* On the day on which I send this book to the printers newscomes of Wrangel's collapse and flight. I leave standingwhat I have written concerning him, since it will apply toany successor he may have. Each general who has steppedinto Kolchak's shoes has eventually had to run away in them,and always for the same reasons. It may be taken almost asan axiom that the history of great country is that of itscentre, not of its periphery. The main course of Englishhistory throughout the troubled seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies was never deflected from London. French historydid not desert Paris, to make a new start at Toulon or atQuiberon Bay. And only a fanatic could suppose that Russianhistory would run away from Moscow, to begin again in asemi-Tartar peninsula in the Black Sea. Moscow changescontinually, and may so change as to make easy the return ofthe "refugees." Some have already returned. But therefugees will not return as conquerors. Should a RussianNapoleon (an unlikely figure, even in spite of our efforts)appear, he will not throw away the invaluable asset of arevolutionary war-cry. He will have to fight some one, orhe will not be a Napoleon. And whom will he fight but thevery people who, by keeping up the friction, have rubbedAladdin's ring so hard and so long that a Djinn, by no meanskindly disposed towards them, bursts forth at last to avengethe breaking of his sleep?
And, of course, should hostilities flare up again on the Polish frontier, should the lions and lambs and jackals and eagles of Kossack, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish nationalists temporarily join forces, no miracles of diplomacy will keep them from coming to blows. For all these reasons a military collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time, even a concerted military advance of its enemies, is unlikely.
It is undoubtedly true that the food situation in the towns is likely to be worse this winter than it has yet been. Forcible attempts to get food from the peasantry will increase the existing hostility between town and country. There has been a very bad harvest in Russia. The bringing of food from Siberia or the Kuban (if military activities do not make that impossible) will impose an almost intolerable strain on the inadequate transport. Yet I think internal collapse unlikely. It may be said almost with certainty that Governments do not collapse until there is no one left to defend them. That moment had arrived in the case of the Tsar. It had arrived in the case of Kerensky. It has not arrived in the case of the Soviet Government for certain obvious reasons. For one thing, a collapse of the Soviet Government at the present time would be disconcerting, if not disastrous, to its more respectable enemies. It would, of course, open the way to a practically unopposed military advance, but at the same time it would present its enemies with enormous territory, which would overwhelm the organizing powers which they have shown again and again to be quite inadequate to much smaller tasks. Nor would collapse of the present Government turn a bad harvest into a good one. Such a collapse would mean the breakdown of all existing organizations, and would intensify the horrors of famine for every town dweller. Consequently, though the desperation of hunger and resentment against inevitable requisitions may breed riots and revolts here and there throughout the country, the men who, in other circumstances, might coordinate such events, will refrain from doing anything of the sort. I do not say that collapse is impossible. I do say that it would be extremely undesirable from the point of view of almost everybody in Russia. Collapse of the present Government would mean at best a reproduction of the circumstances of 1917, with the difference that no intervention from without would be necessary to stimulate indiscriminate slaughter within. I say "at best" because I think it more likely that collapse would be followed by a period of actual chaos. Any Government that followed the Communists would be faced by the same economic problem, and would have to choose between imposing measures very like those of the Communists and allowing Russia to subside into a new area for colonization. There are people who look upon this as a natural, even a desirable, result of the revolution. They forget that the Russians have never been a subject race, that they have immense powers of passive resistance, that they respond very readily to any idea that they understand, and that the idea of revolt against foreigners is difficult not to understand. Any country that takes advantage of the Russian people in a moment of helplessness will find, sooner or later, first that it has united Russia against it, and secondly that it has given all Russians a single and undesirable view of the history of the last three years. There will not be a Russian who will not believe that the artificial incubation of civil war within the frontiers of old Russia was not deliberately undertaken by Western Europe with the object of so far weakening Russia as to make her exploitation easy. Those who look with equanimity even on this prospect forget that the creation in Europe of a new area for colonization, a knocking out of one of the sovereign nations, will create a vacuum, and that the effort to fill this vacuum will set at loggerheads nations at present friendly and so produce a struggle which may well do for Western Europe what Western Europe will have done for Russia.
It is of course possible that in some such way the Russian Revolution may prove to be no more than the last desperate gesture of a stricken civilization. My point is that if that is so, civilization in Russia will not die without infecting us with its disease. It seems to me that our own civilization is ill already, slightly demented perhaps, and liable, like a man in delirium, to do things which tend to aggravate the malady. I think that the whole of the Russian war, waged directly or indirectly by Western Europe, is an example of this sort of dementia, but I cannot help believing that sanity will reassert itself in time. At the present moment, to use a modification of Gusev's metaphor, Europe may be compared to a burning house and the Governments of Europe to fire brigades, each one engaged in trying to salve a wing or a room of the building. It seems a pity that these fire brigades should be fighting each other, and forgetting the fire in their resentment of the fact that some of them wear red uniforms and some wear blue. Any single room to which the fire gains complete control increases the danger of the whole building, and I hope that before the roof falls in the firemen will come to their senses.
