Every party which aspires to govern is in danger from the moment that it attains power. The danger of the Communist Party is. something more than this universal peril. A peculiar and local peril assails it. It inherits power in a country which had the worst governing tradition in Europe. Insensibly its members remember how the rulers of Russia used to behave. All around them are men and women who expect no high standard of conduct in their rulers. The gravest of all dangers that confront the new Dictators of Russia is that they may gradually adopt the attitude of the old bureaucracy towards the masses beneath it. Russians have for years been complaining of the growth of what they call "bureaucracy" under the Soviet system. The word has a meaning which is strange to us. It includes, no doubt, what we call the habit of "red tape"-the operations of a dull but conscientious mind, which works by rule and will not bring either sympathy, or imagination, or even common sense to the interpretation of the codes which it has to apply. This is an evil in Russia as else-where; the apparatus is too rigid, too cumbersome, too expensive, too slow, too much given to wasting time and money in the pursuit of a devious routine. A simple decision must be reviewed by innumerable departments, and all of them work with exasperating deliberation.
But Russians mean a good deal more than this by "bureaucracy"-though this is bad enough. They mean, first of all, the attitude of the official who regards the common mortals with whom he has to deal as an inferior species, for whom he will take no trouble and to whom he owes neither courtesy nor attention. This type of official is always busy with something more important, and tells you to call again. He is the favorite butt of popular humor, and I saw a farce which satirized him (or, as it happened, "her") to the immense delight of an audience which had evidently suffered. Even I, though Russians are habitually almost over-courteous to foreigners, met with this personage-but only once, and then only in a comparatively humble post. For it is the minor officials who are most prone to this disease of uncomfortable vanity. At his worst, this type of official passes from indifference to insolence, and from insolence, when he realizes how soft and yielding is the human material below him, to predatory habits. The governor, in Gogol's irresistible comedy, The Inspector-General, expected the merchants of his town to supply him with vast sugar loaves and bottles of champagne, and to feel honored that they might serve so great a man. I have heard of a Soviet official in just such another little provincial town (it was not Vladimir) who would order what he wanted in the local shops on the understanding that the bill was a mere formality. The same person expected the young women clerks in the service to buy promotion or security of tenure with their favors. He survived for some time, trading on the timidity of some and the servility of others, and profiting by the boundless tolerance and the habitual passivity which distinguishes Russians from Western races. Much against the advice of his friends young man who had more courage than the rest, lodged a complaint at headquarters, and, after prolonged enquiries, not this man only but the whole group of like-minded officials whom he had gathered round him, were cleared out of their posts. In countries where sheep are numerous and watchdogs few, wolves will multiply and flourish.
The foundation of all these scandals, great and small, is the timidity and fatalism of the Russian people. Centuries of experience taught them to expect such conduct in officials. Even after the Revolution they do not realize their power to secure redress, and, if they are not members of the all-powerful Communist Party, they may be pardoned for their failure to realize it. For, undoubtedly, that Party did in effect set up a sort of collective autocracy which differed, indeed, in aim and in its regard for the interests of the masses, from the autocracy of Czardom, but was in practice as little responsible to public opinion. The similarity under the vast difference was, indeed, so striking that a Moscow theatre has actually produced an up-to-date version of Gogol's comedy, under the title Comrade Kleshtakoff. But humor runs unweariedly on these lines. The Communists, however heavy their burdens may be, do constitute in the popular imagination a privileged class. I saw on a provincial stage one of the innumerable comic sketches which turn on this theme. The theme was an attempt by a young man to pass himself off as a Communist, in order to persuade a hesitating father to accept him as a son-in-law.
