Russian soft sign. It modifies both the preceding consonant and vowel. It sounds rather like a light y (as in you).

As examples, Turgenev is pronounced Toor-gheh-nyef; Sergeev = Ssair-gheh-yef; Il’in = Eelyin; etc.

Translators.

Chapter I — THE COLLECTIVE MAN

1

AN old folk legend, which was peasants current among the Russian long before the Revolution, announces the advent of a time when the nameless beast would succeed to the sovereignty of Russia, a beast which is nameless because it will be composed of the innumerable many. Now it is here, the nameless beast, and has set up its kingdom: the impersonal mass is lord of Russia; it is the most important new phenomenon which Bolshevism has produced, a reality which no one can disregard. Whether, like some monstrous creature of fable, it rolls through the streets of the great cities, now growling happily, now roaring with rage, or whether it lies down comfortably on one of the wide squares to enjoy, like an animal, the sun, life, and its own exuberant strength—the many thousand isolated personalities of which it is composed disappear, and we no longer recognize the simple worker in his workaday blouse, the soldier, the typist, the student, or the navvy. A mighty and powerful organism has absorbed them all into itself, and a single rumbling voice, incomprehensible and terrifying as the roar of the elements, has swallowed up all their individual cries, their joyful or angry words.

Anyone who is able to keep himself outside this mass, a foreigner, or an unorganized individual, perhaps retains the feeling that, here, too, it is human beings with whom he has to deal; but, at the same time, he dimly divines the new entity in this transformation to mass. For the voice that comes from its human throats is strange, and strange, too, the movements of the titanic, many-membered body. The individual feels it as a new and hostile phenomenon; he feels that the monster is sparing him today only, sooner or later, to destroy him with infallible certainty. But those, however, who firmly believe in the Revolution proclaim with ecstatic rapture that this sinister-seeming being is the great achievement of the century, the new man; such will be the aspect of that creature of the future which is called upon to take the place of the individual, and, from now on, to reign in his stead.

Awe-inspiring and in mighty pre-eminence, the mass confronts the individual, for it possesses the multiple strength of organization. It, too, once consisted of many helpless individuals, all seemingly abandoned to their blind anarchical fate; but now, united into mass, they stand forth powerful and feared; the secret of their strength is organization; there lies hidden the new salvation by which man may become master of life.

Only in Russia has the final secret of this one possible salvation been recognized, i.e., that it is not so much the development of the soul that can lead humanity to a true rebirth, but that the end is rather to be reached through the mechanical, external, and purely cumulative combination of all individuals by means of organization.

It is only by such external functions as the millions have in common, their uniform and simultaneous movements, that the many can be united in a higher unity: marching, keeping in step, shouting hurrah in unison, festal singing in chorus, united attacks on the enemy, these are the manifestations of life which are to give birth to the new and superior type of humanity. Everything that divides the many from each other, that fosters the illusion of the individual importance of man, especially the soul, hinders this higher evolution, and must consequently be destroyed. The glorious external man is henceforward to take the place of the inner man, organization is to be substituted for the soul. For only the mechanically organized has reality, strength, and permanence, mechanism alone is reliable; only the collective man, freed from the evil of the soul, mechanically united by external interests with all others, is strong. To him alone belongs the empire of the future; only he will be able to reign therein in the millennium.

But the unorganized individual, full of his personal cares, still sick with the vague mystery of the soul, with that evil handed down from an accursed individualistic past, will be unable, on account of this soul, to find a place in the empire of the future.

Strange must seem this meeting on the brink of time: here, on the one side, is still the individual, who tomorrow perhaps will be only a ghost from an epoch which has been won through, while there, only a few paces away and yet on the farther side of the gulf, stands already that superior new being elected to succeed the individual. The older man may see and grasp how the wonderful creature looks, and wherein it differs from himself and his kind.

