A very great deal is being said and written nowadays about democracy and dictatorship. We repeatedly hear it said that democracy must be defended; and as an example of the kind of dictatorship of which we must beware the Soviet Union is often quoted. And yet, at the same time as this Soviet Union is described as a dictatorship, well-known people of different political views make statements which suggest that, in the Soviet Union to-day, there exists a system of government which possesses all the essential features of democracy.
Perhaps the most popular definition of democracy is that of Abraham Lincoln, who described it as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And this is how the well-known students of public administration, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, write about the Soviet Union:
“The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics does not consist of a Government and a people confronting each other, as all other great societies have hitherto been . . . the U.S.S.R. is a Government instrumented by all the adult inhabitants, organized in a varied array of collectives, having their several distinct functions, and among them carrying on, with a strangely new ‘political economy,’ nearly the whole wealth production the country” (Soviet Communism, p. 450).
If this description is correct, then the Soviet Union would appear to conform to the commonly accepted definition of democracy. But Sidney and Beatrice Webb are well-known Socialists, and therefore their description and conclusions might be prejudiced. It is, therefore, all the more significant that another writer, who has never had any sympathy with Socialism, but who knew Tsarist Russia, has recently confirmed the impression given by the Webbs. This is Sir Bernard Pares.
Sir Bernard Pares lived in Tsarist Russia. After the setting up of the Soviet Government in November 1917 he worked in Russia for the British Government, which spent at that time about 00,000,000 on armed intervention in the hope of suppressing the Soviets. In 1919 Sir Bernard returned to England and set himself “to counter the propaganda for an application of the Bolshevist principles and program in this country” by giving “public lectures in almost every county of England” (Moscow Admits a Critic, p. 10).
Only at the end of 1935 did Sir Bernard Pares again visit Russia, now the largest unit in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On his return home he wrote a little book on his impressions, and in it he asked: “To what extent was the Government a foreigner to the people?”
This is his answer: “In the times of Tsardom I never failed to feel it’s almost complete isolation. The Ministers of those times, and more especially in the last days of Tsardom, were for the most part obviously haphazard choices from a very narrow and by no means distinguished circle. I was, of course, one of those who longed to see the Russian public, as a whole, make its way into the precincts of government, and in 1917 for a short time I had that satisfaction. But even then there was the much less definable barrier, though a very real one, which separated the Russian intelligentsia from the great mass of the Russian public. . . . I have to say that in Moscow to-day this frontier seems to have disappeared altogether, and in my visits to public offices and great institutions Government and people were of the same stock” (ibid., p. 35).
The contention of the Webbs, then, that “the U.S.S.R. is a Government instrumented by all the adult inhabitants” is confirmed by the observations of Sir Bernard Pares. Both these authorities agree that the Government of the U.S.S.R. is a Government of the people. Both agree, then, that the Government of the U.S.S.R. contains features which we associate, not with dictatorship, but with democracy.
We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. For example, if we turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the article dealing with “Democracy,” we read: “Democracy is that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.”
But the same writer goes on to say this: “All the people in the city-state did not have the right to participate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the legal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were the slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights; they were not ‘people.’ Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all.”
The Greek city-state has been cited time and again by historians as the birthplace of democracy. And yet, on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that in fact this was a democracy only for a “charmed circle of the privileged,” while the slaves, who did the work of the community, “had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled.”
The classical example of democracy was, then, a democracy only for certain people. For others, for those who did the hard work of the community, it was a dictatorship. At the very birthplace of democracy itself we find that democracy and dictatorship went hand in hand as two aspects of the same political system. To refer to the “democracy” of the Greek city-state without saying for whom this democracy existed is misleading. To describe the democracy of the Greek city-state without pointing out that it could only exist as a result of the toil of the slaves who “had no political and hardly any civil rights” falsifies the real history of the origin of democracy.
Democracy, then, from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship, is, “for whom is there democracy?” and “over whom is there a dictatorship?”
Let us turn to the modern world. The Soviet Union, we have said, is often described as a dictatorship. Yet eminent authorities, describing the Soviet system of government, ascribe to it characteristics which we generally associate with democracy. Can it be that here, too, there is democracy for one section of the community, but dictatorship over another?
The answer to this question is found in the first Soviet Constitution of 1918. In this Constitution the purpose of the Soviet State was described as being “the establishment (in the form of a strong Soviet Government) of the dictatorship of the urban and rural workers, combined with the poorer peasantry, to secure . . . the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, and the establishment of Socialism.”
The urban and rural workers, together with the poorer peasantry, made up over 95 percent of the population of Russia; so that this “dictatorship” was to be a government by the vast majority of the people—those who worked. In this way the Soviet State was the exact opposite of the Greek city-state, in which those who worked had no say in the government.
The Soviet State introduced universal suffrage for working citizens, without property or residential qualifications, and irrespective of sex, nationality, or religion. The right to vote and to stand for election was made available to all such citizens from the age of eighteen upwards. But those who employed labour for profit were deprived of electoral rights. The Soviet State in this way provided a degree of democracy for the working people such as they do not enjoy in any other country even at the present time; but over the employers this democratic power exercised a dictatorship. The small circle of the employers of labour had no voice whatever in the making of the laws to which they were subject.
From its origin the Soviet State consciously embodied features of democracy and features of dictatorship. But the democracy was enjoyed by the vast majority of the population, and the dictatorship was over a small minority. At present I do not wish to go into the whys and wherefores of this, or into its rights and wrongs, but I just want to make one point absolutely clear: it is that democracy and dictatorship have never necessarily been mutually exclusive terms. To speak of “democracy” without saying for whom may be misleading.
To refer to dictatorship without specifying who dictates to whom is also liable to cause misunderstanding. The Soviet State, set up in October 1917, professed to give full democratic rights to the vast majority of the people. Did it do this? In Part I of this book I shall give my answer to this question by describing the organization of Soviet life as I have lived it, from 1931 to 1936. Soviet life, to one who has been brought up in a country where the factories and the land, the mines and the shops, are private property, is a new life, a life which differs in a vast number of ways from that of other countries. And, having lived this life, I find I can only agree with the Webbs and with Sir Bernard Pares, and refer to it as essentially democratic.
But if this life is so different, what is it that makes it differ? In what way is the Soviet State organized so that it can give, to visitors from democratic Britain, this impression of unity between Government and people, of real democracy? In Part II we shall see how the Soviet State came into existence, we shall analyse its structure, and note how it has developed together with changes in social relationships within the country. The new life described in Part I is the essential product of the new State described in Part II.
But if the Soviet State has provided democracy for the whole people, and democracy of a kind which even impresses those who come from democratic Britain, there may be something deficient, perhaps, in our own conceptions of democracy. For to us in Britain to-day it is hard to reconcile the idea of democracy with a dictatorship against any class, however small such a class may be. But perhaps our attitude to democracy is a little old-fashioned! Perhaps we overestimate the extent to which democracy exists in Britain to-day. Let us see in Part III!
But, first of all, let us visit the Soviet Union as it exists to-day and see the new life that they are building. Then let us examine the framework within which this new life is developing, a framework which itself has to be altered as life demands. Then, when we know the Soviet Union, let us come back to our own country, to make comparisons, and to draw conclusions!