nrich
himself, and he cares about nothing else. Nor can he realize that to
beggar his neighbors is to impoverish himself. Hence he always takes and
never gives; as a peasant he destroys the forests, hewing trees and
planting none, and robs the soil of its fertility. On analogous lines he
would fain deal with the factories, exacting exorbitant wages that eat
up all profit, and naively expecting the owner to go on paying them as
though he were the trustee of a fund for enriching the greedy. The only
people to profit by the system, and even they only transiently, were the
manual laborers. The bulk of the skilled, intelligent, and educated
artisans were held up to contempt and ostracized, or killed as an odious
aristocracy. That, it has been aptly pointed out,[280] is far removed
from Marxism. The Marxist doctrine postulates the adhesion of
intelligent workers to the social revolution, whereas the Russian
experimenters placed them in the same category as the capitalists, the
aristocrats, and treated them accordingly. Another Marxist postulate not
realized in Russia was that before the state could profitably proceed to
nationalization the country must have been in possession of a
well-organized, smooth-running industrial mechanism. And this was
possible only in those lands in which capitalism had had a long and
successful innings, not in the great Slav country of husbandmen.

By way of glozing over these incongruities Lenin's ukase proclaimed that
the measures enacted were only provisional, and aimed at enabling Russia
to realize the great transformation by degrees. But the impression
conveyed by the history of the social side of Lenin's activity is that
Marxism, whether as understood by its author or as interpreted and
twisted by its Russian adherents, has been tried and found
impracticable. One is further warranted in saying that neither the
visionary workers who are moved by misdirected zeal for social
improvement nor the theorists who are constantly on the lookout for new
and stimulating ideas are likely to discover in Russian Bolshevism any
aspect but the one alluded to above worthy of their serious
consideration.

A much deeper mark was made on the history of the century by its
methods.

Compared with the soul-searing horrors let loose during the Bolshevist
fit of frenzy, the worst atrocities recorded of Deputy Carrier and his
noyades during the French Revolution were but the freaks of
compassionate human beings. I