HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON On the Side of the Angels

...Chernov was elected President of the freely elected Constitutional Assembly on January 6. 1918, and it was he who prepared the first measures for the Socialization of Land...

...because the deciiiw force giving the minority the final victory wst tht peasantry...

...I felt tkat I was not doing rigkt iu keeping entirely te myself...

...I/AN LOON had more friends than any one I have ever known—and I mean friends, not mere acquaintances...

...They could not understand his purpose, and in the rare cases when they understood it, they regarded it as an attack upon true scholarship which should be "objective" and analytical...

...Victor Chernov at 70 — Portrait of a Socialist By Raohael Abramovitch CROM the early nineties of the latt century, the Rusaisn socialist movement and socialist ideology was divided into two main currents: the Narodniki and the Marriil...

...as its chief theoretician, he wrote innumerable articles and books on sociology, philosophy, agrarian problems, Marxism, syndicalism, etc...

...In sn sgt of career ism, spurious objectivity and materialism, he was a personal force for humanist values snd the City of Man We shall miss him, but it has been a joy V* share the color and the courage he brought to evt.y cause in which he believed...

...The time would come (of this I was absolutely certain) when Reason and Reaaonaklonoaa would need a few shock troops ef tkeir own, and I ronntdered that the Unitarian* Would be among the ¦rat te eaMat in seen an advene* »f Hantan l^#<nHowty« "Fat within that etrenge and Invisible struct«« which the weiU rather vaguely calls ( .olerlanis., there a room fer every thought and every opinion] if it he baaed neon the eeevinu...

...He had keen warned thst his "pump" was unable to keep up with his ethical and politicsl drive...

...t _____ ryIKING World War I Chernov participated in the anti-war conferences at Zimmerwald and Kientbal and was one of the signers of these historic manifestos...

...It wat a revealing remark—and 1 didn't know I had touched quite at raw s nerve...

...thst modern collectivism could not be established by a peasantry but could only be based on a large and well-organized urban proletariat...

...The Na-rodniki (Populists) represented a long-established tradition in the social and poitical thinking of the Russian "Intelligentsia," a tradition tracing from Herxen and Baku-nin, Lavrov amlMik-hailovsky to the Narodnaya Volya, and the terrorists who assassinated the Czar on March . 1, 1881...

...He gayly admitted the charges, and then with a sudden turn to a serious mood he added, "I'm not going to be a Heywood Broun—I've taken out insurance against that...

...THE ancient feud among Narodniki and Msrxittt in Russia was settled in a most peculiar and unexpected fashion: the Narodniki could claim a major theoretical victory because the Social Revolution tea* made by a revolutionary minority...

...W* certainly would have congratulated this valisnt and devoted old fighter for Freedom and Socialism w«« »• still an old ideological adversary...

...When 1 inquired who wrote the policy, he replied, "The Unitarians...

...A Zulu riding in a Rolls-Royce is still a Zulu," he ssid in Tolerance...

...I had lived my sixty yesrs without ever feeling the slighUsi aeed of becoming a member ef any kind •f religious organisation...

...Chernov and his psrty refused to recognise l^nin't government, which had overthrown the democratically elected National Assembly, and during the Civil War which followed, Chernov and a majority of the Constitutional Assembly formed in the Urals a third government against the Reds and the Whites...

...The professional historians are perhaps the outstanding academic illustration of the utterly barren "specialization" that grew like a cancer in our universities after the middle of the 'nineteenth century...

...There was probably no group less fitted by its professional deformation to understand his purpose or his achievement...

...Little more than a month before he died, a small group of us offered him a birthday lunch, and at the table talk ranged from medieval eccletiasti-cal snecdotet to Dutch colonial policy...

...He was the chief editor of the party's periodicals, a member of its Central Committee, a delegate to the Socialist International before the World War and after...

...In a sense, of course, hit whole life was a protest against the Ca'vinist milieu in which he grew up—against its stiff bourge< is conventions, its financial art, its official professors...