Nothing impressed me more, during my visit to Russia this year, than the evidence that the Communist Party is itself alive to the danger which it runs from this drift backwards into the traditional bureaucratic attitude. There is no vocal opposition to play watch dog, but the part has been assumed by the Party's official organ, Pravda. It is unsparing in its denunciation of these and similar abuses, and it carries on an unceasing campaign against the servility and passivity which render these abuses possible. But it has gone far beyond the mere writing of leading articles. It has fostered a very singular institution, whose growth suggests that society in Russia is spontaneously evolving its own appropriate organs of democracy. I have described the fortnightly paper, The Spur, published by and for the workers of the Three Hills Factory in Moscow. It had two columns in which sundry grievances and abuses of factory life were discussed by the workers themselves in free and caustic language. One of them urged that the fact that one of the machines was lying idle was a sign of inefficient management. Another assailed a fore-man by name, because he expected one of the girls under him, who was on piece work, to leave her tasks to make tea for him; not only did he degrade her by making her his lackey, but he robbed her in this way of part of her earnings. In every factory newspaper there are similar columns, and the graver charges find their way into the general provincial press and even into the big newspapers of the capital cities. The workmen who take it upon themselves to write in this fearless way about factory life (and indeed, about the administration generally) are known as rab. corrs (workers' correspondents). They are almost what the Tribunes of the Plebs were in ancient Rome, privileged critics of the rulers and champions of the common people. Their status is so far recognized that they enjoy a certain immunity, and when, as happened lately, an angry official murdered a rab. corr who had criticized him, he was tried, not for murder, but on the graver capital charge of a counter-revolutionary attempt.
It is obvious that an editor who prints these criticisms assumes a heavy responsibility. Pravda maintains a big organization for investigating the charges and criticisms in the letters which reach it, employing for this purpose sometimes its own correspondents, and sometimes the machinery of the local party, or the Works Council of the factory concerned. It has on its books no less than 300,000 of these rab. corrs all over the country, and recently organized a Conference to work out the methods which they should follow. At the head of the permanent staff which attends to this department it has placed one of the most promising of the younger literary men of Russia, who, it is interesting to note, is not him-self a party, member. It can print only a small selection from the letters which reach it, but all of them are analyzed and noted, and periodical reports based upon them are sent up to the departments and institutions which they concern. In this way Pravda is able to supply the administration with a living and sensitive mirror of public opinion. The men who administer the Dictatorship know in this way "where the shoe pinches" and also what aspirations and ambitions for the common good are taking shape among the working masses. I heard of instances in which important new legislation, or vital amendments to legislation, had their origin in. these reports. The method now adopted for levying the tax on the peasants' produce was first suggested in this way. To all this activity Pravda rightly gives full publicity, so that the too timid and passive Russian public is encouraged by continual proofs that public opinion plays its part, even under the Dictator-ship.
Nor is this the only method of focusing public opinion which has grown up in recent years. In addition to the printed weekly or fortnightly factory newspapers, every institution which has many workers, and even every department of a big institution, has its wall news-paper. This is a big sheet which contains articles, verses; water-color sketches, or cartoons by the staff-usually by its junior members. One sees these outlets for high spirits not only in factories, but in the solemn corridors of the Foreign Office, in schools, in village clubs, and even in barracks. Humor predominates, which turns sometimes on public affairs and sometimes on the domes-tic concerns of the institution. In these sheets also grievances find expression and satire has full rein, even at the expense of seniors and chiefs. The resolutions adopted at Trade Union Conferences, which are apt to range freely over a very wide field, are another useful indication of public feeling. Finally, there are the amendments to the Party Program adopted at election meetings (see Chapter III, p. 42). These should be, and often are, a useful guide to the Soviets at the base of the pyramid, and serve to show what modifications in the policy of the Party would be acceptable to public opinion. They would be a more serviceable guide, if the discussions at these meetings were less hurried than they usually are.
In watching these developments and in talking to leading Communists, the conviction grew in my mind that a subtle change has been coming over the Party in recent years. In no sense has the Dictatorship been relaxed. No one within its ranks dreams as yet of tolerating any organized opposition outside it. Of all political tendencies and opinions which it considers "counter-revolutionary," it would say what Burke said on one occasion of Paine's views-it would leave them to the refutation of criminal justice. It made a Revolution by force and, without shame or concealment, it maintains it by force. In the early phases of the Revolution it was a ruthless, reckless, and almost alien force, which broke in upon the slow course of Russia's native development to upset it and divert it, and to reshape it according to a foreign Marxist pattern. In those days it stood above the mass, bending it to its own will, and struggling against nature to impose in hot haste its own plan of a Socialist Commonweal. One must have seen it at work, as I did, during the phase of militant communism, to realize with what stubborn heroism-or, if you will, with what rash disregard of common prudence -it pursued this amazing adventure in social creation. today, it seems to me, it has come to think of itself more modestly, as the servant of the people and the interpreter and executant of its will. I was startled to hear one of the three or four men who form the thinking of the ruling caste say, in the most natural way in the world, without emphasis or self-consciousness, that the Party (he was talking German) is the "Sprachrohr" (speaking tube or mouthpiece) of the people. It seeks to divine what the people desire. And though it tries (as every Party which is more than an opportunist group must try) to modify and shape public opinion, it does realize (as it hardly did at first) that the assent, if not the active demand, of the masses is a necessary condition for its own creative activity. It watches anxiously, above all during elections, for any sign that the masses are becoming indifferent to its efforts. It would feel a sense of defeat and dissatisfaction, if a listless public were to leave it to do its dictating without sharing in its work. There was at one time a good deal of truth in the epigram that the Dictatorship of the proletariat is in reality a dictatorship of the Communists over the proletariat. I doubt whether this saying would be a fair epitome of Russian political life today. The dictators have developed sensitive ears; they listen in the intervals between issuing their decrees.