But for the moment, at any rate, this mass entity produced by organization may only be recognized in its most primitive manifestations: wherever the collective man is seen, on the streets engaged in a demonstration, at festivals displaying a vociferous vitality, he at once gives the impression of a creature of the primitive world; his gigantic body is awkward, uncouth, and unwieldy; he rolls through the streets stamping with heavy tread; he surges up like an enormous wave, and bellows and roars like a great prehistoric monster. And, like a prehistoric beast, he rejoices in his fearsome elemental howls; he relishes the joy which all living things feel in the animal working of their vital functions. The collective man is at present living in his primeval state, exercising himself in the most primitive motions in action and speech, which were also the first steps in the development of the individual man.

The First of May is his festival, his birthday, as it were, when his naïve character is most clearly in evidence. The Red Square, with the magnificent rows of shops, and the wall of the Kremlin are then richly decked with flowers and pine branches, and hung with many flags and streamers. In the middle of the Square stand toys of various kinds, his birthday presents, gigantic dolls, trains, engines, and boilers made of papier-mâché. Excited and delighted, the collective man stumps about with his thousand legs and shouts Hurrah! hurrah! from his thousand throats. Sometimes he stops suddenly, looks round, considers one by one the enormous figures made of cardboard or cloth stuffed with straw; all at once he notices that the dolls have the faces of foreign statesmen and capitalists, that is to say, of people against whom he has a grudge at the moment. In a mad rage, he hurls himself against them, furiously tears out their stuffing, holds them in his many outstretched hands, and gloats in the intoxication of victory. Often the figures are hanged on a rope; the raging mass sticks a long tongue of red ribbon in their mouths, or burns them ceremoniously. All this is done with the naive cruelty of savages or children, with the primitive joy in smashing toys which is natural to both. Like a child, the collective man, in his games, avenges himself on all his enemies. He amuses himself in this way on the Red Square till late in the evening; if he finally gets tired, the megaphone from the platform above sounds the signal for closing, and the mass man goes off and lies down obediently to sleep in his ten thousand beds.

But he is not always so good-humoured. If anyone attempts to doubt his power, at once he breaks into desperate fury, and there is no longer anything of childish glee about him. The mere sight of him spreads terror and fear. Suddenly, in the course of a few moments, he towers above the sea of houses, like a black, many-headed, gigantic beast, takes up a threatening stand before the Great Theatre, and remains motionless and waiting, ready to spring at any moment. At such times, the thousands of individual entities are nothing but a great giant body crouched in mad rage, a single mighty movement, a single sinister shriek from countless throats.

For it is only in his rage that the collective man shows his strength; a fight is the element in which his real nature is most strongly in evidence. And this is a sure proof of the primitive state in which he still is, for it is exactly the attitude of prehistoric man to the outer world.

It is difficult to draw any conclusions about his later development from, these first manifestations of the collective man. He rejoices in play, in sunshine, in the untrammelled use of his throat and limbs, in gaily decorated squares and rows of houses; he is capable of resistance, terrible in anger, and proves himself in attack. But instinctively we ask ourselves whether this mass man gives any promise of rising above organized prowling and growling, above attacks, and of becoming a superior being, whether he is really destined to contribute new values to history. At present, seeing him still in the first stages of his development, we look in vain for that collective mechanism which, according to Bolshevist affirmations, is gloriously to replace the slaughtered individual soul; we can find very little trace of the constructive, creative capacities which alone can furnish the criterion of its historical vocation.

2

The dissolution and destruction of the soul-encumbered man of the past is not yet completed in Soviet Russia; the collective man is still actually to be seen only at festivals, at demonstrations, on the Red Square, on the streets, or at meetings in the great factory halls; in lonely homes, on the endless Sarmatian steppes, in the recesses of many Russian hearts the persecuted old man still lives on in secret; on the other hand, the visible authority over town and country, over the whole Russian realm, is solely and wholly in the hands of the organized mass. The face and form of the new Russia, the pulse and rhythm of life, are determined not by those who stand aside cherishing in their heart the old man, numerous though they be, but by those who, out on the street, on the Red Square, or in the factory halls, stand organized in one mighty mass.

Everything that happens in Russia today happens for the sake of the mass; every action is subordinated to it. Art, literature, music, and philosophy serve only to extol its impersonal splendour, and, gradually, on all sides everything is being transformed to the new world of the mass man who is the sole ruler.

