Lenin was a clear-sighted realist, but since he was a man, his realism was not unaffected by passion.

'From Lenin's own friends and disciples,' says Herr FülöpMiller, we know that his whole mind had been inflamed with hate ever since the execution of his brother, to such an extent that, during the last years of his exile abroad, his bitterness made visible changes even in his features. "As soon as you met him," says Zinoviev, " you could observe in Lenin a deep unquenchable hate which, as it were, shook a clenched fist in the face of the bourgeoisie. Even his face was changed in the course of time by this secret fury." Hate was Lenin's element.'

As the cloistered monk rejects the smallest physical comfort in order that his whole being may be concentrated on the spiritual, so Lenin deliberately shut himself away from every humanising influence in order that his hatred might not grow less. In a letter to Gorki, he said, 'I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But to-day is not the time to stroke people's heads; to-day hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly.' This passionate hatred, the result of long years of persecution, is the natural and traditional feeling of the revolutionary leader to his oppressors. But it is entirely irrational. As he sat in his bare office in the Kremlin, Lenin was concerned with electrification and motor ploughs. He was the successor of Peter the Great. His purpose was to Europeanise Russia, to make its work efficient, to increase its production. Lenin in Moscow, and Mr Henry Ford in Detroit, had much the same objective. But the practical man of affairs was, at the bottom of his soul, far more eager to destroy than to create. It was his hatred of Czardom and the bourgeoisie that permitted the creation of the Tcheka, authorised the persecution of the Church, and tolerated the ruthless slaughter of the Russian prisons.

The hatred and the years of brooding resentment made Lenin a realist in a hurry. Lenin, says Herr Fülöp-Miller, 'saw necessity clearly, but he lacked all insight into reality, as represented by the actual conditions of the time.' Karl Marx asserted that Communism was the inevitable sequel to capitalism, and he predicted

that it would first occur in the most advanced industrial communities. And Lenin was certainly not a scientific Marxian in expecting, as Trotsky says he did, to establish Socialism in six months in a country which had not passed through 'the industrial and capitalistic phase of development.' Lenin lived in a fever of hurry. He wanted to jump the centuries. He was in Mr Wells's phrase, the 'dreamer of electrification.' As Herr FülöpMiller says:

'In the country of waste of time, of complete apathy, among men like those depicted with such extraordinary vividness in Concharov's novel 'Oblomov,' with the aid of a bureaucracy of truly Oriental laziness, Lenin decided to create a super-American system of labour organisation in

which not a grain of energy should be wasted.'

Lenin died with his hopes unrealised, but he had, none the less, contrived miracles. In the cities, the old Russia has disappeared, and Bolshevism has created a new Russia. It has affected the people,' writes Dr Farbman, 'with a new fever of activity, self-assertion, and acquisitiveness. Of the notorious dreamy and idle Slav temperament nothing now remains in Russia.' It is clear, however, that this is true only of the cities. The peasant remains much as he was before the revolution, and the peasant is still the ultimate power. It was the peasant who forced Lenin to water down his Communistic enactments. It was fear of the peasant that induced Stalin to send Trotsky into exile.

There is considerable, if superficial, resemblance between the Fascism of Mussolini and the Bolshevism of Lenin. Both repudiate the Liberalism of the 19th century. Both claim to be realistic, to be entirely concerned with things as they are, not as they were, or even as they might be. Both are impatient of sentimental clichés. But Fascism was largely an improvisation. When Mussolini marched to Rome, it was to break the power of an incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy, but he had obviously little idea of what was to be put into its place. The theories of the Fascist State have been evolved during the development of the Fascist government; action has come first, and theory and justification afterwards. Lenin, on the other hand, was provided from the beginning with a clear and definite political philosophy, largely elaborated by himself from the writings of Karl Marx. He was both the Rousseau and the Robespierre of the Russian revolution, and perhaps the only political theorist in history who has ever had a free hand to put his own theories into practice.

