The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism quotes

The Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events of the world’s history.

It is natural to compare it to the French Revolution, but it is in fact something of even more importance. It does more to change daily life and the structure of society: it also does more to change men’s beliefs.

There is, however, another aspect of Bolshevism from which I differ more fundamentally.

Bolshevism is not merely a political doctrine; it is also a religion, with elaborate dogmas and inspired scriptures.

When Lenin wishes to prove some proposition, he does so, if possible, by quoting texts from Marx and Engels.

The hopes which inspire Communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically, and are likely to do as much harm.

Cruelty lurks in our instincts, and fanaticism is a camouflage for cruelty.

Fanatics are seldom genuinely humane, and those who sincerely dread cruelty will be slow to adopt a fanatical creed. I do not know whether Bolshevism can be prevented from acquiring universal power.

Unfortunately, violence is in itself delightful to most really vigorous revolutionaries, and they feel no interest in the problem of avoiding it as far as possible.

Hatred of enemies is easier and more intense than love of friends.

But from men who are more anxious to injure opponents than to benefit the world at large no great good is to be expected.

Friends of Russia here think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly occupational, not geographical.

They think that “proletariat” means “proletariat,” but “dictatorship” does not quite mean “dictatorship.”

This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense.

He is very friendly, and apparently simple, entirely without a trace of hauteur. If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way eminent.

I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance.

He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal;

If one met him without knowing who he was, one would not guess that he is possessed of great power or even that he is in any way eminent. I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance.

He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other.

He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of self-seeking, an embodied theory.

He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian, and retaliated when they acquired power.

Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills.

If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world. I went to Russia a Communist;

Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the sceptical temper of the Western world.

I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Trotsky, whom the Communists do not by any means regard as Lenin’s equal, made more impression upon me from the point of view of intelligence and personality, though not of character.

The Bolsheviks are sometimes said to have done great things for art, but I could not discover that they had done more than preserve something of what existed before. When I questioned one of them on the subject, he grew impatient, and said:

“We haven’t time for a new art, any more than for a new religion.”

Unavoidably, although the Government favours art as much as it can, the atmosphere is one in which art cannot flourish, because art is anarchic and resistant to organization. Gorky has done all that one man could to preserve the intellectual and artistic life of Russia.

The law concerning conscientious objectors to military service is practically the same as ours, and its working depends upon the temper of the tribunal before which a man comes. Some conscientious objectors have been shot; on the other hand, some have obtained absolute exemption.

Life in Moscow, as compared to life in London, is drab, monotonous, and depressed.

I am not, of course, comparing life there with that of the rich here, but with that of the average working-class family. When it is realized that the highest wages are about fifteen shillings a month, this is not surprising.

The food problem is the main cause of popular opposition to the Bolsheviks, yet I cannot see how any popular policy could have been adopted.

The Bolsheviks are disliked by the peasants because they take so much food; they are disliked in the towns because they take so little.

What the peasants want is what is called free trade, i.e., decontrol of agricultural produce. If this policy were adopted, the towns would be faced by utter starvation, not merely by hunger and hardship.

By this definition, Bolshevism is a religion: that its dogmas go beyond or contrary to evidence, I shall try to prove in what follows.

Those who accept Bolshevism become impervious to scientific evidence, and commit intellectual suicide.

Even if all the doctrines of Bolshevism were true, this would still be the case, since no unbiased examination of them is tolerated.

The Marxian sees through this latter camouflage, but not through the former. To desire one’s own economic advancement is comparatively reasonable; to Marx, who inherited eighteenth-century rationalist psychology from the British orthodox economists, self-enrichment seemed the natural aim of a man’s political actions.

But modern psychology has dived much deeper into the ocean of insanity upon which the little barque of human reason insecurely floats.

The intellectual optimism of a bygone age is no longer possible to the modern student of human nature. Yet it lingers in Marxism, making Marxians rigid and Procrustean in their treatment of the life of instinct.

The desire for some form of superiority is common to almost all energetic men. No social system which attempts to thwart it can be stable, since the lazy majority will never be a match for the energetic minority.

What is called “virtue” is an offshoot of vanity: it is the habit of acting in a manner which others praise.

The operation of material conditions may be illustrated by the statement (Myers’s Dawn of History) that four of the greatest movements of conquest have been due to drought in Arabia, causing the nomads of that country to migrate into regions already inhabited.

The only possible way by which politicians as a class can be improved is the political and psychological education of the people, so that they may learn to detect a humbug.

In England men have reached the point of suspecting a good speaker, but if a man speaks badly they think he must be honest.

Unfortunately, virtue is not so widely diffused as this theory would imply.

it is the patent lesson of the present condition of Russia. The Bolshevik theory is that a small minority are to seize power, and are to hold it until Communism is accepted practically universally, which, they admit, may take a long time.

But power is sweet, and few men surrender it voluntarily.

It is especially sweet to those who have the habit of it, and the habit becomes most ingrained in those who have governed by bayonets, without popular support.

But the truth in social questions is not quite like truth in physiology or physics, since it depends upon men’s beliefs.

Optimism tends to verify itself by making people impatient of avoidable evils; while despair, on the other hand, makes the world as bad as it believes it to be.

It is therefore imperative for those who do not believe in Bolshevism to put some other hope in its place.

Wherever, as in barbarous or semi-civilized countries, labour is too weak or too disorganized to protect itself, appalling cruelties are practised for private profit. Economic and political organizations become more and more vast, leaving less and less room for individual development and initiative.

It is this sacrifice of the individual to the machine that is the fundamental evil of the modern world.

To cure this evil is not easy, because efficiency is promoted, at any given moment, though not in the long run, by sacrificing the individual to the smooth working of a vast organization, whether military or industrial.

I do not believe any one evil can be thus isolated, but if I had to select one as the greatest of political evils,

I should select inequality of power.

And I should deny that this is likely to be cured by the class-war and the dictatorship of the Communist party. Only peace and a long period of gradual improvement can bring it about.

No tone can blame them for this, since the work of government must be carried on; but it is one of the ways in which class distinctions have reappeared where it was intended that they should be banished.

I talked to an obviously hungry working man in Moscow, who pointed to the Kremlin and remarked: “In there they have enough to eat.”

He was expressing a widespread feeling which is fatal to the idealistic appeal that Communism attempts to make.

To face the hostility of the world may show heroism, but it is a heroism for which the country, not its rulers, has to pay the price.

In the principles of Bolshevism there is more desire to destroy ancient evils than to build up new goods; it is for this reason that success in destruction has been so much greater than in construction.

The desire to destroy is inspired by hatred, which is not a constructive principle. From this essential characteristic of Bolshevik mentality has sprung the willingness to subject Russia to its present martyrdom.