A fundamental upheaval has thus begun, and there can be no doubt that a new era is coming to birth. For what has been enacted in Russia is in truth more than a revolution in the ordinary meaning of the word: we have to deal with something more important than a mere modification of social and political conditions, or of the social position of a few classes of the population. The revolution has touched the ultimate problems of mankind. With unheard-of boldness, an attempt is being made in Russia to make a correction in the archetype of humanity itself, to wipe out the former type of the lord of creation, that soul-encumbered individual creature, and to replace it by a higher type, by what is believed to be a new and more valuable species of living being, by the collective man, to replace the individual by the dividual.

This ardent striving after the mass man arose in Russia at a moment when Western Europe was coming more and more to recognize the modern scientific theory that mass psychology is nothing but the reassertion of the old instincts of the primeval horde, a return, a regression of the human soul to the conditions of a prehistoric, primitive stage of development, which culture long ago surmounted, but which is still to be found occasionally, even now, among savage races. Le Bon first expressed the view that the individual acquisitions of the person were completely obliterated in the absorption into the mass, that then all the values which the isolated personality had built up for itself disappeared, so that thereafter only the unconscious racial heritage remains, and the heterogeneous is submerged in the homogeneous. The main characteristics of the individual existing in the mass are, therefore, a disappearance of conscious personality, and a predominance of the unconscious; the individual is no more himself, he has rather become an automaton with no will of his own. In Le Bon’s judgment, man, by adherence to a mass, descends in the scale of civilization; although, in his isolation, he was perhaps a cultivated individual, once merged in the mass, he will become a barbarous creature of instinct; he will acquire the spontaneity, the impetuosity, the indiscriminating enthusiasm and heroism of primitive peoples.

The same view of the psychological deterioration of the individual man through absorption in the mass is also put forward by Sigmund Freud in his Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. He, too, sees in the mass the decline of individual initiative, a reciprocal levelling of the most valuable qualities of the individual in favour of the joint mass reaction, and, therefore, a retrogression to primitive psychological conditions.

In contrast to the views of these Western European investigators, the Bolshevists find in the complete absorption of all individuals in a million-headed impersonal mass, the ideal of all development, for which they must strive with all their strength. The collective man means to them a superior category, a higher, more valuable form of organization of existence, the realization of which is worth any sacrifice. The poets of Bolshevism extol with apocalyptic rapture the coming empire of the mass man; thus the folk bard, Dem’ian Bednyi, proclaims in winged verses the conquest of the world by the new being:

"Million-footed: a body. The pavement cracks.

A million mass: one heart, one will, one tread!

Keeping step! Keeping step!

On they march. On they march.

March, march...

Out of the factory quarters, smoke-wreathed,

Out of black dungeons, filthy rat holes,

He came—his fingers bent like pincers,

Burst the thousand year old chains rattling about him—

Came now the new ruler on to the street.

Like flecks of blood

Crimson flags waved above him. Steel-hard fists

Are raised aloft. The bones of the bourgeoisie whine.

But he speaks:

‘All this is mine!

Streets, palaces, canals, the Exchange, the Bank,

Arcades, granaries, gold, materials, food and drink,

Libraries, theatres, museums,

Pleasure grounds, boulevards, gardens and avenues,

Marble and the splendour of bronze,

The poet’s poem and the singer’s song,

Towers, ships, cathedrals, space all around,

All this is mine!’

The houses thunder back. The highway clamours.

The giant stands fast."

But even the sober and professionally unimaginative historians and sociologists of Bolshevism write of this higher collective being in a tone of credulity which is in no way behind the dithyrambic outbursts of the Soviet poets. They, too, see a higher being in the impersonal mass, into which the whole of the still differentiated society of individual personalities is to be transformed, and they, too, are of opinion that the dissolution of all individuals in the mass man must be the ultimate and highest goal of all endeavour.