But turning from grim recognition of the danger, and from speculations as to the chance of the Russian Government collapsing, and as to the changes in it that time may bring, let us consider what is likely to happen supposing it does not collapse. I have already said that I think collapse unlikely. Do the Russians show any signs of being able to carry out their programme, or has the fire gone so far during the quarrelling of the firemen as to make that task impossible?
I think that there is still a hope. There is as yet no sign of a general improvement in Russia, nor is such an improvement possible until the Russians have at least carried out the first stage of their programme. It would even not be surprising if things in general were to continue to go to the bad during the carrying out of that first stage. Shortages of food, of men, of tools, of materials, are so acute that they have had to choose those factories which are absolutely indispensable for the carrying out of this stage, and make of them "shock" factories, like the "shock" troops of the war, giving them equipment over and above their rightful share of the impoverished stock, feeding their workmen even at the cost of letting others go hungry. That means that other factories suffer. No matter, say the Russians, if only that first stage makes progress. Consequently, the only test that can be fairly applied is that of transport. Are they or are they not gaining on ruin in the matter of wagons and engines! Here are the figures of wagon repairs in the seven chief repairing shops up to the month of June:
December 1919............475 wagons were repaired.January 1920.............656February.................697March...................1104April...................1141May.....................1154June....................1161
After elaborate investigation last year, Trotsky, as temporary Commissar of Transport, put out an order explaining that the railways, to keep up their present condition, must repair roughly 800 engines every month. During the first six months of 1920 they fulfilled this task in the following percentages:
January..................32 per centFebruary.................50March....................66April....................78May......................98June....................104
I think that is a proof that, supposing normal relations existed between Russia and ourselves, the Russian would be able to tackle the first stage of the problem that lies before them, and would lie before them whatever their Government might be. Unfortunately there is no proof that this steady improvement can be continued, except under conditions of trade with Western Europe. There are Russians who think they can pull through without us, and, remembering the miracles of which man is capable when his back is to the wall, it would be rash to say that this is impossible. But other Russians point out gloomily that they have been using certain parts taken from dead engines (engines past repair) in order to mend sick engines. They are now coming to the mending, not of sick engines merely, but of engines on which post-mortems have already been held. They are actually mending engines, parts of which have already been taken out and used for the mending of other engines. There are consequently abnormal demands for such things as shafts and piston rings. They are particularly short of Babbitt metal and boiler tubes. In normal times the average number of new tubes wanted for each engine put through the repair shops was 25 (10 to 15 for engines used in the more northerly districts, and 30 to 40 for engines in the south where the water is not so good). This number must now be taken as much higher, because during recent years tubes have not been regularly renewed. Further, the railways have been widely making use of tubes taken from dead engines, that is to say, tubes already worn. Putting things at their very best, assuming that the average demand for tubes per engine will be that of normal times, then, if 1,000 engines are to be repaired monthly, 150,000 tubes will be wanted every six months. Now on the 15th of June the total stock of tubes ready for use was 58,000, and the railways could not expect to get more than another 13,000 in the near future. Unless the factories are able to do better (and their improvement depends on improvement in transport), railway repairs must again deteriorate, since the main source of materials for it in Russia, namely the dead engines, will presently be exhausted.
On this there is only one thing to be said. If, whether because we do not trade with them, or from some other cause, the Russians are unable to proceed even in this first stage of their programme, it means an indefinite postponement of the moment when Russia will be able to export anything, and, consequently, that when at last we learn that we need Russia as a market, she will be a market willing to receive gifts, but unable to pay for anything at all. And that is a state of affairs a great deal more serious to ourselves than to the Russians, who can, after all, live by wandering about their country and scratching the ground, whereas we depend on the sale of our manufactured goods for the possibility of buying the food we cannot grow ourselves. If the Russians fail, their failure will affect not us alone. It will, by depriving her of a market, lessen Germany's power of recuperation, and consequently her power of fulfilling her engagements. What, then, is to happen to France? And, if we are to lose our market in Russia, and find very much weakened markets in Germany and France, we shall be faced with an ever-increasing burden of unemployment, with the growth, in fact, of the very conditions in which alone we shall ourselves be unable to recover from the war. In such conditions, upheaval in England would be possible, and, for the dispassionate observer, there is a strange irony in the fact that the Communists desire that upheaval, and, at the same time, desire a rebirth of the Russian market which would tend to make that upheaval unlikely, while those who most fear upheaval are precisely those who urge us, by making recovery in Russia impossible, to improve the chances of collapse at home. The peasants in Russia are not alone in wanting incompatible things.