Bolshevism derives from the Marxian materialist interpretation of history admirably summarisd by Prof. Laski, who says: 'It is simply the insistence that the material conditions of life taken as a whole primarily determine the changes in human thought.' The system of production that obtains at any one epoch determines the law, the religion, the method of government, and the social relations of that epoch. Marx defends this theory with a wealth of illustration, arguing always, as it seems to me, with a narrow precision. He asserts, for example, that 'the doctrines of religious freedom and liberty of conscience simply gave expression to the rule of free competition within the domain of knowledge.' But this linking of the intellectual and economic to the spiritual and material will hardly stand detailed investigation. Class antagonism is to Marx and his followers inevitable in a society roughly to be divided between one class dependent mainly, though not entirely, on wages, and another class living mainly, though not entirely, on the ownership of capital and the means of production, and it is asserted that there can be no peace until the proletariat has triumphed and the capitalist class is destroyed. When that end is achieved, labour will cease to be a commodity to be sold, and the State itself, as we understand it, must disappear. In a novel economic environment, there will come vital changes in human nature itself. Old wants will disappear, old desires will be modified, and human nature will be remoulded.

The Bolshevists have always recognised that their ends can only be reached by world-wide revolution. The worker must be rescued from the shackles of national enthusiasms and prejudices. He must be taught that 'his real country is his class,' that (I quote Prof. Laski) ' he can only seize the State for communist ends successfully by uniting with the working classes of other countries.' It is curious that the Bolshevists, to whom

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patriotism is a mere bourgeois sentimentality, should have been forced by political necessity to be the patrons and allies of fervent nationalists throughout the East.

To the Communist, the State is necessarily 'an organ of repression,' as Bukharin said, 'a union of the master class,' and the very existence of the State, Lenin urged, proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.' Democratic liberty is practically valueless. There can be no political equality where there is economic inequality. In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political power increases,' writes Lafargue, 'and the number of elected rulers increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.' This is hardly to be denied. It is evident, indeed, in almost every country where there is democratic government. The British Labour party believes that the State can be captured and its machinery used for the evolution of a better social order. The Bolshevist believes that the State is the evil creation of evil conditions, incapable of reform. The tyranny of the State, it is asserted, has so sapped the vitality of its victims and so impaired their initiative, that the majority are incapable of common action for the State's destruction. They are far more inclined to hug their chains than to break them. Consequently, there must be the period of transition, the dictatorship of a minority, compelling the majority out of the old world and into the new.

It was clearly perceived by the Bolshevist thinkers, long before 1917, that this dictatorship could only be established and maintained, as Trotsky said, 'by the systematic and energetic use of violence.' The Bolshevist accepts the fact, unpleasant for the Liberal humanitarian, that no revolution has ever been successful unless the revolutionists have been ready, at some moment in its development, for wholesale killing in cold blood. The Bolshevist philosopher justifies terrorism by the conviction derived from the pages of Marx, that the society which he desires must be created sooner or later by the power of blind economic forces. It may be hastened, or it may be delayed. But it must occur. Terror,' said Trotsky, 'is a weapon utilised against a class doomed to destruction which does not wish to perish.' Revolutionary violence is justified by common sense, while anti-revolutionary violence, since it can in the long run achieve nothing, is merely a futile offence against humanity.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is only a means to an end. The Proletarian State, with its new methods of government, most of which have proved in practice to be the mere trappings of a tyranny, will continue only until the last vestige of capitalism has been destroyed. Then its utility will cease, and it will, in Engel's phrase, 'wither away.' Whatever may be the consolations and satisfactions for the ordinary worker when Communism is attained, the Bolshevists have always frankly admitted that the path to Communism must necessarily be thorny, and that, in the transitional state, there must be the surrender of most of the human possessions to which value has been attached in the Capitalist State. No man can be left to choose what he will do. He will be technically trained and made efficient and put to the job which his Communist guides select for him, He may be permitted to criticise, but he must be compelled to obey. There can be no liberty of action, and, in the old Liberal sense, no freedom of conscience.

There has been in Russia an immense enthusiasm for education since 1917 and a determination to deal with the problem of illiteracy. But, writes Herr FülöpMiller,

'we must not overlook the fact that the whole of education in Soviet Russia does not aim, as in Western Europe, at the training of free individuals for a lofty human culture, but at creating as quickly as possible useful fighting troops for Communism. They are not undertaking the education of a "great race of men worthy to stand with free people on free soil," but the breeding of an eternally subordinate ecclesia militans of agitators and Soviet bureaucrats, quite in the spirit of Metternich's reactionary system.'

And the reason why religious teaching is forbidden is not due to mere sentimental atheism, but to the fact that if Bolshevism is to continue, the Bolshevist army must secure a supply of recruits for Communism. If the child is to grow up a Communist, he must be free