It is clear that in such a dogmatic negation of every kind of individual separate existence, no exception could be made even for the commanding personality. Its unique importance, humbly recognized by the bourgeois world, has been unmasked as a fiction, and at the same time it had to be proved that the achievements of many individuals, however outstanding they might be, had no claim to personal character, since they too were nothing but a mere product of collective conditions, or, as Bukharin expressed it, as it were a coagulated mass of compressed and tightly interwoven social influences. The rigid fanaticism with which the Bolshevist ideologues defend their theory that the collective-impersonal alone is real and the separate existence of the single individual an illusion, is most clearly evidenced by the fact that the notion received no check even before Lenin, that truly unique personality who, by his very individual achievement, was the chief creator of Bolshevism. When Pokrovski, the great historian of Soviet Russia, wanted to describe for the proletarian masses the significance of Lenin for the revolutionary development of humanity, he explained the Communist conception of the phenomenon Lenin in words which sound utterly fantastic to Western ideas: We Marxians do not see personality as the maker of history, for to us personality is only the instrument with which history works. Perhaps a time will come when these instruments will be artificially constructed, as today we make our electrical accumulators. But we have not yet progressed so far; for the moment, these instruments through which history comes into being, these accumulators of the social process, are still begotten and born in an entirely elemental way.

Once the primacy of collectivism had been so decisively settled, and the creation of the impersonal massman had been decreed to be the highest aim of the Bolshevik revolutionary upheaval, everything that stood in the way of the coming of this new collective man had forthwith to be fought with all weapons. Naturally, it was first the turn of the soul, the root of all particular life, which had to be mercilessly exterminated. The soul-encumbered individual man must no longer be suffered to lead his pernicious separate life unchecked; above all, for the sake of the future, he must be annihilated in his premises. These premises include all particular ideas, all conceptions, of whatever nature, of the importance of individuality, of the possession of spiritual or material assets; of the value of personal achievement and the struggle for an isolated inner development. But, further, all those precious cultural possessions accumulated by the individualism of past centuries, all the acquisitions of personal thought, all the creations of individuals, must be sacrificed without any sentimentality, for they might hinder the arising of the new collective man.

3

This passionate protest against the value and significance of the individual personality, so hard for the Western European to understand, can only be explained by the specific cultural and intellectual history of Russia. The Russian has never been able to perceive the ultimate development of humanity except in a collective form, in a conception of the collectivity, of the people, into which even the Russian idea of God has always been retransformed; God and people have always been identical for the greatest Russian thinkers.

This deification of the whole nation necessarily involved a disregard and finally a complete contempt for all personal values, and, in the end, for individuality itself. Russia has from time immemorial been the country of the impersonal-collective idea. The realization of this ideal was the aspiration of the Church, as well as of all the sects opposed to the Church, and of all the intellectual, cultural, and social currents, however they might differ from each other.

May it not be that this singular exaggeration of the value of the collective as opposed to the individual, peculiar to the Russian, this strange cast of thought, so alien to the West, has ultimately its root in the institution of serfdom, the century-long, complete oppression of great masses of the people, and with the view of the serf people as the impotent possession of a single master?

In his book, Russian History and Philosophy of Religion, which has become famous, Th. G. Masaryk makes the following statements with regard to serfdom in Russia: It is almost impossible today for anyone to form even a faint image of Russian serfdom; even those who know the history of the institution, usually realize only the legal and economic aspect. But we must grasp its moral and social significance in its vital concreteness, the fact that the peasant was in bondage, body and soul, that the master could sell his serfs, that, up to the year 1833, the family of a serf could, at the master’s pleasure, be broken up by the sale of one of its members as surely as it could be broken up by death....The serf was currency in barter; the landowner staked his ‘souls’ at cards; he could make a present of them to his mistresses....The picture of serfdom painted by the best writers in their memoirs is a terrible one; anyone who reads carefully the older Russian literature will discover everywhere this moral and social background.

Only a people who had for so long been under the yoke of despotic lords could find its highest ideal in a complete renunciation of the individual will; Russia, after all, never took a real and vital part in the great European intellectual development, which began with the decay of the Middle Ages, and which, by way of the newly discovered classical antiquity, and especially Platonism, rediscovered the idealistic methods of the exact sciences, with the art and politics intimately connected with them, and thus created an entirely new world, and above all a new conception of the autonomous personality. All that today we can call modern in the true sense of the word may be traced back to this historical connection.

