Marian Zdziechowski

Two revolutions

Since its outbreak, the Russian Revolution has been compared with the French Revolution. The similarities were evident. In both Russia and France, ruthless and sophisticated terror were chosen as a means to achieve the goal and then to consolidate the new state of affairs. In both Russia and France, the victory of the revolution not only did not bring prosperity to the masses, which it supposedly aimed to defend, in France under the slogan of equality, that is, equaling the masses with the privileged strata, and in Russia under the slogan of the dictatorship of the masses. In both countries the masses found themselves in even more abject misery than under the old regime.

But these similarities are superficial, while the differences run much deeper. Right at the start, one can see a striking detail: the terror in France lasted less than two years, while in Russia it has already continued for sixteen. Meanwhile, a new generation has emerged. Totally separated from Western influences, it knows nothing about Europe’s history or culture, or about the foundations of all culture such as religion, family, and ownership. Instead, it has a carefully instilled conviction that all of these things are “bourgeois” (which in the Soviet jargon means “rotten”) and that the Bolsheviks will be the ones to finally create a new order, a new world.

Let us suppose that the dream of the Russian émigré community and all honest people in the world comes true and that the Soviets are defeated and wiped out and that a new government emerges and sincerely intends to repair everything that the revolution destroyed or damaged. Will this government be strong enough to overcome the resistance, even if only passive, of this new and morally savage generation brought up in the haughty contempt for all the goods that we call culture? Who will be able to harness these bands of devils, seething with hatred for spiritual things and God, whom Lenin called “the great landowner who owns all people on Earth” and a tyrant venerated “through sanctification of people’s basest, slavish instincts, through man’s own debasement”1 — who will be able to yoke these bands to a spiritual culture alien and repugnant to them?

The long-livedness of this revolution is not an accident that can be disregarded. We say that this is because it did not face the obstacles which the coalitions of European states and bloody uprisings in the west of France posed to the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution quickly suppressed the resistance of the tsarist army, exhausted by the four-year war, and the European states had supported the Revolution from the beginning, of course secretly and pretending to be completely neutral. This reminds me of the words of President Masaryk,2 who said that he did not care about the events in Russia or what should be done about Russia, because “the Russians would settle it among themselves.” Were those words uttered by the great philosopher, who used to emphasize his ethicality, not hypocritical? Can we regard the murder perpetrated on the great nation as a spectacle which we can watch indifferently from our gallery? In this case, is this strict neutrality, this non-interference in the affairs of others, not an interference for the benefit of the stronger?

Last but not least — and this is the most important thing and here lies the fundamental and profound difference between Bolshevism and the French Revolution — unlike the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution set itself a real goal, that is a reasonable and attainable one. In France, the absolute power was in the hands of the king, who based on the nobility and the higher-rank clergy, and the Revolution was the work of the bourgeoisie, which wanted to acquire the same privileges so as to then use its numerical superiority to push down those strata and rule France. Among the revolutionaries there were people with communist sympathies but they constituted a small minority. So once the goal was reached, the terror naturally had to eventually give way to a legal order.

By contrast, the Russian Revolution intended to implement integral socialism on the ruins of the ultimately destroyed capitalist system. Capitalism rests on proprietorship, and a sense of ownership lies in human nature — even little children argue about what is whose. What lies in human nature and what results from it can be destroyed through terror, which is what happened in Russia, but let us ask whether this violated nature will not demand its rights and reclaim them. This is why I call the Russian Revolution’s goal unrealistic.

No one can say that the capitalist system is an ideal one. It does lead to consequences that infringe on and violate proprietorship. Small capital is unable to compete with larger capital. One by one, smaller enterprises go bankrupt, while big capital becomes concentrated in the hands of fewer and increasingly powerful billionaires. Even the state yields to their potency because it has to borrow money for its own purposes — be they investment, military or any other ones. The state has to borrow money and the more it owes, the more taxes it imposes on its population to be able to pay interest to its creditors. One would expect a mortal combat between big capital (that is plutocracy) and socialism. This is not the case, however, because socialism becomes a tool for big capital.

Our brilliant writer and thinker, Count Wojciech Dzieduszycki, once depicted big capital as the mythical leviathan.3 “The leviathan of today,” he said, “is the powerful billionaire who produces nothing himself but profits from everything that exists in the whole world. He is the general owner of other people’s property and the employer even of those who call themselves employers and whom he neither knows nor needs to care about.” Everything that happens in the world, from major events like revolutions to minor events like political assassinations, occurs in accordance with his will and by his order. He supports the revolutionary press because revolutions are good business for him. A state after a revolution is a ruined and impoverished state. In order to lift itself from indigence and chaos, it must borrow and at high interest at that. And who will extend a loan to it? Only the leviathan, and this makes him an overlord in the state, feared by kings and presidents. Will there be anybody intelligent enough to fathom the danger which plutocracy poses to the state? The leviathan becomes anxious but he can remedy that, and “in order to divert attention from his power and luxuries he commands that abuse be hurled in newspapers and during rallies at small capital, chiefly the landed nobility, which is to be called feudal oppressors of the people and fabulously privileged tycoons. The foolish public believes this and even a most indebted landowner can temporarily believe in his [having control of the] state and his feudal power.”

