Where the News Ends

...The many peasant uprisings against the Communists failed for lack of intelligent organization and modern weapons...

...The repressive nature of Tsarism was an important factor in the success of Communism...

...By obstructing the normal development of institutions of national and local self-government, by harassing trade-unions and even such moderate bodies as the zemstvos, Tsarism helped to create the political vacuum into which Lenin and his disciplined, fanatical party sprang...

...My correspondent argued vehemently that even Ivan the Terrible could be judged fairly only against the background of his time—the time of Henry VIII, the St...

...These questions were recalled to me by a long letter which I recently received from an American of Russian origin who obviously felt rather passionately on the subject...

...WHERE THE NEWS ENDS Reflections on the Russian Tragedy By William Henry Chamberlin The Russian tragedy, of course, lay in the replacement of an autocracy that was a byword for oppression and reaction by a dictatorship that has been far more brutal to its own subjects and a much greater threat to international peace...

...Pitiless terror is part of the answer, but not all of it...

...By its policy of suspicious repression, it turned many a constructive reformer into a violent Utopian revolutionary...

...But not the least of these causes was the profound division in the ranks of its enemies, a division which Lenin and his associates exploited with great skill...

...Let us hope that Russia, 1917-1921, will not in this respect be a preview of Europe and Asia, 1954-1957...

...There was no trust for the Whites, with their fantastic Great Russian chauvinism, among the Poles, Finns, Ukrainians, Caucasians and other peoples who wanted autonomy or independence...

...Bartholomew Massacre and many unsavory events in Western Europe...

...Decisive proof of the failure of Tsarism to hold the loyalty of any large number of the Russian people is the fact that during the years of the Civil War, when there was certainly widespread hatred of Communism, no White leader of any consequence proclaimed as his ideal the restoration of the Tsar...

...He had fought in the Imperial Russian Army for three years in the First World War and then in the White armies for three more years, and he had come out of it all a staunch upholder of the Tsarist system...

...One could sympathize with his emotional nostalgia...

...And he tried to portray modern Tsarism as an almost idyllic constitutional regime, with the Duma as a parliament and the Tsar's power "only slightly wider than that of the United States President...

...And it is true that, by such reasonable standards of comparison as numbers of executions, numbers of persons in concentration camps and completeness of intellectual regimentation, Tsarism in retrospect seems mild alongside the dictatorship of Lenin, Stalin and Malenkov...

...The blind utopianism of much Russian revolutionary thought, its exaggerated faith in the natural goodness of man was another...

...How did the Communists take power in the first place, hold it in a savage civil war fought under conditions of almost unimaginable cold, hunger and suffering, and then consolidate that power...

...There was no common feeling between the landlords and landlords' sons who were often officers in the White armies and the masses of peasants who wanted neither the return of the landlords nor the Communist requisitions...

...Perhaps the greatest of all the historical sins of the Tsarist system is that it paved the way for the triumph of Communism...

...There was also the amazingly successful appeal to class hatred and class envy, with which, I think, any student of the first years of the Soviet regime must be impressed...

...Very important??and this has great significance today ?? was the fateful division in the ranks of the anti-Communists...

...The Dumas, elected on an increasingly narrow and weighted franchise, were not truly representative and had little political importance after the fall of the autocracy in March 1917...

...The question remains how the Communists were able to hold power after their promises of peace, bread and land proved to be bitter deceptions—as Civil War gripped Russia, the workers got less to eat than under the Tsar and the peasant found that, although he might have the land, he was obliged to give up most of the produce to requisitioning detachments...

...There is indeed a contrast between Lenin's comfortable vacationing life as a political exile??able to hunt, read, study and write??and the horrible, brutalized existence of anyone unfortunate enough to be sent to a Soviet slave-labor camp...

...However, Tsarism should be judged, not by the terrorist standards of Communism and Nazism, but by the constitutional practice of Europe before the First World War...

...What are the roots of this tragedy...

...And here it does not come out very favorably...

...The organized White movements, the most important being those of General Denikin and Admiral Kolchak failed because their political appeal antagonized large non-Communist elements of the population...