MEN AND MATTERS

Matamata Record, Volume II, Issue 69, 14 February 1918, Page 4

MEN AND MATTERS

By Pen N i B

Exactly what is happening in Russia hardly anybody knows. If it is said that a revolution has taken place, civil war is raging and Russia may be regarded as out of the war you have about the sum of general knowledge. The Russian Revolution stands cut in sharp contrast to every other big political movement called a revolution. Great noblemen revolting against a king secured Magna Charta. Eminently substantial property owners and taxpayers upset the Stuarts and established parliamentary supremacy. The American Revolution was largely inspired and directed by persons whose social circumstances were of an advantageous sort. When something like the democratic ideal of real, direct rule by the mass of the people developed, it got into difficulties; the conservative class then intervened and shaped the present conservative Constitution. The French middle class, assisted by the lesser nobility, launched a revolution that was far along before it came into control of the sans-culottes. Their mismanagement gave Napoleon an opportunity to close the revolutionary chapter with his celebrated " whiff of grapeshot."

The Russian Revolution is the only big movement of that sort which —by what seems the best evidence available—was mainly directed, from the beginning, by people at the social base; the only revolution which was thoroughly democratic from the beginning.

But it will certainly fail unless its leaders develop the capacity to govern. Whoever knows anything about the American and French Revolutions realizes that instability and insecurity are the most intolerable of social conditions. After an extended experience of them, people will turn to anything that promises a reasonable degree of order and certainty.

The military disorder in Russia is patent; but that might not be a crucial factor as to the life of the revolutionary government. Reports speak of wide and growing industrial disorder —unserviceable railroads, idle plants, food supplies in jeopardy. Unless the government can maintain a reasonable degree of order and security at home, "reaction will certainly sweep it away. People may talk anarchy ; but they will not long endure it.

The Russian revolution is not thinking politics, as we understand politics. Broadly speaking, it does not care a rap about politics. Eighty per cent, of it is peasant; and, while provisional government and sovyets at Petrograd haye been fighting and fulminating, tjie peasants over a large part of Russia have simply taken possession of the land. There is no strictly formulated programme about it; no enactment; hardly a scrap of paper. With no force whatever to oppose them, they have simply taken possession; and they mean 'to keep possession.

Just how legal title is going to be fixed up, what the constitution is going to say about it or whether there is any constitution, interests them very little. Revolution for them means possession of the land. Not one in five of them can read ; so what anybody is going to write down or have printed in a statute book up at Petrograd . concerns them very little. Their interest is not in any political theories or abstractions, but in the very simple concrete fact of possessing so many acres of land.

City workmen, who are mostly peasants at one remove, took possession of factories in the same simple, direct fashion. With very little violence, and usually with much good nature, a committee of workmen notified the proprietor that thereafter they would run the shop—which they did. . The live question now is not what sort of document a constitutional assembly shall produce ; but whether the industrial organization of the country can be kept going. Of course it cannot be under these conditions. Three-hour and four-hour working days in revolutionized factories are showing results in the way of a scarcity of boots, coats and implements for the peasants. The livest question for the revolution now is not what the workmen's councils resolve, but whether the workmen work.