Unfortunately, Dzieduszycki lamented, this feudal lord, against whom democratic agitators of all hues are so vehemently instigating, “walks in high boots all day long out in the fields; during his sleepless nights worries about where to get the money for taxes and, first and foremost, for bank loan installments, and also about how to pay for his children’s upbringing. He refuses everything to himself, calling the preservation of his inherited property a patriotic duty. And despite all this he is an object of envy of the local population” and is hailed an exploiter and “bloodsucker.” Oh, how much more applicable are these words to our times! Meanwhile, the billionaire who eats up all the profits from his indebted landed estate lives in luxury in an urban palace or a villa somewhere on the Mediterranean; organizes lunches, hunts, and balls; keeps race horses; and bathes his mistress in champagne.”

I think that if Dzieduszycki had lived to the present, he would have retouched his depiction slightly. The leviathan undoubtedly did contribute to the start of the revolution in Russia but he did not benefit from it financially because he failed to foresee the debtor’s insolvency.

The Russian Revolution abolished private ownership, on which rests the capitalist system and replaced it with a new form of capitalism by making the state the owner of everything there is. That revived the thing that had been a disgrace to humanity and seemed to be gone forever — serfdom. Bolshevism began with destroying the wealthy and then targeted peasants. As proprietorship is considered lawlessness, then in the Bolshevik terminology, the peasant who still owns something or has some savings is a criminal and a kuhlak. He is deprived of his property and if he resists, he is killed or sentenced to hard labor. In the kolkhozes everything happens at the sound of a bell or drum. There is a detailed schedule; every minute of work is counted, every short break for rest is added up too, and food is eaten from a common cauldron. And this collective eating from the same cauldron (is it not ironic?), these few spoonfuls of groats are the peasant’s only compensation for having been deprived of freedom. Under the capitalist system, poverty cannot be eliminated; only its symptoms can be mitigated through private charity, social welfare, and state intervention. And if universal communism or, more precisely, state capitalism, which the Soviets are striving for, is implemented, then everyone will be provided with minimum subsistence, namely those couple of spoonfuls of groats and a piece of dry bread, nothing more or less, but will live a life of a slave or prisoner. Do not all prisoners and slaves yearn for freedom?

According to G. Le Bon,4 a revolution wins when mystical elements prevails in it, when it becomes a religion, generating a fanatic faith if not in the living God or gods, then in inanimate formulas or words.5 The French Revolution was driven by a fanatic faith in reason, which was to lead humanity out of the madness in which it had lived. The leaders of the Russian revolution are more like vivisectionists who perform their horrible experiments on the nation’s living organism. To the masses they gave the religion of the machine, for the machine is the highest expression of progress and a symbol of future happy humanity. Over twenty years ago, Ferrero argued that “in the century when everything can be rejected — God, homeland, and family — one thing cannot be questioned: the benefits of technological progress.”6 Machines will become increasingly perfect. They will produce more and more, faster and faster, needing less and less time and effort, and so they will produce increasingly flimsy, shoddy things. No civilization will be able to stop their fury, and they will flood the world with trash — “quality will fall under the blows cast by quantity.” The Italian historian and thinker found that particularly painful. Moreover, since machines increase production for which in the end there is no demand, artificial needs have to be invented. “The machine demands the transformation of man into an insatiable animal, and this is the motive for colonial wars, for imposing this civilization which progresses thanks to machines on the nations which want one thing only, namely to live in peace.”

But writing this 20 years ago, Ferrero did not reflect on the fact that artificial needs have their limits, that our globe is not boundless either, and that there may come a time when due to the vast volume of production, there will be no outlet for the products. This moment has now come.

Bolshevism is not thinking about this. It has undertaken to make man resemble a machine. One should visit Bolshevik Russia and get to know her as well as probe into, experience, as Fulop Miller put it, the joyless joys of the Bolshevik7 in order to fathom the full horror of the fantastically savage thought that emerged there, the thought of transforming humanity into one giant automaton, into a disgusting monster that has thousands of legs and arms and which was named the “collective man.” The Bolshevik artist Krynskiy1 depicted this collective man as an enormous machine, made up of tiny blocks, each shaped like a human. In his other drawing we see the interior of a temple where a machine hangs over the altar, under the dome, surrounded by those human-shaped blocks which stand there as if in pious concentration — all of them looking alike, expressionless, lifeless, and devoid of any individuality. For the sake of consistency, Bolshevism should have erased names and replaced them with numbers but can it obliterate individuality in the human being to such an extent that man number 125 will not differ from his neighbor number 124? And can one suppose that a living, sentient, and thinking being would want to be a mindless automaton, a cogwheel in a machine or an appendage to it?

