Communist party. In every regiment, every battalion, every com- pany is to be found a communistic cell. In this way a new communistic order of ' Samurai ' has been formed. And the army is not merely a fighting organization, it is a political school the like of which has not been known to the world."
Trotsky prided himself particularly on the incessant political propaganda. "In the beginning we had not a single elementary school in the army now we have 3,800; before the 1st of Jan. we had 32 clubs: now we have 1,315. Before the 1st of Jan. we had not a single mobile library: now we have 3,392."
As regards officers and other specialists drafted into the Red army from the cadres of the old Tsarist army, Trotsky main- tained that thousands of them had reconciled themselves with their new position and were faithfully serving the new order. He was contemplating the institution of one man's rule instead of the system of commanders watched over by two commissars.
Economic Problems. The most serious discussions took place in connexion with the problems of food and fuel-supplies. Tsuru- pa, the People's Commissar at the head of the Narkhoskom (the Commissariat of People's economics) gave an account of the working of bread monopoly. All corn supplies had been national- ized and the system was enforced by charging each province with a fixed contribution which was subsequently distributed among the districts of each province, while the districts assessed the villages with quotas according to estimation. The whole assess- ment of the country was reckoned at 324 million poods of corn of every kind: of the 30% which were charged to the first quarter some 60 millions were expected to come in by Dec. i. This did not quite correspond to the demand, but as some provinces were not under the control of the Soviet power, the assessment might be said to have been carried out satisfactorily in the greater part of the country as regards corn. This did not mean, however, that the supply of corn was secured for those who needed it. Many thousands of poods lay stored and rotting at the stations, because there was no transport to convey them to their places of destination. As regards meat the situation was much worse. Only 600,000 poods were available instead of the five million de- livered in 1918; the cause was the great falling off of the numbers of cattle held by the peasants. Butter and fats were also at a dis- count: the commissariat could not dispose of more than 300,000 poods for the whole of Russia, and that meant famine in respect of fats. Of fish roughly 75% of the normal supply had been caught but the transport conditions were badly hampering its distribution. The proposal of the Commissariat was to extend the State monopoly and the coercive assessment to all food prod- ucts and it was adopted by the Congress.
As far as fuel was concerned, the situation had grown to be catastrophic. The loss of Baku and of the Donets coal-mines had largely reduced the quantity available. Instead of 500,- 000,000 poods of naphtha, e.g. Soviet Russia disposed of 80 million. It continued to exist only because all private stores and supplies had been confiscated. Things got better when the roads to the Donets and to Ural were cleared, but the disorganization of the transport told heavily on the distribution of fuel. As a matter of necessity Russia had to fall back once more on wood fuel, although the adaptation to a new system of heating involved immense losses. The first requirement was to provide material for the railways and that was being gradually achieved by means of labour conscription. As for domestic heating, its needs were so great that the only way of solving the problem was to cut down timber in the neighbourhood of cities, and Moscow, for example, was being served by means of the clearing of timber in an area of 18-30 square versts. The Commissariat was obliged to engage the services of private contractors and agents in order to get the required supplies. When, in discussion, fanatical Communists reproached Commissar Rykov with this deviation from the recognized principles of communism, he answered that there was no other way of collecting the timber and that, after all, the Extraordinary Commission was able to proceed against specula- tors and profiteers. In other words, the Soviet administrators might enable men to enrich themselves by private enterprise and then prosecute them on account of their gains.
Comrade Sofronov reported on the constructive work of the Soviet; this work had proceeded from the top to the bottom and
the administration of the country had assumed the shape of parallel columns subordinated to " heads " and " centres," each managing its own concerns, but with little connexion between them and often with opposed views on kindred subjects. The Narkomjus (People's Commissariat of Justice), for example, was not in agreement with the arbitrary terrorism of the Extraordi- nary Commission, but was powerless to influence or to restrict it, because it was acting within the column of the Home Commis- sariat, and no solution could be found for the difference between judicial and administrative tribunals.
The discussion gave rise to attacks on the bureaucratic cen- tralization and the suppression of freedom by the communistic dictatorship. The reporter Sofronov admitted that there was a tendency towards one man's rule in all branches of the organiza- tion, but such a tendency, explicable in the course of civil war, could not be conceded as a principle. It did not check the com- plete anarchy of economic and legal relations produced by the lack of harmony in administration. It ought to be corrected by a reform of elections, which would regenerate the local Soviets and thus create a basis for political reorganization at the top. An essential condition for such a reform was the removal of counter- revolutionary elements. Therefore the electoral law ought to be supplemented by stringent enactments not only disfranchising the " tight-fists," but making it a punishable offence for them to take part in any electoral or other meeting in the village.
Lenin came forward to defend the policy of Soviet rule against the reproach of anti -democratic tendency:
" We do not promise," he said, " that our constitution guarantees freedom and equality in general. Freedom but it must be pointed out for what class and for what ends. Equality but who shall be equal and with whom? for those who work and who have been exploited in the course of centuries by the bourgeoisie, who are fighting the bourgeoisie even now. This has been stated in the con- stitution: the dictatorship of the workmen and of the poorest peasants in order to suppress the bourgeoisie."
These ideas were more fully developed in Lenin's speech to the Congress of School Extension workers (May 6 1919):
" It cannot be gainsaid that freedom is a powerful catchword for any revolution, democratic or socialistic. But our programme declares: freedom, if it obstructs the emancipation of labour from the oppression of capital, is a fraud. Any one of you who has read Marx, or even popular accounts of Marx, knows that he devoted the greater part of his life to ridiculing freedom and equality, the will of the majority and all the Benthams who commented on these things in glowing terms. He proved that at the back of all these phrases lay the interests of free trade, the freedom of free capital, which are used to oppress the workers. . . . We maintain that to grant freedom of meetings to the. capitalists would be the greatest crime it means freedom of meetings for counter-revolutionaries. We say to the bourgeois intellectuals, to the adherents of democ- racy : ' You lie when you reproach us with the infringement of freedom. When your great bourgeois revolutionists of 1649 in England and of 1792-3 in France carried through their revolutions they did not concede to the monarchists the freedom of meetings. The French Revolution was called the Great one because it was not like the weakly phrase-making revolution of 1848: after over- throwing the monarchists it crushed them out of existence. . . . The peasant is a hybrid being : half a workman and half a speculator. This is a fact from which you cannot escape, unless you destroy money, destroy exchange. And to do that you want long years of firm domination of the proletariat, because it is only the proletariat that can conquer the bourgeoisie.' When we are_ told you have broken equality not only as against exploiters (a social revolutionary or a Menshevik might admit that), but you have broken equality as between workmen and peasants, you have broken the equality of toiling democracy, you are criminals,' we answer: 'Yes, we have broken the equality between workmen and peasants and we main- tain that you, who defend this equality, are followers of Kolchak.' . . . We ask you : ' the ruined workmen of a ruined country, in which factories are at a standstill, would they be right to submit to a majority of peasants, who do not yield to them the surplus of their corn? Have they the right to take this surplus by violence if it_is impossible to do so in any other way? ' The peasants are a special class : as toilers they are the enemies of capital, but at the same time they are proprietors. The peasant has been taught during centuries to consider the corn as his own, and that he is free to sell it. It is my right, thinks the peasant, because it is my labour, my sweat and my blood. It is not easy to change his psychology: it will take a difficult and long process to do so. He who imagines that the transi- tion to socialism will be effected by one man convincing another, and this other a third, etc., is at best a child, or a political hypocrite. You can, if you have luck, smash an institution at one blow : it is
