III. Fitness of the Extremists

The transition from opposition to power is not a sudden one for the extremists. The whole point about the dvoevlastie, the dual sovereignty, is that it is not a struggle between government and opposition, between ins and outs, but between two governments within the same state. Under the old regime perhaps no more than a pressure group, the revolutionists’ organization gradually takes over, in the confusion of the first stages of actual revolution, governmental powers which are never thereafter wholly subordinated to the provisional government, the almost legal heir of the old regime. The process is especially clear in Russia, though it is substantially uniform in all our revolutions.

Practically all the soviets, even in the market towns, did administrative work from the very beginning. Trotsky, here in his role of historian, gives some good succinct examples: “The soviet in Saratov was compelled to interfere in economic conflicts, to arrest manufacturers, confiscate the tramway belonging to Belgians, introduce workers’ control, and organize production in the abandoned factories.... In the Urals the soviets frequently instituted courts of justice for the trial of citizens, created their own militia in several factories, paying for its equipment out of the factory cash-box, organized a workers’ inspection which assembled raw materials and fuel for the factories, superintended the sale of manufactured goods and established a wage-scale. In certain districts of the Urals, the soviets took the land from the landlords and put it under social cultivation.” Obviously, in parts of Russia the slogan “All power to the Soviets” had become a bit superfluous even before the October revolution.

In France the “Societies of Friends of the Constitution,” at their formation in 1789 hardly more than pressure groups, or possibly French variants of the Yankee caucus, had by June 2, 1793, taken over a good many functions normally carried out by governmental bodies. When the “constituted authorities,” as the Jacobins respectfully called governing councils and legislatures, failed to do what the Jacobins wanted, the Jacobins went ahead and did it themselves. Notably the whole repressive legislation on the non-juring (Catholic) clergy was anticipated in practice by the Jacobin clubs in the provinces. The clubs were organized like parliamentary bodies, with elaborate rules on debating, with committees, officers, minutes, and indeed all the apparatus of a proper legislature. Sometimes a club would overawe or persuade municipal or departmental officers into an approved Jacobin policy; sometimes, failing in this, a club would almost openly pass laws and decrees. Those of the members who protested against this shocking interference with authorities chosen by popular election—and many did protest on just such grounds—were thereby ticketed as moderates, and were lucky if they avoided the guillotine later.

That the men who made the American revolution were by no means unexercised in the art of actual governing has long been a commonplace of proud Anglo-Saxon writers on both sides of the Atlantic. What we must note here is that that preparation had by no means been wholly of the conventional legal sort. Not only in town meeting and colonial legislatures, but in caucuses, committees, and congresses that bear a close parallel with soviets and Jacobin clubs, the American radicals were schooled to take over the government from the agents of the Crown. We shall see in the next chapter that they did not hesitate to use terroristic means to preserve, as they had used to attain, that power.

In England the situation is complicated by the fact that though the illegal organization headed up in the New Model Army, the various Independent congregations were also in their way agents of the extremists in their drive to power. The army itself, of course, began very soon after Naseby to interfere in politics in a way no conventional army does; and the first expulsion of Presbyterians from Parliament was initiated and carried through by army resolutions and an army committee. But the Independents, and especially the Independent clergy, had much earlier taken a hand in matters very terrestrial indeed. As Professor Grierson has said, “It is not what Laud did that Baxter [a Puritan divine] seems to complain of, so much as what he would not allow them, the parish pastors, to do, viz., to exercise a moral discipline co-extensive with the parish.” And by a moral discipline a Puritan meant something co-extensive with the whole of human life.

The extremists are not, then, politically innocent or inexperienced; they have had a long experience of oppression, and a briefer, but very intensive, training in actual government before they come to full power. To call either leaders or rank and file inexperienced, “pure theorists,” and “metaphysicians,” as has long been the habit especially among political writers in English, is misleading. Neither their aims nor their methods are those that good Victorians like Bagehot or Maine could approve or sympathize with. They are certainly heaven-storming idealists, scornful of compromise. But they are not academic theorists totally unadapted to action. On the contrary, they are admirably adapted, almost in the sense a biologist gives to adaptation, to the special, the unique environment of the crisis. That is why they succeed.

The actual overthrow of the moderates is usually a very neat job, an excellent example of the skill of the revolutionary leaders and the close adaptation of the revolutionary organizations to their functions. It is, as we have seen, by no means a great popular uprising. The crowds whose confused milling about makes an exact account of the taking of the Bastille or the February revolution in Petrograd impossible for the historian, do not interfere with the professional dispatch with which Pride’s Purge, the purge of the Girondins, and the October revolution were put through. In France the extremists reached power in two of these coups d’état. The first, the overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792, was achieved through an elaborate but never confused collaboration of various organs of the illegal government—Jacobin and other political clubs, the fédérés, local militia from all over France assembled in Paris to celebrate the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, and the ward organizations out of which the revolutionary Parisian Commune was made. Almost the same elements were integrated ten months later for the easier task of bullying the Convention into giving up the Girondins. Danton, Marat, possibly Robespierre, and certainly a number of less famous but very skilled secondary leaders formed a general staff which engineered both of these coups.