...In the light of this development, which will be o( increasing importance to world labor in the yean *• come, the oW "foe" of the Russian Marxists, Victor Chernov, is increasingly a friend and comrade...

...He knew he was working himsell to death...

...It wat a sermon worth preaching, and in the most effective Calvinist style, even if the vocabulary and the imagery were unorthodox...

...that Russia, consequently, must pass through the stage of industrial capitalism and politicsl democracy before facing the problems of Socialism...

...Ht succeeded in delivering his speech and escaping befort the Chekists were able to reach him through the densely packed crowd...

...1 probably won't go very often, but I like their work abroad for the refugees...

...But living in a world dominated by Adolf Hitler was "worse than all the rhumbs ing hearts in the world"—at he wrote to the chairman of the National War Fund in accepting an invitation to take part in the New York drive latt fall—and to he kept on journeying to New York tor this cause and that...

...that mankind can save itself only if it accent* the were* ef the greatest spiritual benefactor ef all time, that humble bet undaunted prophet from the village ef BetkWhcsi, who tret ef all had the courage to proclaim these words: 'My brethren, nothing can ever he aeeompbukod iu this world unless, trst, yes leern te tovs eae another.' "It seems perhaps a Utile tee simple* But all the great things in life are really very simple...

...His friends are still trying to assess the full measure of their loss—for many months to come small groups will gather and say "That's something for Van Loon" to catch themselves with s new sharp sense of the los» we have all suffered in his premature death...

...I wat teasing him with the frequency with which he teemed to slip into a secular venioa of h i aneettral Calvinism...

...that any genuins revolution in Russia could never be accomplished by a revolutionary minority, however heroic, but only by the organised working class as a whole...

...They're on the tide of the angels—and that't where I want to be on the books, to there won't be any mistake about it afterward...

...But there was only one meeting of the Assembly—it was forcibly dissolved by tht Bolsheviks—and Chernev's child, the Socialization of Lend, the long cherished dream of the Narodniki, wat snatched awsy from his hands by I^nin and adopted, without any changes, by the Soviet Government, which issued it as its first decree...

...He wss as Dutch as they make them—although the Dutch "intellectuals" had as much difficulty with his universalism as their American colleagues—and at the same time he had somehow made himself into a receiver snd a sender of the richest values of traditional A meriea...

...In personality he was a cross between hit own hero Erasmus and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac— but the world insisted on sending his books to professors of history for reviews...

...because it was a "proletarian' dictatorship Uitt succeeded in subjugating 150 million Russian pestsntt...

...The Narodniki believed that Socialism in Russia would be based on the peasantry and led by a revolution minority composed of intellectuals...

...Resders of The New Leader know that his pet peeve in recent months was an irritable resction to the advertising trades assumption that the pottwsr world would be s paradise because it would have stresmlined motors, plastic houses snd babies wrapped in cellophane...

...Chernov abandoned the Siberian Committee, in which the Whites under Admiral Kolchak later became dominant, and returned to- Soviet Russia where he was forced to live illegally, sought by the Ckeka, the forerunner of the GPU...

...In this ideological snd political struggle between Narodniki and Marxists, a man who played an important historical role is Victor Chernov, the leading writer, publicist and theoretician of the "Russian Social-Revolutionary party for the past 45 years, and now a resident of New York...

...They had the type of ability that might have corrected Van Loon's footnotes...

...HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON On the Side of the Angels By Harry D. Gideonse HE worked himself to death They rave him • funeral in Old Greenwich, marked—at the New York ritwiea said— with "quiet splendor...

...After the 1917 revolution he returned to Russia snd became Minister of Agriculture in the Kerensky government...

...Then came the inevitable exile—in Berlin, Prague, Paris...

...On his 70th birthday, an erect and vigorous fighter, we weleome snd gr*** -him in mutual harmony and friendship...

...because it was a Marxian government that accomplished the Narodnik idea of lend localisation...

