“O Liberty, what monstrous crimes are committed in thy great
    name!”

CHAPTER VII

BOLSHEVIST THEORY AND PRACTICE

I

Utopia-making is among the easiest and most fascinating of all intellectual occupations.  Few employments which can be called intellectual are easier than that of devising panaceas for the ills of society, of demonstrating on paper how the rough places of life may be made plain and its crooked ones made straight.  And it is not a vain and fruitless waste of effort and of time, as things so easy of achievement often are.  Many of the noblest minds of all lands and all ages have found pleasure and satisfaction in the imagining of ideal commonwealths and by so doing have rendered great service to mankind, enriching literature and, what is more important, stimulating the urge and passion for improvement and the faith of men in their power to climb to the farthest heights of their dreams.  But the material of life is hard and lacks the plastic quality of inspired imagination.  Though there is probably no single evil which exists for which a solution has not been devised in the wonderful laboratory of visioning, the perversity of the subtle and mysterious thing called life is such that many great and grave evils continue to challenge, perplex, and harass our humankind.

Yet, notwithstanding the plain lesson of history and experience, the reminder impressed on every page of humanity’s record, that between the glow and the glamour of the vision and its actual realization stretches a long, long road, there are many simple-minded souls to whom the vision gleamed is as the goal attained.  They do not distinguish between schemes on paper and ideals crystallized into living realities.  This type of mind is far more common than is generally recognized; that is why so many people quite seriously believe that the Bolsheviki have really established in Russia a society which conforms to the generous ideals of social democracy.  They have read the rhetorical “decrees” and “proclamations” in which the shibboleths of freedom and democracy abound, and are satisfied.  Yet it ought to be plainly evident to any intelligent person that, even if the decrees and proclamations were as sound as they are in fact unsound, and as definite as they are in fact vague, they would afford no real basis for judging Bolshevism as an actual experiment in social polity.  There is, in ultimate analysis, only one test to apply to Bolshevism—­namely, the test of reality.  We must ask what the Bolsheviki did, not what they professed; what was the performance, not what was the promise.