The World Significance of the Russian Revolution/Section 8
VIII. What is Bolshevism?
We have seen that outwardly there was little difference between the Red Armies, and the White Armies, the material on both sides consisted mainly of Russian peasants whose only real concern was peace and food. They got none of the former and little enough of the latter. On both sides there was also a considerable foreign element. In the Red Army were Chinese, Letts and dago mercenaries of every description. In the White Armies were Czecho-Slovaks, and alien ex-prisoners of war. The Red Armies have a sprinkling of German military experts on their staffs, and the Whites had a sprinkling of Allied officers. Why then are these Armies, so nearly alike in personnel, nationality and interests, fighting each other?
The answer is supplied when an examination reveals what Bolshevism really is.
Like all other terms denoting a definite historical movement associated with an "ideology" more or less particular to it, the term Bolshevism has been used to express, not only the bare fact of its existence, but in addition all the odium, and also, let it not be forgotten, the rapturous approval, of its partisans and opponents. But mere abuse and mere effusive praise does not help to explain, in the least, what a thing is—its characteristics, properties, origin, relations and consequences.
However inadequately, an attempt will here be made to analyse it as scientifically and briefly as possible. In dealing with it in the broadest possible way it will be found necessary to deal with it under two aspects—common to all scientific classification—the generic and the specific. That is to say we must now recognise that "Bolshevism" is not simply a sporadic growth which suddenly makes its appearance as the result of one nation's economic and military collapse, but that it is a movement with a very long history and which in its development bears the closest association to, and the identical symptoms of, movement in other countries and at other periods of the world's history. Our account must therefore involve two sets of ideas: one deals with the particular, the other with the type; the former with its symptoms, i.e., what it is ostensibly—its apologetics, its "idealogy," its growth; its locality, historical antecedents, and particular and immediate causes and effects. And the latter with its diagnosis; it treats it psychologically and comparatively; with its motives, its affective (i.e., emotional) power, and the general causes of its condition: these being peculiar to no country and no time.
"Bolshevism" as a Particular.
Everyone by now knows that the origin of the term "Bolshevik" was merely the accidental fact that at the Brussels-London Conference of the Left Social Democratic Party in 1903, the extreme left wing had a majority (Bolshinstvo). As a party they now officially style themselves "The Communist Party (of the Bolsheviks.")
The origin and growth of the Revolutionary movement in Russia has already been briefly sketched out, and attention has been called to the fact that it had its rise in Russia with the introduction of industrialism in the nineteenth century, and the importation, from the highly comercialised countries of Western Europe, of the Socialistic and Communistic doctrines which a highly mammonised industrial system inevitably breeds—as surely as a foul body breeds lice. We had also to insist on the essentially different type of civilisation presented by an almost exclusively agricultural country like Russia, and, as a consequence, the patriarchal nature of its government, and the comparative absence of middle classes, bourgeoisie and proletariat (industrial operatives); all these imported classes forming an insignificant fraction of the total population. It can now be understood why the patriarchal government of the Tzars took care to exclude and vigorously control Jews, who, as a class, are normally found in greatest numbers among the bankers, middlemen, profiteers and usurers.