The October revolution was elaborately prepared, and has been clearly described in Trotsky’s own History of the Russian Revolution. We need not here go into details of this preparation. But a quotation from Trotsky will show how the details were taken care of: “The typographical workers, through their union, called to the attention of the Committee [the Military-Revolution Committee in Petrograd, the general staff of the October revolution] an increase in Black Hundred leaflets and brochures. It was decided that in all suspicious cases the printers’ union should come for instructions to the Military-Revolution Committee. This control was the most effective of all possible forms of control over the printed agitation of the counter-revolution.” Naturally; printed agitation has to have printers as well as legal freedom of the press. In a dozen such ways the moderates were hamstrung in the last few days before the Bolshevik insurrection. There was no nonsense about a general strike; there was simply a co-ordinated series of seizures of centers of power, press, post and telegraph, banks, and ministries.

The dramatic seizure of Charles I by Cornet Joyce on June 3, 1647, at Holmby House is perhaps the first assumption of sovereign power by the New Model. When Charles asked Joyce whence he had his commission to remove him, Joyce is said to have replied, pointing to his soldiers drawn up on the lawn, “There is my commission.” The reply will serve in all our revolutions. Once the extremists are in power, there is no more finicky regard for the liberties of the individual or for the forms of legality. The extremists, after clamoring for liberty and toleration while they were in opposition, turn very authoritarian when they reach power. There is no need for us to sigh over this, or grow indignant, or talk of hypocrisy. We are attempting to discern uniformities in the behavior of men during certain revolutions in specific social systems, and this seems to be one of the uniformities.

“It was but a bare six months,” writes Gardiner, “since the Independent leaders [Cromwell and Vane] who now permitted some hundreds of sufferers to be excluded for conscience’s sake from the University of Oxford, had been striving to lay the foundations of a broad system of toleration in The Heads of the Proposals and had even taken into consideration a scheme for extending that toleration to the Roman Catholic priesthood itself.” Later under the Rump a strict censorship of the press was instituted, and the various canons and tastes of Puritanism enforced as far as possible by government policy. Similarly in France and Russia the new government clamped down at once on its enemies and began to build up the machinery of the coming Terror. Where, as in France and Russia, the army had lost its discipline under active attempts to introduce Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, discipline was reintroduced with a good deal of firmness. Mr. Chamberlin describes the Russian situation: “The Bolshevik military authorities now began to talk about the harmful and disruptive influence of army committees very much as Kornilov, Denikin, and the old army officers had spoken in 1917; and strict obedience to the orders of the officers gradually became embedded in the discipline of the Red Army.”

The Heads of Proposals and The Agreement of the People, radical platforms adopted by the army under Leveller influence, had proposed something very close to what came to be conventional nineteenth-century democracy—equal electoral districts, frequent parliaments, specific limitations on the executive power, even universal manhood suffrage. Cromwell seems never to have been in any sense a doctrinaire rebel, and indeed probably had many of the sentiments about authority and tradition one would expect from a country gentleman. If he suffered at all in mind about the situation, it was probably because the good old parliamentary institutions could not be restored. Certainly the last thing that could be done was to hold an open and free election on any conceivable franchise. The so-called Parliament of Saints which met in 1653 after the dissolution of the Rump was hardly more than a council sent up from trustworthy Independent groups and chosen by caucus methods.

Similarly in France, the victors of June 2nd did not dare go to the people. As a gesture they promulgated the so-called Constitution of 1793, based on universal suffrage, bill of rights, and the rest of the paraphernalia of democracy, but they took good care to go no further than printing it. It was never put into effect.

The Bolsheviks had for months attacked the Provisional government for not calling a constituent assembly. Such an assembly was finally chosen by universal suffrage just before the Bolshevik coup. In it the Bolsheviks were in a minority. Lenin dissolved this constituent assembly in January, 1918, with a light heart, but many of his followers, in spite of their Marxist training, were really hurt by such a defiance of democratic sentiments and traditions. Many good Jacobins were also worried by the fact of their new dictatorship.