...Fundamentally a secular preacher of humanist values —a moralist, if you please, although he would not have approved the term—he was always spotlighting the individual, the unique force of personality, and the ' color snd Variety of esthetic and moral choice...

...But it soon becsme evident— as our Social Democratic Party predicted -that thert wss no way of totm'mg an effective "third power" which could successfully fight against the Bolsheviks aid tht Whites...

...Still the man wss lonely, in a deep and modern sense...

...When the Menahevik-controlled Union of Typographical Workers of Moscow in the Summer of 1920 arranged a reception for the British Trsde Union delegation, the crowd of more than 5,000-and the Cheka officers who were watching this "dangerous" meeting—were startled when Victor Chernov suddenly appeared on the podium as one of the sneaker...

...The old divergences of opinion between the Ruiii»» Social Revolutionaries and the Russian Social Democrats have lost their former meaning, for tince tin victory of Bolshevism a new demarcation line hst bees established—the line between the demccrstic Socislii* snd dictatorial Socialism, which in fact is no Socislit* nt all but a totalitarian regime based on s tUt« economy...

...But the Marxists of the Lenin vsritty could claim a "victory" too, because it wst a minority composed of "orthodox" Marxists who made the Narodniki revolution...

...He was gifted in a dosen ways—in his drawings, in his music, in his homely writing, in the best "table talk" I have ever shared, and in a dynamic ethical idealism that wss the closest link between his Dutch background and the secular culture of modern America...

...Russian Marxism, introduced by Plekhanov and Axel-rod, and developed by their pupils Lenin, Potressov, Martov snd others, rejected the Nsdroniki conceptions at Utopian, "subjectivistic" snd based on pre-capitalistic conditions...

...The son of a poor peasant, Victor Chernov studied at the Moscow University and joined the revolutionary movement as a young boy...

...He knew that he was living on borrowed time, and be wst aware of hit responsibility even as a tymbol after hit death...

...In that framework, Hendrik William Van Loon wat a twentieth-century version of the classical type...

...But his spirit was unbroken...

...A brilliant writer, an eloquent speaker and an indefatigable student, he soon became one of the leading spirits of the movement...

...At a historic fcrce, however, Calvinism had little to do with the money-proud upper crust but it wat the faith of small folks who looked for "works" rather than theological niceties, who bated their theology on a deep tuspicion of human cuisedness which they called "original tin," and who interpreted s predestination that might have led others to a hedonistic fatalism as a call to "work for the night it coming when man's work is done...

...Van Loon had a passion for synthesis, for pulling things together again, for the universal and the humanistic...

...Van Loona books sold some six million copies and he wat a rival to H. G. Wells in his contributions to a modern popular encyclopedia but the full success of his enterprise in terms of its own criteria of schievement, never quite reconciled him with the academic reception of his work...

...In a sense Van I/Oon spent his life on a mission to the folk "with sound parish views...

...It led him to a constant conflict with the prevailing technolog-ism and its materialist postulates...

...Hendrik Willem Van I/oon wes a master of th« simple, in his own grand sense of the word...

...Chernov wanted neither the Bolsheviks nor the reactionaries and monarchists to rule Russia...

...because Russia did jump from a semi-feudil regime to collectivism without passing through s capitalist stag...

...I've joined a church, man...

...e | ET me conclude with a few paragraphs from a statement he wrote less than a year ago (April IMS) explaining his new affiliation with the Unitarians: "I think we shall understand each ether better if I explain, in a few wares, why last year I Joined Ike friendly society of my fellow Unitarians...

...They asserted that Russia cannot leap from a feudal-type society directly to Socialism...

...From France he escaped to safety in the United States...

...Partly it was the reenh ef having ebaerved the behavior ef a number of the young Unitarians wfca rendered sorb magnitWent services te tke cause ef kumanity In Nasi-strkkea Europe- But my main consideration was or a sligktly different nature...