Russia, however, which, in the school of Byzantium, went other ways, and, even in the geographical sense, gave Europe a wide berth, remained completely alien to all this. The Russian never knew that evolution from the stuffy narrowness of the Middle Ages to a free universal humanity, which Europe experienced. It was not only the mass of serfs who never succeeded in attaining to a free development of their personality: serfdom in the same way corrupted the masters too. Masaryk makes some observations also on this point, based on Prince Kropotkin’s memoirs:

Kropotkin in his memoirs draws a poignant picture of the moral effects of serfdom on the Russian aristocracy. In fact, with every form and degree of slavery, we must consider not only the effect on the slaves, but also on the slave-owners. Every form of slavery is everywhere and always a double and two-fold thing—as the master, so is the slave, as the slave, so is the master. Both are slave souls, the slave and his master. Therein lies the curse of slavery—a hierarchy of slaves, from the Tsar down to the last village pasha, men who will not and cannot work because they are free to use their fellow men as machines.

Even later, the man of the steppes could never get rid of the stamp of everlasting bondage, oppression, and suffering, and when at last in the ‘sixties he attempted to free himself from the typical Russian yoke, he could not pass beyond the nihilistic protest of the individual. The Russian recognized personality only in such distortions as Dostoevski described in his Underworldlings, rotten with solipsism and impotent, or again in the groping efforts which were to be noticed in Russian society before the Revolution. Maxim Gorki has given an excellent description of that pitiful sham existence, that farce of individuality. But only in this way can it be explained how even so important a thinker as he could arrive at the strange view that the individual has, in general, no right to existence: all the value of life must be credited solely and exclusively to the collectivity, and the significance of personal achievement is altogether trifling, since the collectivity alone is the power which creates all material values, and at the same time the source of everything spiritual.

Since Gorki, too, recognizes personality only as a part of the true reality as represented by the mass, and allows it no rights outside this relation, he sees in the development which personality had taken in the Russian middle classes, the public proof of their nullity and the cause of their well-earned overthrow. In his essay on The Destruction of Personality, Gorki has described, in impressive words, this gradual decay of individuality, which made itself felt even before the Revolution. At the same time, thus early he proclaims that new vital power which is destined to replace personality, the collective man, only to be realized later by Bolshevism.

In the light of after events in Russia, it is doubly interesting to note how Gorki, even then, foresaw the utter decay of personality: Contemporary society, he says in the essay already quoted, "already feels the earth trembling beneath its feet. This is clearly to be perceived in their whole mode of thought, and makes itself most plainly felt in the general fear of the coming days.

The soul of men is a desert; they are all shudderingly afraid that next morning may throw up something unknown and hostile in this desert, and that the over-ripe social question will rise up in their soul like a sphinx. Because man is aware that necessity fatefully awaits him, and that he is no match for it, he tries to hide from it in the deepest darkness.

Gorki goes on to describe how the little rickety ego, shaking with fear, spiritually impoverished, and bewildered in the darkness of contradictions, is ludicrously trying to find a quiet corner to hide in. But while personality is writhing in its death agony, the great new community is already taking shape. Step by step this power is beginning to be conscious of itself, to recognize that it alone is destined to create life anew, as the great joint soul of the universe. In the eyes of the individualists, this phenomenon seems like a cloud on the horizon, they shrink from it as from physical death, for this new force means social extinction for them. Each of them is proud of his own personality, as if this deserved special regard; but democracy, which seeks to renew the life of man, will pay no attention to these aristocrats of the intellect. Some of the individualists already grasp the great importance of what is to come, and are attempting to sneak into the socialist ranks as legislators, prophets, or commanders. But the people must and will recognize that the readiness of the bourgeoisie to go with them is only a concealed attempt to maintain individual personality.

This prophecy made by Maxim Gorki long before the Revolution, was later to be fulfilled by Bolshevism, the destruction of all personal values and the advent