At Vladimir I was very kindly allowed to attend a private meeting of delegates from all the branches of the Communist Party in the County, which discussed the results of the elections that had just been concluded. It was a meeting of comrades who knew and trusted each other. Nearly all of them, including the chairman, an able and commanding personality, were, or had been, manual workers; indeed, I came across only two "intellectuals," a doctor and a teacher. Many of them had graduated in Czarist prisons, though few of them seemed to be much above middle age. The discussion was orderly, but informal and good natured, and occasionally was enlivened by a joke which set the whole meeting rocking with laughter. In its election campaign, here as elsewhere, the Party had a single object-to induce the largest possible number of electors to go to the polls. The reckoning was that if a voter is hostile or indifferent; he will not trouble to attend the election meeting. If, on the other hand, he can be induced to attend, one may assume some degree of sympathetic interest on his part in the objects which the Soviets are pursuing. The Party had attained its object. While only fifty percent of the electors attended last year, the attendance this year was seventy-six percent.
Even more interesting was the effort which the Party had made to bring "new blood" into the Soviets. No less than sixty-nine percent of the members elected to the town Soviets were sitting for the first time, and in the villages the percentage was still higher-seventynine. Here the intention was to diffuse active participation in the practical work of government as widely as possible. This is no new aim, but it has been followed this year, not only in Vladimir but generally, with greater boldness than usual. The aim is now to broaden the base of the Dictatorship-more citizens are to sup-port it by voting; more are to serve it by sharing in the administration; more are to partake in it through the big recent increase in the national membership of the Party.
I gathered from the discussion that propaganda for the election had started earlier than usual. The Communist Youth had been busy and the press active; the cooperative shops had wrapped up their goods in leaf-lets. Much had been achieved through soldiers of the Red Army, who wrote letters to their parents in the villages. Plays had been organized, and clubs decorated. On the election day, in one village, while the mothers went to the meeting, the women arranged the cradles in a row so ingeniously that ten of them could be rocked by one string. The interest, as one speaker put it, was so intense that even the fire brigade, which is always asleep when fire breaks out, was for once wide awake.
The reasons which various speakers assigned for the success are worth recording. Everyone agreed that part of it was due to the rally of public opinion to the Government and the Party as the result of the menacing Note from Sir Austen Chamberlain. Next came the enthusiasm for the progress of the revolution in China. (These causes, be it noted, had operated in villages and little towns in the heart of peasant Russia. Undoubtedly interest in international affairs is far keener in Russia than in any other European land.) Next in order it was agreed that the vote reflected satisfaction with the material progress of the community and the general well-being. The growth in membership of the Communist Party was another factor making for success. And lastly (note the recurrence of the Sprachrohr (mouthpiece) theme) it was claimed that the Party had rightly understood and carried out the wishes of the workers and peasants.
Two further points are worth noting from the discussion. One speaker said that the Party had won the gratitude of the peasants for the merciless campaign which it had carried on to suppress bribery and drunkenness in the villages. Two speakers reported that the Kulaks (literally "hardfists," i. e., the richer peasants who "speculate," lend money in advance of the harvest, and sometimes employ hired labor) were strongly organized, had taken an active part in the elections, but had been defeated after a hard struggle.
