The most important of these consequences, as everyone in the past month has become vividly aware, has been the transformation of Russia from a feudal peasant country with only the beginnings of a fast-growing modern industry into a technological power of the most advanced type, second to or even equal to the United States. This achievement is epochal but not unprecedented. The transformation of all the modern industrial powers—the United States, England, France, Germany and Japan—was carried out with almost equal rapidity.
What is unique is the system which bolshevism created for the organization and harnessing of national resources, labor and talent and for concentrating them upon a single goal—industrialization of both manufacturing and agricultural processes.
In the West, industrialization was achieved despite a running struggle between the possessors of capital, the managers of industries, and the labor force on which they were so dependent. Exploitation of labor was crude in the early stages but as the system got going, the owners of capital found that it was in their own interests to reward workers more richly because, once the industrial technique had been established, the greater the stimulus to the worker the more productive and profitable the capitalist economy became.
But in Russia things worked out quite differently.
The Bolshevik Revolution bequeathed to its successors and to the Russian people what might be called a benevolent delusion. The revolutionaries said and the people believed them (at least, for a long time) that by destroying private property and private industry they had destroyed the root of all the evils of industrial exploitation.
They did not realize that an avaricious state dictatorship, bent on achieving industrialization in the shortest possible time, would find it possible under the convenient blanket of this delusion to turn a whole nation into something which only too closely resembled the sweatshops of the hated bourgeoisie.
Nor was this all. Having inherited traditions of tyranny, and having deliberately created a tyranny in order to overthrow the tyrants, it was but a half step—an almost imperceptible step—from the use of terror and the suffering were over, the New Jerusalem, bright and shining, would remain.
But if the men who made the revolution were mistaken in the nature of what they had created, neither they nor the onlookers in Russia and in the Western world were mistaken in their instinct that the Russian revolution was the event of a lifetime, indeed of a century. As the French Revolution and its legacy of political doctrine dominated the nineteenth century, so the Russian Revolution has been the political touchstone of the twentieth. It is literally true that the life of every man, woman and child on earth has been changed by the spin which Lenin gave to the roulette wheel of history.
The most important of these consequences, as everyone in the past month has become vividly aware, has been the transformation of Russia from a feudal peasant country with only the beginnings of a fast-growing modern industry into a technological power of the most advanced type, second to or even equal to the United States. This achievement is epochal but not unprecedented. The transformation of all the modern industrial powers—the United States, England, France, Germany and Japan—was carried out with almost equal rapidity.
What is unique is the system which bolshevism created for the organization and harnessing of national resources, labor and talent and for concentrating them upon a single goal—industrialization of both manufacturing and agricultural processes.
In the West, industrialization was achieved despite a running struggle between the possessors of capital, the managers of industries, and the labor force on which they were so dependent. Exploitation of labor was crude in the early stages but as the system got going, the owners of capital found that it was in their own interests to reward workers more richly because, once the industrial technique had been established, the greater the stimulus to the worker the more productive and profitable the capitalist economy became.
But in Russia things worked out quite differently.
The Bolshevik Revolution bequeathed to its successors and to the Russian people what might be called a benevolent delusion. The revolutionaries said and the people believed them (at least, for a long time) that by destroying private property and private industry they had destroyed the root of all the evils of industrial exploitation.