Theory came to provide a salve to wounded consciences. The theory of revolutionary dictatorship is very nearly identical in all three of our revolutions. Liberty for everyone, liberty full, free, and fair, is of course the ultimate goal. But such liberty at present would mean that men corrupted by the bad old ways would be able to realize their wicked plans, restore the bad old institutions, and frustrate the good men. On reflection, the extremist continues, it is clear that we must distinguish between liberty for those who deserve it, and liberty for those who don’t, which latter is, of course, false liberty, pseudo-liberty, license or anarchy. God had given liberty to the Saints—true liberty, which is obedience to Him—but he clearly did not give liberty to sinners. You repress papists as you would repress devils. To argue that such sinners ought to be left alone would have seemed to seventeenth-century English Puritans as absurd as it would to us to suggest that yellow-fever-bearing mosquitoes be left alone. Robespierre himself phrased it with classic neatness: the revolutionary government, he said, was the despotism of liberty against tyranny. For Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary transitional stage, in which the last vestiges of capitalistic methods and capitalistic mentality are wiped out. Ruthless use of force will be necessary in this period—unfortunately of indeterminate length. Once a capitalist, always a capitalist, apparently. But when men are finally brothers, then the freedom of the classless society will finally begin.

Solaced by the knowledge that they are serving Liberty—in the high, true sense of the word—by a rigorous application of what to the unbeliever seems tyranny, the extremists go ahead to consolidate their power through institutions. Before we attempt a brief, generalized description of these institutions, we may note another uniformity. With the triumph of the extremists as we have defined them, the process of transfer of power from Right to Left ceases. The extremists are not indeed exempt from the difficulty other triumphant groups had faced from the very beginning of the revolutionary process. They develop internal conflicts, tend to split up into groups too hostile among themselves for co-operation. But these groups cannot be neatly ranged from Right to Left; and their dissension is ended quickly and without even the turmoil and confusion of a coup d’état. The dissensions have by now become so subtly doctrinal, so remote from the masses of the population, that they can be centered on a few leaders. And they are settled by the banishment or “judicial murder”—as it seems to the defeated partisans—of some of these leaders. What began with large-scale popular uprisings has now come to the dramatic intimacy of a courtroom.

France is here the clearest case. The victorious Montagnards of June 2nd divided into three major factions, that of which Robespierre stands as the head, that of Danton, and that of Hébert. There were, of course, sub-factions, wheels within wheels, and had Marat not been assassinated in the summer of 1793, there might have been still further complications. Robespierre, eventually victorious, rationalized the situation as a conflict between the true revolutionaries on one hand and the Ultra-revolutionaries (Hébert) and the Citra-revolutionaries (Danton) on the other. He was, to himself, the golden and virtuous mean between proletarian vice and bourgeois corruption. The actual situation is almost unbelievably complicated, and only the narrative historian with plenty of space to command can disentangle it. Both Dantonists and Hébertists, “traitors” and “anarchists,” were condemned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, and went to the guillotine in two large and rather miscellaneous batches. For the next few months, the “faction of Robespierre” was in complete control of France.

The victorious Independents in England in 1649 found themselves facing an astonishing variety of sects which had been carried along to triumph in the general good work for the cause of complete toleration of all Dissenters. We shall in a moment have a word to say about the doctrinal aspect of these groups. Meantime we may note that not only did Cromwell continue to keep down papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians, but he and his officers saw to it that Fifth Monarchy Men, Diggers, Levellers, Millenarians, Quakers, and the rest were not allowed to try out their wilder schemes in practice. The Diggers could dig no more in this earth. The old tactics of “no enemy to the Left,” which had held ever since the beginning of the revolution, were now definitely abandoned. As Professor Trevelyan has written, “All revolutionists, the moment they undertake the actual responsibilities, become in some sort conservatives. Robespierre guillotined the Anarchists. The first administrative act of the [English] Regicides was to silence the Levellers.” There are, then, if you like, those more extreme than the group we have called the extremists. But such men are of the lunatic fringe. They are the impractical people erroneously thought by some conservatives to be typical revolutionists. They definitely do not attain power.

The Russian situation is still somewhat obscured in respect to the opposition to official Bolshevism after October, 1917, and this obscurity seems in some ways thicker than ever today. Nevertheless it is clear that even while Lenin was alive, and especially in the year or so after the October revolution, there were a good many stresses and strains within the Bolshevik party, and that Lenin and his followers suppressed opposing groups even when they claimed to be more “revolutionary” than the Leninists. Thanks to the excellent discipline of the Bolshevik party and to the particularly pressing nature of the war against the Whites and the Allies, these quarrels were not as public as they had been in England and in France. The recent Moscow trials seem to belong to a different phase of revolution, or rather, are internal difficulties of a specific state that has gone through the cycle of revolution. In spite of certain superficial analogies, they do not seem to be a part of the uniformity we are here discussing.