Among the reports of its work which the Vladimir Party gave me, was one which showed its anxiety to study the minds and the wishes of the people whose shepherd it was. In one big district (uyezd) it had carried out a house to house enquiry to discover what chiefly interested the inhabitants. Fifty percent replied "the theatre and the cinema;" twenty-three percent said "lectures and political meetings;" the rest did not answer. Then they were asked whether they were attached to the soil and wished to continue to lead a peasant life. Some thirty percent answered "yes," chiefly because they wished to have a security for old age. But no less than seventy percent would wish to be free from the ties which at present bind them to the land and the village. What impressed me was that the report did not pause to consider whether the wholesale transfer of the population to industry was desirable in the national interest. It at once assumed that, if the people had a wish, that wish must be carried out. It went on, accordingly, to discuss how a big increase of the permanent factory population could be provided for, by accelerating the housing schemes and speeding up cooperative building. These surely are the most solicitous and obedient of dictators.
What, then, shall we say of this Dictatorship which broadens its base, keeps its ears open, thinks of itself as the mouthpiece of the masses, and begins to cultivate tact? Is it destined to a gradual disappearance? Is it fading, into a rather original, but still genuine, form of democracy? That, I think would be a rash and precipitate conclusion to draw from the facts. I should say rather that the Dictatorship will behave, and is, indeed, behaving already remarkably like a democracy, but only because it retains, means to retain, and will retain absolute power in the hands of its governing Party. That Party may make a habit of yielding gracefully and compromising in the grand manner; it may choose to obey the voice of the people. But it will always insist on collecting that voice in its own specially prepared receivers. If it yields, it will seem to yield spontaneously. It will never submit major issues to a free election, nor permit an opposition to rally its citizens against it. Within these limits, it would, I think, be true to say that many of the fruits of democracy may be enjoyed. Even democrats who insisted that the voice of the people was the voice of God, have held themselves entitled to interpret the sacred text. The Communists deny God, but they too are learning to obey the voice-when they choose to hear it.
The Dictatorship, after all, can survive only under certain favorable conditions. The town population, or at least the organized workers within it, including the railway men, must remain true to the Soviets. Experience has proved that, fighting on internal lines, a party which has behind it the massed industrial population of Central Russia can, in the long run, dominate the rest of its vast area. Again, it is a sine qua non that any con-script army raised within this central area must be loyal. That presupposes that the town workers have moral ascendancy enough to lead at least the younger generation of peasants. A dictatorship which must conform to these conditions has something in common with a democracy. It rests on the consent of that part of the people which is strategically important.
The other indispensable condition for the exercise of the Dictatorship lies in the fundamental rule of the Communist Party. It is a formidable instrument for action, because it requires and receives absolute obedience from all its members to every decision which its elected congress has taken. The consequence of this rule is that controversies which have once been thrashed out within the Party are not revived within the Soviets. The Party may abandon itself for a time to a hot and unrestrained debate over a big political issue, as it did last year on the questions raised by Trotsky and his group. The controversy rages in the Party press. It may give rise to a war of books and pamphlets. It may be actually the one topic which interests every intelligent man and woman in Russia. But, until the Party has made up its mind, the issue will not be raised within the Soviets in any form that challenges a decision. And after the Party has decided, the action for which its decision calls will be prescribed by the Soviets as a matter of course. The beaten minority of the Party will not merely sit silent while the arguments of the majority are repeated in the formal Soviet debates; it will actually vote for the course which up to this point it has done its utmost to oppose. Failing the observance of this rule, the Dictatorship would collapse. If the discipline of the Party were so far forgotten that a beaten Communist minority were to renew the struggle in the Soviets and appeal to the nonpartisan members for support, the tradition of its responsibility for government must first have disappeared. This rule is so axiomatic to Communists that they accept its consequences as the only natural state of things. I happened to remark to a veteran member of the Party that, so far as I had observed, the all-important issue of the reduction of prices, which had been the center of contention in the Trotsky controversy, was never really discussed at the elections to the Soviets. If it was mentioned at all, the references were brief and never went beyond the vaguest and most general language. But that's a Party question," was his answer, delivered in a tone of slightly pained surprise.
