young men with a burning faith in their eyes, though often without the full power of expressing their argument—were, at almost every meeting, boldly defensive of the Russian Bolsheviks. There are two sides to Bolshevism; there is the mere violence and tyranny of the Jacobin, upthrown at a certain stage of most great revolutions; and there is the 'Syndicalist' idealism. To do them justice, it is the latter aspect of Bolshevism which really attracts and holds my young Scottish antagonists. The Bolsheviks are in revolt against a Parliamentarism based on local communities or, as they would put it, on so many social pyramids each with its Capitalist at the top. Their ideal is of a federation of vocational soviets or unions—soviets of workmen, of peasants, and, if you will, of professional men. Therefore the Bolsheviks, both in Petrograd and Berlin, have consistently opposed the meeting of national assemblies for the purpose of framing Parliamentary constitutions on the Western 'bourgeois' model. Their revolt is towards an organisation by interests rather than localities.[1] For the reasons stated in this
- ↑ The vocational soviet of the peasants is only incidentally local; it is not local in the fuller sense of combining various local interests into a community.
