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 against the bourgeoisie and the real enemies of the new state to their employment against the people. The police, the terror, the camps, the forced labor—all this was necessary if the Russians were to be starved and sweated, year after year, into building at a rapid pace the machines and factories of the new industrial Goliath. There was no other way.
This was not the system or the state which Lenin and his associates thought they were creating. Instead of a New Jerusalem, the Bolsheviks had fashioned an instrument for quick capital accumulation and for the discipline of the masses by terror.
Stalin lashed the Russian workers together. He formed the chain gangs and, with the threat of katorga (penal servitude) and generous use of the knout, he, like Peter the Great before him and Ivan before Peter, drove the Russian masses painfully and laboriously forward. The "new" system (which, stripped of its idealistic catchwords, was remarkably like the old system) worked. Vast progress was made. As the years passed, it became more and more evident that the Soviet method, regardless of its deviation from Marxist ideals, was indeed capable of transforming a backward agrarian country into an advanced industrial one.
It is this fusion of idealism and coercion, of humane goals and inhumane methods, which the success of the Russian system commends to other lands that now lag behind the industrial West as Czarist Russia did.
Thus, the Soviet system and variations upon it have strong appeal in other backward, feudal, dependent and colonial countries. They, too, see an apparent method of short-cutting history, of leapfrogging from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first century.
That is why it is in Asia and the Middle East (as sooner or later it will be in Africa) that communism spreads. Practical people in all these
countries see that communism is an instrument for the social and economic advancement of backward countries. The principal reason why communism has never made a success in the West is that it is inferior to the form of social organization which already exists there. Communism is superior to the feudal society which it replaces but infinitely less responsive and capable of adaptation to newer and higher techniques than the complex order which, for lack of a better name, we call advanced Western capitalism.
Like any tight dictatorship, communism surpasses at "crash" achievements. It is capable of peacetime concentration and mobilization which Western democracy utilizes only under war conditions. The "crash" achievements—development of the Soviet atomic and hydrogen bombs, the I.C.B.M., the satellite, and so on—are paid for, of course, by the workers and peasants through the indefinite postponement of any substantial improvement in their standard of living.
The chief difference between the Russian Revolution and its first cousin once removed, the Chinese Revolution, is that Mao Tse-tung recognized much more clearly than Stalin (or Lenin) that the peasant was the foundation of the revolution. Mao openly and frankly has based his system on the peasant. He utilizes the same ingredients—coercion and idealist slogans—to carry out China's transition from feudalism to industrialism.
But because he understands better what he is about, he may avoid the brutal struggle which Stalin eventually felt compelled to launch against the peasants behind the mask of a drive for collectivization.
If, then, the Bolshevik Revolution has created a pattern for the rapid industrialization of backward countries rather than a gateway to a Fourieristic paradise, where does the whole painful agony lead in the end? It may be that history is preparing a most sardonic trick not only upon the Old Bolsheviks but upon the stanch and sturdy warriors of both of the present embattled worlds of capitalism and communism as well. For the longer "communism" endures the plainer grow the indications that the goals toward which it is moving cannot be differentiated from those of any other society based upon industrial technology.