Russia in the ShadowsWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Russia in the Shadows
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Communism -- Soviet Union; Soviet Union -- Social conditions
He is a young man who has come back from
unskilled work in America, a very likable human being and a humorous and
very popular speaker in the Petersburg Soviet. He and I exchanged
experiences, and I found that the thing that rankled most in his mind
about America was the brutal incivility he had encountered when applying
for a job as packer in a big dry goods store in New York. We told each
other stories of the way our social system wastes and breaks and maddens
decent and willing men. Between us was the freemasonry of a common
indignation.
It is that indignation of youth and energy, thwarted and misused, it is
that and no mere economic theorising, which is the living and linking
inspiration of the Marxist movement throughout the world. It is not that
Marx was profoundly wise, but that our economic system has been stupid,
selfish, wasteful, and anarchistic. The Communistic organisation has
provided for this angry recalcitrance certain shibboleths and passwords:
“Workers of the World unite,” and so forth. It has suggested to them an
idea of a great conspiracy against human happiness concocted by a
mysterious body of wicked men called capitalists. For in this mentally
enfeebled world in which we live to-day conspiracy mania on one side
finds its echo on the other, and it is hard to persuade a Marxist that
capitalists are in their totality no more than a scrambling disorder of
mean-spirited and short-sighted men. And the Communist propaganda has
knitted all these angry and disinherited spirits together into a
world-wide organisation of revolt—and hope—formless though that hope
proves to be on examination. It has chosen Marx for its prophet and red
for its colour.... And so when the crash came in Russia, when there
remained no other solidarity of men who could work together upon any but
immediate selfish ends, there came flowing back from America and the
West to rejoin their comrades a considerable number of keen and
enthusiastic young and youngish men, who had in that more bracing
Western world lost something of the habitual impracticability of the
Russian and acquired a certain habit of getting things done, who all
thought in the same phrases and had the courage of the same ideas, and
who were all inspired by the dream of a revolution that should bring
human life to a new level of justice and happiness. It is these young
men who constitute the living force of Bolshevism. Many of them are
Jews, because most of the Russian emigrants to America were Jews; but
few of them have any strong racial Jewish feeling. They are not out for
Jewry but for a new world. So far from being in continuation of the
Jewish tradition the Bolsheviks have put most of the Zionist leaders in
Russia in prison, and they have prescribed the teaching of Hebrew as a
“reactionary” language. Several of the most interesting Bolsheviks I met
were not Jews at all, but blonde Nordic men. Lenin, the beloved leader
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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