impossible to smash a habit, whatever your luck. We have given the land to the peasant, freed him from the squire, thrown off all his fetters, and yet he goes on thinking that liberty is free trade in corn, and serfdom the duty to surrender the surplus at a fixed price."
The Eighth Congress of the Soviets. The Eighth Congress of Ail-Russian Soviets was convened at Moscow on Dec. 23 1920. Approximately 80% of the delegates were members of the Com- munist party, the remaining 20% were not affiliated to any party. It was known that with reference to certain questions of policy there was an important divergence of views among leading Com- munists. These differences of opinion were especially marked in connexion with (i) economic reconstruction, including the ques- tion of concessions to foreigners, and (2) the demobilization of the army. Lenin was at the head of the so-called Right Wing, while the Left was under the leadership of Bukharin. The dis- illusionment of many Communists concerning Soviet administra- tion was expressed in strong terms at the Congress. These crit- icisms were summarized and by one of the leaders, Ossinsky, in an article which contains the following passage:
" For three years, the Soviet Government has seriously turned aside from the principles of proletarian democracy, and from the spirit of the Soviet Constitution. On the one hand, there have been created two legislative bodies, not provided by our constitution the Council of Defence and the Military Revolutionary Council; on the other all constitutional organs (legislative as well as execu- tive) have virtually disappeared. The eclipse of the Central Execu- tive Committee is generally known. But even the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of Defence, which have ostensibly re- placed the Central Executive Committee, have been, in their turn, eclipsed by still another body. In reality, the centre of political leadership has been shifted to the Central Committee of the Com- munist party, and even here to a smaller body, the ' Political Bureau ' of this committee. Legislative measures, diplomatic acts, and military plans decided by this ' Politik-Bureau are formally sanctioned and issued in the name either of the People's Commissars or the Council of Defence." (The New Statesman, 1921, p. 635.)
The Congress decided to establish Provincial Economic Con- ferences which should be charged with the unification of all pure- ly local economic institutions. Meetings were to be held no less than twice a month, and the persons who were to participate in the proposed Conferences were to be designated by the Supreme Economic Council, the Commissariats of Supplies, Labour, Finance, etc. All local branches or institutions of the Supreme Economic Council in the various provinces were to be subordi- nated to these Provincial Councils, with the exception of so-called " principal " industries, such as important metal factories, mines, etc., which still remained directly subordinate to the Supreme Economic Council.
The number of members of the Central Executive Committee was increased to 300 and sessions were to be held at least twice a month. The managing board of the Central Executive Council was given power to cancel any decisions of the Soviet of People's Commissars. All conflicts or disagreements between the Peo- ple's Commissars and Central Institutions on one side, and the local Executive Committees on the other, were to be referred to and decided by the managing board of the Central Executive Committee. All decrees and regulations of general importance, including laws, military decisions and questions of foreign policy, were to be examined by and were subject to confirmation by the Soviet of People's Commissars. The Congress considered that the Soviet of Labour and Defence which had been created at the height of struggle between the republic and an Imperialistic world (Nov. 30 1918), should be reformed so as to form a com- mittee of the Soviet of People's Commissars. An appeal was addressed to the peasants asking them to support the republic by contributing all their surplus agricultural produce to assist the Commonwealth. Trotsky favoured a partial demobilization of the regular army and the organization of a militia.
These were the principal decisions of the Congress. The gen- eral attitude of the Communist party was best expressed in speeches delivered by Lenin and by Zinoviev. Lenin welcomed the establishment of Soviet Republics in Bukhara, Azerbaijan and Armenia, as showing that the Soviet system was acceptable, not only in industrial countries, but also in agricultural lands. It was hoped that a treaty would shortly be signed with Persia.
Relations were being cemented between the Soviet Government and Afghanistan and Turkey. Lenin defended the policy of granting concessions to foreign capitalists. It would be ridicu- lous to talk of Russia's economic independence while the Soviet Republic remained a backward country. Guarantees would be demanded from those who received concessions and it was essen- tial that everything should be done to promote trade relations without delay. He reminded his audience that a long series of wars had hitherto decided the fate of the revolution. They must prepare for the next chapter in this history:
Without economic restoration they would be unable to hold their own. To achieve this economic aim it would be necessary to unite compulsion with moral suasion as successfully as they had been united in the Red army. Russia was a State of small farmers and the transition to communism was hampered by difficulties greater than those which would have arisen in other conditions. For the attain- ment of their economic objects the assistance of the peasants was ten times more necessary than it had been during the war. The peasants were not Socialists. The Communist workers " must tell the peasants that it was impossible to continue freezing and dying of starvation indefinitely." If such conditions continued they would be defeated in the next chapter of the war. There must be a larger area of land under cultivation next spring, and there was no hope of salvation unless this economic victory was obtained. They recognized their obligation to the peasants. They had taken their bread in exchange for paper-money. They would compensate them as soon as industry was restored. The menace of Russia to the capitalist world could not be maintained without an improvement of economic life. As long as she remained a small farmers' country capitalism would find more favourable acceptance than Com- munism. The foundation ami basis of their home enemy (capitalism) has not been removed. Electrification would help them to remove it.
Zinoviev admitted that the Soviet regime was degenerating through the influence of an immense and inefficient bureaucracy. He laid the blame on the traditions of the old administration:
The utilization of bourgeois specialists in the work of economic and administrative reconstruction was absolutely essential and in- evitable. The worst feature of this recourse to specialists was that they exhibit a red-tape attitude towards their work, not entering into the spirit of it : they have brought the worst habits of Govern- ment lethargy and bourgeois bureaucracy into our administrative organs. Those workers and peasants, whom the Soviet Government drew into direct participation in the Government, although they saw the weak side of these specialists, were themscjves powerless to raise affairs to a higher level. Thus a wrong attitude was taken up toward those who worked by brain and not by hand. Workers who stand at the lathe are regarded as useful members of society, but what about the man who counts the lathes, who works out plans of production, who carries out essential statistical work ? Such men are sometimes contemptuously described as bureaucrats. . . .
The workers' and peasants' control must be transformed from an organ of supervision over the activity of Government institutions into an organization for attracting broad masses of the workers and the peasants to administrative tasks, for inculcating the methods of administration in accordance with the decree of the All-Russian Executive Committee dated Feb. 7 1920.
RUSSIA IN 1920-1
Soviet Russia had shrunk considerably by 1921 in compari- son with the former Russian Empire. Instead of a population of some 180 millions it comprised in 1921 about 130 millions, of whom 10 millions were peasants and the rest were divided among the townsfolk and the nomadic and hunting tribes of the eastern steppes and of Siberia. It is estimated that the country lost 1,700,000 killed in the course of the World War, but it is impos- sible to form even an approximate conception of the number of those who perished from the indirect effects, of the war through wounds, ill-health and privations, and of those who were de- stroyed by the massacres of the civil war, the misery of retreats and migrations, the epidemics of typhus, cholera, diphtheria which claimed a heavy toll in the unsanitary cond'tions of life. It would hardly be an exaggeration to put the number of victims of these disorders at some 10 millions. The abnormal increase of the death-rate has been definitely registered in certain cases, and there is good reason to suppose that in all centres where people congregated for political or economic reasons exceptional mortality prevailed and the health of the population was enfeebled through starvation and sickness. Petrograd, with 2,250,000 inhabitants in 1914, had been reduced to some 700,- ooo, and Moscow to 1,000,000 instead of 1,800,000.
