The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav MovementPetrunkevitch, Alexander
History
The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement
Petrunkevitch, Alexander
Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921; Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1917-1936; Yugoslavs
important evidence in his possession. It is also a remarkable fact that
the majority of the present leaders are known broadly only under
assumed names. Lenine's true name is Uljanov, Trotzky's--Bronstein,
Zinoviev's--Apfelbaum, Sukhanov's--Gimmer, Kamenev's--Rosenfeld,
Steklov's--Nakhamkis, and a number of others whose identity is not
even always known. Trotzky's assertion that the Workmen's and Soldiers'
Government is a government of workingmen, soldiers, and peasants is
therefore nothing but a perversion of facts.
There is, however, nothing extraordinary in the fact itself that
intellectuals are the real leaders of all Russian parties. Better
education and wider knowledge of the affairs of the world have always
appealed to the dark masses who realize only dimly their own desires and
grasp at any concrete formulation of reforms which contains a tangible
promise or seems to express those desires. At the same time they often
put their own meaning into the words of their leaders, which is true
even of factory workers in the larger cities. As for the peasants,
representing about 90 per cent of the entire population, they are still
very poorly educated, questions of national import remain outside their
horizon, and even their language is not the language of the educated
Russian, inasmuch as it lacks the rich vocabulary of modern life and
is devoid of the very conceptions to which this vast treasury of words
applies. Their mind, great as it is in its potentialities, still moves
in the furrows of familiar ideas abhorring things too much at variance
with inherited traditions or actual experience. Yet in the turmoil of
revolutionary activity the peasants are going to have their say and
may become the decisive factor, because they are voters and are casting
their votes for those leaders whose words they believe to contain the
greatest promise and the least menace of a general disruption of their
accustomed mode of life.
We are thus brought back, for the present at least, to the necessity
of recognizing that even the state of anarchy under which Russia is
laboring, even the rule of the renowned proletariat so much trumpeted
about by Lenine and Trotzky, is in reality the work of intellectuals,
an answer of the masses to the call of their leaders, a groping for
principles beyond their perception.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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