III. Economic and Social Position: Leaders

Hitherto we have been considering the main bodies of the revolutionists, and have found that on the whole they by no means represent the dregs of society, even in the great proletarian uprising, and that they commonly include members of almost every social and economic group in a given society, except possibly the very top of the social pyramid. And yet the Essexes, Washingtons, and Lafayettes are very close to the top. Even in Russia, Brusilov, a distinguished Czarist general, lived to serve the Soviet government in the 1920 drive on Warsaw.

Let us now see what we can make of the leaders, judging them first by the comparatively objective standards of their social origins and economic status. With the Jacobins the present writer was able to make some study of the purely local leaders, the men who normally don’t get into history. From the careers of dozens of these subalterns of revolution, a conclusion seemed clear: “the leaders are substantially of the same social standing as the rank and file. Possibly there are, among the leaders during the Terror, more men who seem definitely, in 1789, failures, or at least at odds with their environment. Yet the proportion of these village Marats is not striking.”

As for the national leaders in the French revolution, they are, judged by these standards, a varied lot. In the years 1789-92 they include noblemen like the King’s cousin, the Duke of Orléans, Mirabeau, the Lameths, Lafayette; lawyers in vast numbers, from well-known Parisian lawyers like Camus to obscure but thoroughly respectable provincial lawyers like young Robespierre from Arras (who had once written his name de Robespierre), or rising barristers like Danton, come to Paris from a peasant background in Champagne; men of science like the astronomer Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, and the mathematician Monge; and, nursed by the new power of the press, journalists like Marat and Desmoulins, publicists like Brissot, provincial bourgeois of Chartres, and Condorcet, a marquis and a philosophe. After 1792, extremely few new leaders came to the top. The men who ran France in 1793-94 were, perhaps, somewhat less refined or distinguished than the hopeful intellectuals of Mme. Roland’s circle; and they would have seemed very barbarous at Versailles in 1788. They were not, however, of very different social origins from the men who really ran the old France—the literate bourgeoisie from which were ultimately recruited the bureaucracy.

Of the striking respectability and excellent social standing of the men who signed our Declaration of Independence most Americans are fully aware. Of its fifty-six signers thirty-three held college degrees and only about four had little or no formal education. There were five doctors, eleven merchants, four farmers, twenty-two lawyers, three ministers. Twelve were sons of ministers. Nearly all were affluent. Sam Adams, who seems among the more disreputable of our leaders, came from a merchant family of some means, and graduated from Harvard in 1740, where he was listed fifth out of twenty-two in those mysterious lists which before Professor S. E. Morison’s researches we all thought directly measured social standing. Even the Tories, though they flung words like “rabble” about very freely, could consistently reproach the revolutionary leaders with nothing worse in this respect than being amateurs in the art of governing. “From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attorneys they are become statesmen and legislators.... Almost every individual of the governing party in America fills at present, in his own fancy, a station not only superior to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill,” writes a conservative, or moderate, in the Middlesex Journal for April 6, 1776.

We need not go into the social origins of the leaders of the moderates in the English revolution. They are clearly among the highest in the land. The immoderates present an interesting spectacle, a mixture of gentlemen of good breeding, of self-educated careerists and of humble men inspired by a fury as yet divine, as yet without benefit of psychoanalysis. Cromwell himself, of course, was an East Anglian country gentleman, whose family tree ramified into a good deal of the new wealth originating in Tudor confiscations. Ireton, who became his son-in-law, was of similar antecedents, as were many other Independent leaders in old and new England. Ludlow the regicide was a son of Sir Henry Ludlow of Wiltshire, and went to Trinity, Cambridge. Even John Lilburne the Leveller is described as “of good family” dating back to the fourteenth century, and seems to have been typical of the lesser gentry whose sons not infrequently passed over into trade. We know little of the social origins of such men as Winstanley the Digger or Edward Sexby, a soldier of Cromwell’s regiment who appears later as a kind of international agent of republicanism. Robert Everard, with Winstanley a leader of the curious communistic group known as the Diggers, was a captain in the army and is described as a “gentleman of liberal education.” John Rogers the Millenarian was the son of an Anglican clergyman and a Royalist.

