COMMUNIST PURITANS
COMMUNIST PURITANS
BY LOUIS FISCHER
The Soviet state is omnipotent and omnipresent. Bukharin, the arch-theorist, contends that this is a transitional phase in the development of Communism toward perfection. The Bolsheviks’ professed aim is thereductio ad administratumof the functions of the state; they would make government the traffic cop of the nation but not the all-pervading busybody and touch-everybody-everywhere which it is now in Russia. The transitional period, however, may last long. In default of a world revolution it may project itself beyond the present generation and even beyond the next. And in the meantime it is good Communist doctrine to maintain an Argus-eyed, Herculanean-clubbed state. The Soviet Government is alike an administrator, politician, statesman, merchant, manufacturer, banker, shipbuilder, newspaper publisher, school-teacher, and preacher.
Such a state is the highest expression of the anti-individualism of socialist philosophy. The singlesimian erectusis nothing; it is the class, the nation which counts.
The citizen lives for the state. Mind and muscle must ever be at its service. A Communist who is a loose liver is an anomaly. There is virtue even in a grain of asceticism and in “morality,” not, it is important to note, because luxury and license are sinful and lead to damnation and hell but because the excessive gratification of physical desires, be they for sex or for alcohol, and any over-indulgence of one’s selfish mental weaknesses reduce the energy and attention which the individual can offer to the state and to society.
The Bolsheviks do not believe in evolution in the realm of politics; they are revolutionists. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century liberalism tended toward the survival of the fittest. But the essence of the Russian revolution is the protection of the under dog, of the proletarian and peasant who, unaided, would not survive in the unequal struggle with the capitalist and landowner. The function of the Soviet state is tosupport the oppressed majority against the vested and acquired interests of the economically powerful minority.
The doctrine of the survival of the fittest, translated into every-day life, permits freedom of action, as little restraint as possible, the freest play for nature and human nature. Communist doctrine involves the negation of individual freedom; human nature is discounted in the socialist scale of weights and measures; laissez-faire is replaced by discipline, if need be, by force. Only once did the Communists reveal a liberal vein. It was in their treatment of conscientious objectors during the civil wars. Russia has many sects such as the Dukhobors who are opposed to violence on grounds of conscience. Though the Government was engaged in a death struggle, it respected these sentiments. But in all else, whenever its own interests have been at stake, the state has disregarded the wishes and inclinations of the human unit. Liberty of the individual is not as sacred an ikon as it is in the West. To give economic freedom to the mass is a nobler aim. Thus the Communists would explain and justify (but in my opinionthis does not justify) the absence of a free press in Russia and the activities of the G. P. U.
The aim of the Bolsheviks was not merely to overthrow one government and to establish their own. This was a means toward creating a new society. To that extent the Bolsheviks are as presumptuous as most reformers. In 1917 they must have argued to themselves much to this effect: “We are a minority. The majority has not invited us to rule it. But we know better than the majority what is good for it.” In the interest of the new society a powerful state was set up. The powerful state was privileged to ride roughshod over the individual. The Bolsheviks presume to tell the individual how to act and how to live. This is the “superiority complex” which is one of the most essential characteristics of puritanism. “I am perfect. Watch me. Go thou and do likewise.” The Russian Communists are puritans without religion.
In matters of morals the Communists advocate and agitate but do not use force. Only in the case of members of the Communist Party do they interfere if the individual’s actions are likely “directly or indirectly to discredit theparty.” (Such a phrase permits of the widest interpretation and misinterpretation.) Thus in an article in thePravdaon The Party and Personal Life, O. Zortzeva, an official of the Central Control Committee, writes that “not long ago one of the representatives of the Control Committee in the South asked for instructions to combat the evil of divorce.” She cites an instance (and there must be many more such instances) where a Communist was required to explain why he left his wife. He replied he could not live with her because she was unfit to mingle in the society of his new friends and acquaintances. The reply was regarded as unsatisfactory. The Soviet state enforces a most liberal divorce law. But the Communists discourage divorce. Within the party it is looked upon with disfavor.