Here, then, one comes to the real core of the Dictatorship and the secret of the Communist Party's ascendancy. It reserves the real decision on big issues of policy to its own ranks. It can guard itself against the premature emergence, or the undesired revival, of these capital issues in the Soviets, because it can trust its members to be loyal in the letter and the spirit to their vow of obedience. Again, a peculiarity of the Soviet system renders it possible for it to exclude such issues from popular debate at the elections and yet to keep some life in these annual festivals of unanimity. These elections do not seem a mere farce, for they do result in the choice of men and women who will carry on the actual work of administration in the lower Soviets, in accordance with the views of the masses. It is, after all, this work of administration that the average man can observe. It requires some imagination to grasp the importance of the deliberative work done at the center. Thanks to the intricacies of the system of indirect election, the average man is never rudely reminded of his impotence to influence the decision in these major issues. He chooses men and women to do his work for him. They in turn choose others to do their thinking for them. It looks like a simple and shipshape arrangement. The fountain of power seems to spring from the factory and the village. Nor is that a mere delusion. For while the Party keeps the vital decisions in its own disciplined hands, it knows very well that it must contrive, at its peril, to keep factory and village loyal and contented. On the administrative side, at least, this is much more nearly "government of the people by the people" than any other system which obtains in Europe. And I doubt whether the average Russian citizen [The average citizen is, of course, a worker or a peasant. The intellectuals undoubtedly feel their impotence acutely.] is deeply troubled because he is never invited to decide at the polls whether foreign imports should be taxed, or whether a Zinoviev letter is a menace or a forgery.
To what extent is this average Russian citizen irked or depressed by the Dictatorship? I attempt an answer to this question with diffidence. If a foreigner could ever answer it with confidence, it would be only after spending some years in Russia in some position which brought him into daily confidential intimacy with workers and peasants-for these are the average citizens. I have had no such advantages. I can form my impressions only from chance talks with workers whom I rarely met more than once. But I have been startled several times by the natural and spontaneous way in 'which a worker would say, when summing up the gains and losses of the Revolution, "Besides, we are free." He would say it, indeed, without emphasis, as if it were a thing which everyone knew, and no one could possibly doubt. In trying to think oneself into this state of mind, one has to cross many countries. Behind our own views of personal freedom and democratic rights lies a long evolution which Russians wholly escaped. Human beings do not spontaneously resent government by dictation. To accept it is, indeed, the natural and habitual attitude of our species. That part of it which inhabited the two shores of the Atlantic has recently (for, in the life of instinct and emotion, three centuries is a brief span) acquired another outlook. It arrived at it after opening its mind to a series of revolutionary influences some economic, some religious, some philosophical, which all tended, to elevate the Western conception of the sanctity and importance of the individual. There were none of these self-conscious individuals in Babylon or Egypt. The Catholic Church did not breed them. They are the children first of the Reformation, then of Whig philosophy, and finally of the French Revolution. These movements, we are apt, in our insolent Western way, to regard as epochs in the history of mankind. They were much less than that. None of them touched Russia. It is true, indeed, that a few persons of eccentric modernity at the court of Peters-burg had read Voltaire and Rousseau before they died. It is true that, after barbaric Russia had hurled back the Napoleonic invasion, the minute literate class began to read, first French, and then German philosophy. They had less influence on the mass of workers and peasants, than the much larger class in India which has received a Western education, has yet had upon the mass of Indian peasants. There was never in Russia any percolation downwards of the philosophic and religious individual-ism which in the West took such deep root in the working class. For, in the West, Protestantism, and especially Protestant dissent, had carried these ideas to ploughmen and tinkers. And what the Churches may have left unfinished the Trade Unions completed.
The Russian masses were immune from all such influences. They read nothing; indeed, they could not read. The Orthodox Church went on repeating the mystic other-worldliness of the dark ages. And the Trade Unions, when they did at last begin to influence the elite of the urban workers, brought with them not the individualism of French "philosophy" and English radicalism, but a rigid form of Marxism. This doctrine looked at mankind in the mass and taught the worker to think of himself, not as a human individual who had a title to certain personal rights, but rather as a member of a class to which he owed "solidarity." For nearly three generations English workers were absorbed in the struggle to win the Parliamentary vote, which appeared to them to be a badge of their individual human dignity. When the Russian workers began to struggle in grim earnest, it was to win power for their class organization, the Soviet. If English workers have since turned to Socialism, they retain, none the less, much of the exalted conception of the individual's rights and of his standing in the eyes of God and his fellow-men, which their fore-fathers drank in, with heads bowed in prayer, or learned to sing to the words of Robert Burns. This respect for the individual can be reconciled with the spirit of West-ern Socialism. To Russian Communists it seems merely a relic of "bourgeois mentality"-a true diagnosis, in the sense that it was the middle-class revolution which first conquered the world for these conceptions of a humane democracy.
