Those fanatics fell into another error; they were in a hurry, and would fain have effected their great transformation as by the waving of a magician’s wand.  Impatient of gradation, they scorned to traverse the distance between the point of departure and that of the goal, and by way of setting up the new social structure without delay, they rolled away all hindrances regardless of consequences.  In this spirit of absolutism they abolished the services of the national debt, struck out the claims of Russia’s creditors to their capital or interest, and turned the shops and factories over to labor boards.  That was the initial blunder which the ukase alluded to was subsequently issued to rectify.  But it was too late.  The equilibrium of the forces of production had been definitely upset and could no longer be righted.

One of the basic postulates of profitable production is the equilibrium of all its essential factors—­such as the laborer’s wages, the cost of the machinery and the material, the administration.  Bring discord into the harmony and the entire mechanism is out of gear.

The Russian workman, who is at bottom an illiterate peasant with the old roots of serfdom still clinging to him, has seldom any bowels for his neighbor and none at all for his employer.  “God Himself commands us to despoil such gentry,” is one of his sayings.  He is in a hurry to enrich himself, and he cares about nothing else.  Nor can he realize that to beggar his neighbors is to impoverish himself.  Hence he always takes and never gives; as a peasant he destroys the forests, hewing trees and planting none, and robs the soil of its fertility.  On analogous lines he would fain deal with the factories, exacting exorbitant wages that eat up all profit, and naively expecting the owner to go on paying them as though he were the trustee of a fund for enriching the greedy.  The only people to profit by the system, and even they only transiently, were the manual laborers.  The bulk of the skilled, intelligent, and educated artisans were held up to contempt and ostracized, or killed as an odious aristocracy.  That, it has been aptly pointed out,[280] is far removed from Marxism.  The Marxist doctrine postulates the adhesion of intelligent workers to the social revolution, whereas the Russian experimenters placed them in the same category as the capitalists, the aristocrats, and treated them accordingly.  Another Marxist postulate not realized in Russia was that before the state could profitably proceed to nationalization the country must have been in possession of a well-organized, smooth-running industrial mechanism.  And this was possible only in those lands in which capitalism had had a long and successful innings, not in the great Slav country of husbandmen.