The war, the revolution, the civil wars have worked havoc with the Russian family. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that family life is crumbling. Trotzky, who has given more active attention to these questions of personal behavior than any other Communist leader, seeks to reënforce the collapsing buttresses ofthe family. (It will be recalled that Engels, the author with Marx of the “Communist Manifesto,” wrote the “Origin of the Family” to prove that the family was a new, unnecessary, and reactionary institution.) Trotzky urges the “communalization of the family household” so as to “disencumber the family of kitchen and laundry.” Take the burden of washing, cooking, sewing, child-raising from the family and “the relation between husband and wife will be cleansed of all that is external, foreign, forced, accidental. Each would cease to spoil the life of the other....”
The family life of most Communist leaders would probably find favor in the eyes of the Bishop of New York, and we can imagine that Cotton Mather, if he returned to the flesh and visited Moscow, would hurry to Trotzky, slap him untheologically on the back, and say, “Thou art a man.” There was something ascetic and impersonal in the way Lenin used to live. There is something reminiscent of Christian self-abnegation in Chicherin’s, Bukharin’s, Radek’s disdain for good clothes. A Communist is required to contribute to the party treasury all thesalary he earns above $95 a month. And even if his writings bring him a supplementary income he must not spend it for luxuries. The Communists are the shock troops of the Soviet régime. They must be like athletes in training. They must not consume mental and spiritual ice creams and pastries.
Alexandra Kollontai, now Soviet ambassador in Christiania, stands for the utmost freedom in sexual relations. But a review in the official press of her book, “Love Among Laboring Bees,” stigmatizes her views on the subject as “prostitution” and “intellectual tomfoolery.” “It is imperative,” reads the last sentence of the criticism, “to guard against the harmful influence of Comrade Kollontai.” This is the attitude which in other countries leads to the appointment of vice censors. Russia, fortunately, is too advanced to subject itself to such a humiliation. Only the lives of Communists are censored. In respect to the great mass of the people the Bolsheviks content themselves with preaching.
Trotzky’s sermons will certainly do the people no harm. Russians have barely a trace ofpuritanism. Take the instance of their famous, many-ply “mother” oaths. Beside them the worst product of the British navvy looks pale. Says Trotzky: “One would have to consult philologists, linguists, and folk-lore experts to find out whether any other people has such unrestrained, filthy, and disgusting oaths as we have. As far as I know, there is no other.” The Communists have initiated an anti-swearing campaign. In some factories the workers themselves decided to fine any one who used an “expression.” Wherever one goes, in industrial plants, in beer saloons, in clubs, one sees the colored “Don’t Swear” poster. Even in the army, where curses once found their most fertile field, they are becoming increasingly rare.
A Communist should not play cards. A member of the party will not, if he is a good Communist, enter a gambling casino. (The Moscow gambling casinos, incidentally, have been closed by order of the Government.) Newly initiated Communists ask their instructors whether they are to permit their wives to powder their faces. A Communist would hardly come to her office with her lips rouged and even non-Communistworkers in many Soviet commissariats feel that it is bad form to use the lipstick. Certainly very few if any women Communists dress to fashion. Most of them dress badly. There are more serious things to do than to mind the clothes on one’s back. It is unworthy of a Communist, and Communists think it is unworthy of all Russians, to give too much thought to the flesh. I know a non-Communist Soviet official who likes to carry a cane, but he leaves it home when he goes to work.
There can be no let-up, says Trotzky, in the war against alcohol. The Government has abolished vodka, but the bootleg “samogonka” has replaced it. The police arrest men and women (in Russia most of the apprehended bootleggers are women) but force removes as little of the evil here as it does in the United States. So strong is the drink tradition in Russia that even many Communists indulge in the permissible wines and light beers. But the party reminds its members that they must inhibit such desires. It will not do for the best soldiers of the state and the master-builders of a new society to becomeinebriated, or lose their heads and time in the pursuit of women, or play cards, or stop to adjust their neckties while the foundations of the structure are being laid.