These little opposition factions are inextricably woven in with various eccentric groups which are not completely stilled until the height of the Terror—if even then. They represent, as we have seen, the lunatic fringes common to any complex civilization, and they are especially active and vocal in the early stages of our revolutions, and during the struggle between moderates and extremists. They are less important in the actual course of these revolutions than conservative historians, and conservatives generally, like to make out. But they are interesting variations in the main body of revolutionary orthodoxy, and they illuminate in many ways the general history of heresy and heretics.

“Never did the human mind attain such a magnificent height of self-assertiveness as in England about the year 1650,” wrote Lytton Strachey. And certainly what we now think of as almost a racially founded British love for the middle-of-the-road is not very evident in these years. Strachey ironically lists the possibility of becoming a Behmenist, a Bidellian, a Coppinist, a Salmonist, a Dipper, a Traskite, a Tyronist, a Philadelphian, Christadelphian, or Seventh Day Baptist, omitting the subject he was actually writing about, Ludovic Muggleton, founder of the still-existing Muggletonians. The terms mean almost as little to us today as do those with which John Goodwin is referred to in the third volume of Gangraena: “a monotonous sectary, a compound of Socinianism, Arminianism, Libertinism, Antinomianism, Independency, Popery and Skepticism.” This is a marvelous compound of contradictions, as though a man today were called a mixture of Communism, Hitlerism, Fascism, Republicanism and Prohibitionism. As Mr. Gooch has said, the English revolution presents some of the most remarkable communistic speculations in history. As early as 1647 John Hare published a pamphlet, Plain English to our Wilful Bearers of Normanism, in which he attacked the institution of private property without being very clear about what might take its place. Chamberlen, in his Poor Man’s Advocate, urged the nationalization of all Crown and Church possessions, the resumption of all common lands that had been enclosed. This land was to be called the national stock, and was to be administered for the benefit of the poor.

The Diggers, however, are the most remarkable of these communistic groups, if only because they tried to put their ideas into practice. The movement was prefaced by an obscure pamphlet of December, 1648, with a title quite characteristic of the age, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Early in April of 1649 one Everard, a cashiered soldier of the New Model, with a few followers came to St. George’s Hill in Surrey “and began to dig, and sowed the ground with parsnips, carrots, and beans.” A voice, said Everard, had bidden him dig and plow the earth and receive the fruits thereof. They did not intend to meddle with enclosed land, but simply to take what was common and untilled and make it fruitful. For the time being General Fairfax, who seems to have regarded them as harmless fanatics, left them to their digging.

The apocalyptic touch is even more striking, if possible, in the Millenarians or Fifth Monarchy men. These held that the fourth monarchy of the Bible was drawing to a close, and that the fifth monarchy, or reign of the saints, was at hand.... They, of course, were the saints. They split, however, over the question as to whether or not it was proper for them to aid divine providence. Some of them held that the Lord was in himself quite equal to the task of overthrowing the mighty of this world; others believed that it was lawful, and presumably helpful, to combat the Lord’s enemies with the material sword, and hasten the day when the saints should possess riches and reign with Him on earth. Their dilemma reminds one somewhat of that facing nineteenth-century Socialists, forced to choose between the militants and the revisionists.

In comparison with the wealth of imagination the English put into the effort to bring heaven to earth, the other two revolutions seem poverty-stricken. Perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon belief that the French lack imaginative depth is valid, but surely this cannot be brought up against the Russians. Perhaps the answer is simply that as sources of imaginative inspiration neither the Enlightenment of the eighteenth-century philosophes nor the dialectic materialism of the Marxist can hold a candle to the King James version of the Bible. Yet France was by no means unproductive on the side of the lunatic fringe. The Enragés, led by Varlet and Roux, and based largely on the poorer sections of Paris, seem to have held a vaguely communistic doctrine. At any rate, they were definitely against the rich, against the new merchant aristocracy. The Hébertistes, another popular Parisian group sometimes confused with the Enragés, had largely yellow journalists and ward spoilsmen as leaders, but their main body must have nourished vaguely Utopian dreams. Then there was the incredible little circle around Catherine Théot, “Mother of God”—with Robespierre designated at least as one of the manifestations of God. It does indeed seem likely that republican professors in France are right, and that much of this was stirred up by Robespierre’s enemies to make him seem ridiculous; for even at the crisis period of revolutions some men retain a sense of humor. Yet the fact remains that Catherine Théot and her circle existed.

In Russia the completeness and quickness of the Bolshevik victory probably explains the relative lack of rival Utopias. It is true that from 1918 to 1921 the Bolsheviks were forced to fight off Whites and Allies on a dozen fronts, and that in a region like the Ukraine, for instance, you can find everything from Czarist rulers through mild narodniks and partisan or guerilla rulers to pure Reds. But there is a dog-eat-dog cruelty in the Russian revolution that seems to exclude the mild delusions of an Everard or a Catherine Théot.