Russia presents a case more nearly parallel to our other countries in respect to the social origins of the leaders of her revolution than might at first sight seem likely in a proletarian revolution. Perhaps the moderates in Russia held power so briefly and so uncomfortably that they hardly count. Kadets like Miliukov, a historian of good family, Tereschenko, a Kiev sugar millionaire, the Octobrist Guchkov, a wealthy Moscow merchant, and poor old Prince Lvov remind us of the rich Puritan lords and merchants of the English revolution, the well-born Feuillants of the French revolution. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary leaders were mostly intellectuals, petty officials, trade union and co-operative leaders; some of their most eloquent orators came from Georgia, “the Gironde of the Russian revolution.” Kerensky was a radical lawyer of provincial bureaucratic stock from the little Volga town of Simbirsk, now called Ulianovsk, in memory of a greater than Kerensky who also hailed from Simbirsk. As a matter of fact, V. I. Ulianov, better known by his revolutionary name of Lenin, came from exactly the same social class as Kerensky. His father was an inspector of schools at Simbirsk, a position of much more social standing in bureaucratic Czarist Russia than it would seem to us to be—very definitely in the superior bourgeoisie.

The other Bolshevik leaders are a varied lot: intellectual Jews like Trotsky (born Bronstein) and Kamenev (born Rosenfeld), both educated men, by no means typical Ghetto Jews; Felix Dzerzhinsky, of noble Polish-Lithuanian stock; Sverdlov, by training a chemist; Kalinin, whom one might call a professional peasant; Stalin (born Djugashvili), of Georgian peasant-artisan stock, destined by his mother for the priesthood, and actually for some time a student in a seminary; Chicherin, of stock sufficiently aristocratic to hold himself at least as well-born as Lord Curzon; Antonov-Ovseënko, Red Army leader with the fine bourgeois inheritance of a hyphenated name. The negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, however, afford a neat synopsis of Bolshevik leadership and proof of its non-proletarian character. When the first Russian delegation was sent to that town to meet the Germans it included as samples of the proletarian achievements of the revolution one specimen each of sailor, worker, and peasant. The peasant is said, no doubt by malicious enemies of the working class, to have distinguished himself chiefly by his interest in the liquor supply. When, however, the negotiations really got going after a recess, the Russians dropped their ornamental sailor, worker, and peasant, and were represented by men of course not the social equals of the high-born Germans opposite them, but, one suspects, their cultural superiors—Joffe, Kamenev, Pokrovsky, Karakhan—and by a somewhat neurotic lady-Bolshevik, Mme. Bitzenko, who had won her spurs by shooting a Czarist official in the bad old days. But, of course, even orthodox Marxism admits that the proletariat cannot lift itself by its own bootstraps, and that its leaders must therefore come from classes sufficiently privileged to have had an education fitting them to interpret the subtleties of Marxist theology.

Finally, the inexperience, the “newness,” of the revolutionary leaders has generally been exaggerated in our textbooks. They had, especially in Russia, a long training in the direction of dissenting and persecuted little societies, the revolutionary groups. And revolutionists as a group are so much like any other human beings that to learn the art of leading them is to have gone a long way in political apprenticeship. Even in France, the members of the National Assembly were not as politically innocent as they are supposed to have been. Many had had business experience, or had been diplomatists, or civil servants, or had taken part in local politics in provinces which had their own estates. All of them were used to the politics of pressure groups. These revolutionary leaders are mostly far from academic, unworldly, pure theorists; they do not step suddenly from the cloister to the council hall. Their training may have subtly unfitted them for leading a stable society; but that is another, and at present insoluble, problem. They are certainly fitted for leadership in an unstable society.

We have, then, found that both rank and file and leaders of active revolutionary groups cannot be catalogued neatly as coming from any one social or economic group. They are not even strikingly, precociously, young. Their leaders are usually in middle age, the thirties and forties, and thus younger than most of the politically prominent in stable societies, which naturally incline to the rule of the old. But the St. Justs and the Bonapartes, the boys in their twenties, are the exception, not the rule. The leadership of the Russian revolution which, with the distortion that comes from contemporaneousness, we are likely to regard as the most “radical,” was on the average the oldest in years of all our revolutions. The revolutionists tend to represent a fairly complete cross-section of their communities, with a sprinkling of the very highest ranks of their societies—men like Lafayette, for instance, whom Mr. Lothrop Stoddard calls “misguided superiors”—and, as far as the active ruling groups go, extremely few of the submerged, downtrodden, lowest ranks. This is as true of the Bolsheviks as of the Puritans and the Jacobins. Bums, hoboes, the mob, the rabble, the riffraff, may be recruited to do the street-fighting and the manor-burning of revolutions, but they emphatically do not make, do not run, revolutions—not even proletarian revolutions.