These reflections may seem trite and superfluous. But, in asking oneself what is the state of mind of the average man of another race and civilization, it is important to ascertain not merely what ideas his mind contains, but also what ideas are missing from its storehouse. The democratic individualist ideas never penetrated to the mass soul of the Russian workers. It leaped, skipping the long historic preparation through which the West had passed, from the primitive villager's view of life, which like the village itself, had remained unchanged for half a dozen centuries, suddenly and with blood-shot eyes, amid perils and excitements, to a highly doctrinaire and abstract form of Socialism. Why then, should this average worker and peasant resent the lack of democratic liberties, for which he had never sighed or struggled?
The tragedy of Russia is that, while the conquering working class had escaped this democratic evolution, the minute intellectual class, nurtured on a great and humane literature and familiar with the thought of the West, had passed very thoroughly through it. It, assuredly, had sighed for freedom and struggled gallantly to win it. It-or a great part of it-feels itself injured and insulted by a dictatorship which despises the fundamental liberties. Part of it has rallied to the dictator-ship because, on the whole, it aims at many of the concrete ends which humanitarian Socialism pursues. But part of it remains in the shadow, dejected and disappointed. But again, we must not, by following Western analogies uncritically, exaggerate its influence. Its ideas do not percolate down to the mass, as, in the West, the ideas of the middle-class usually do-and this for two all-important reasons. It enjoys no economic influence, for it is no longer an employing class, nor the associate and ally of an employing class. Nor has it the command of a press. The Dictatorship uses that instrument to make the thinking of the masses, and uses it with entire success. To speak of newspapers alone, its journals have more than twice the circulation which the whole Russian newspaper press possessed before the Revolution. The average mind cannot resist its daily influence, and feels (if I guess rightly) small inclination to struggle against it. Its very instincts of inertia are enlisted in support of the Soviet system. For, with whatever jolts and jars and losses and privations, that system works. To the average unimaginative man it has the supreme merit of existing. The rebel is always the imaginative man, and it requires an effort of the imagination in modern Russia to conceive any other system. Memory, indeed, can recall Czardom, but who would restore that?
But a candid mind, must, I think, go further. The Dictatorship in Russia was the inevitable outcome of her tragic history. The economic collapse, the daily misery of the mass, the shame of defeat in the field, and the weakness of the politicians who tried during 1917 to find a solution in compromise, left no way open save catastrophic upheaval. When once the follies and failures of the past have set to any society the problem of embarking on a rapid and thorough-going reconstruction of its foundations, Liberalism has no technique to offer it. The democratic idea came to life in close alliance with the doctrine of laissez-faire. For, while the middle-class, to free itself from the oppressions of feudalism, put forward its claims to civil liberty and a wider suffrage, it was far from supposing that the State would be better able, thanks to these reforms, to play a creative part in shaping the destinies of society. It would be more nearly true to say that typical liberals intended by these innovations to disarm the State. Even the democratic vote was conceived by them rather as a defense against undesired interference, than as a means of ensuring rapid and fundamental change. They hoped, above all, that it would sweep away the last obstacles of the feudal tradition which hampered the free play of their own individual initiative as traders and manufacturers. The State was for them merely the door-keeper of the vast arena in which economic forces, personal energies, and self-regarding motives should have free play. That generation may have understood the implications of Liberalism rather better than its modern professors, who have discarded laissez-faire. For the moment one realizes in an historic emergency that the State must not merely regulate but also create, and that amid fierce struggle and at break-neck speed, the mechanism of democracy seems ill-adapted to its task. Could the two-party system and the tradition of the political see-saw, which are common to both the British and the American systems, survive a resolute attempt to introduce fundamental change? Would it be reasonable to expect of any party, which had done what this Russian party did in its first months and years of power, that it should jeopardize the very basis of the new system by risking elections, which might bring its adversaries to the helm, and result in the undoing of all that it had achieved? So much the candid observer may admit. He has still the right to ask how long it may be necessary to prolong the Dictatorship. He may argue that it cannot last beyond some point, which will always be difficult to locate, without causing lasting injury to the mind and will of a people which submits to it. He may doubt whether a party which has learned to use these rough methods will ever have the greatness of mind to discard them. But again, if he is candid, he will recognize that the Russian Communists are, by devious ways, attaining some of the advantages which democracy ensures.
Next: Chapter 10: Perspectives