To want something like this, one must first renounce the religious sentiment, the essence of which was so aptly defined by St. Augustine: “Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee” (Irrequietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in Te). We associate the idea of God with those finest and noblest feelings that overcome us at the finest and noblest moments of our life. Man would like to break the bounds of worldly existence and set himself free of the small and trivial things, from what passes and disappears. His heart yearns for what does not pass and does not disappear! We look with delight at the bird, gliding across the sky. It symbolizes the distant and infinite happiness for which we long, while the amphibian crawling on the ground disgusts us.

This upward drive is innate to man. He is a cripple who does not feel it. Bolshevism has undertaken to cripple man. It would seem that the Bolshevik concept of the mechanized world where living people would become soulless machines should evoke feelings of revulsion. Unfortunately — no! It pains me to say that it has some charm that attracts the modern man. Merezhkovsky9 describes this frame of mind of the modern man as a will or desire to rid himself of his own self (vola k bezlichnosti). According to him, this is how today one can sum up what we want.

To not be oneself, but instead to be in God, to immerse oneself in the eternal, absolute beauty of God, that is, to rise above nature by nature — this constitutes the deepest content of religion. Not to exist, to stop being oneself and to become a cogwheel turning in a machine, like a clock, at a specific time for a specified time — this is the most hideous caricature of religion imaginable.

It is anti-religion that is pushing man from the heights of humanity into the abyss of debasement. Into this abyss fell Soviet Russia and it is followed by Europe, which is falling with the increasing speed of a thrown stone. “Such a thing the world has not seen,” rightly wrote Dr Jan Bobrzynski,2 “such widespread blindness, such a suicidal policy resulting from this blindness.”8 It is no wonder that it did occur to Merezhkovsky that perhaps the world had gone mad at a mystical suggestion from dark powers.

No, maybe it was Merezhkovsky who went crazy. Or maybe I have gone mad, for how can we — writers, people from the world of dreams or ideals — oppose political realists, professional politicians, and leaders of states? Is it not impudent arrogance to regard as foolishness, as a humiliating and suicidal folly those non-aggression pacts which they manage to beg from the Bolsheviks, triumphantly proclaiming to the world that these pacts are achievements, masterpieces of the diplomatic art, which are to bring people certain peace and many years of prosperity!

I sometimes harbored similar doubts. Once, after a conversation with a politician where I coyly defended my opinion, I returned home and resumed reading a book written by the man on whom the whole world is no looking, and whose words and actions are certainly worrying us — Poles. And there I came across the following words on the issue of Bolshevism: “You do not conclude a pact with a partner who you know wants to destroy you and considers that his only interest.”

Who wrote those words? The leader of German nationalism in its most glaring form, Adolf Hitler.3 He argues in this book that the intention to restore the 1914 borders is ein politischer Unsinn [a political nonsense], for Germany must stretch much further east and therefore should reject any alliance with the Soviets: “Warring in alliance with them would trigger a disastrous coalition of the rest of the world against us. The end of this war would be the end of Germany... You invoke Bismarck, but the point is not what Bismarck did then, but what he would do today. His political reason would not allow him to seek an alliance with a state doomed to fall.”9

Footnotes

1 Vladimir Krinskiy (1880‒1971) — Russian artist and architect.

2 Jan Bobrzyński (1882‒1951) — Polish journalist and conservative politician, son of Michał Bobrzyński. Publisher of conservative periodicals, such as Dzień Polski and Nasza Przyszłość. In 1926, became Secretary General of the National Labor Party. Advocated cooperation with the Sanation camp, provided that the conservatives remained autonomous. When he concluded that the conservative circles which he had been associated with became too close to the ruling camp, he started an ideological and political dispute with them, accusing them of opportunism and renouncing a number of conservative principles. Founded the Association of Polish State Thought (1934). After the war, due to his anti-communist attitude, he could not hope for resuming his public activity. Penned, among others, Sprzeczności idei demokratycznej [the contradictions of the democratic idea] (1929), Bolszewicka prawda [the truth about Bolshevism] (1936), Na drodze walki. Z dziejów odrodzenia myśli konserwatywnej w Polsce [By way of combat. History of conservative thought in Poland] (1928).