The sentinel on the wall marched up and down with shouldered rifle.
The sky was clear but moonless; above the machine-gun turret shimmered the Milky Way.
Rubashov shrugged his shoulders. “Admit,” he said, “that humanism and politics, respect for the individual and social progress, are incompatible.
Admit that Gandhi is a catastrophe for India; that chasteness in the choice of means leads to political impotence.
In negatives we agree.
But look where the other alternative has led us. ...”
“Well,” asked Ivanov.
“Where?”
Rubashov rubbed his pince-nez on his sleeve, and looked at him short-sightedly.
“What a mess,” he said, “what a mess we have made of our golden age.”
Ivanov smiled. “Maybe,” he said happily.
“Look at the Gracchi and Saint Just and the Commune of Paris.
Up to now, all revolutions have been made by moralizing dilettantes.
They were always in good faith and perished because of their dilettantism.
We for the first time are consequent. ...”
“Yes,” said Rubashov. “So consequent; that in the interests of a just distribution of land we deliberately let die of starvation about five million farmers and their families in one year.
So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves.
So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China.
Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa.
Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter.
In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution.
The people’s standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies; we have lowered the age limit for capital punishment down to twelve years; our sexual laws are more narrow-minded than those of England, our leader-worship more Byzantine than that of the reactionary dictatorships.
Our Press and our schools cultivate Chauvinism, militarism, dogmatism, conformism and ignorance.
The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been.
We have built up the most gigantic police apparatus, with informers made a national Institution, and with the most refined scientific system of physical and mental torture.
We whip the groaning masses of the country towards a theoretical future happiness, which only we can see.
For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed, apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh. ...
Those are the consequences of our consequentialness.
You called it vivisection morality.
To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves. ...”
“Well, and what of it?” said Ivanov happily.
“Don’t you find it wonderful?
Has anything more wonderful ever happened in history?
We are tearing the old skin off mankind and giving it a new one.
That is not an occupation for people with weak nerves; but there was once a time when it filled you with enthusiasm.
What has so changed you that you are now as pernickety as an old maid?”
Rubashov wanted to answer:
“Since then I have heard Bogrov call out my name.” But he knew that this answer did not make sense.
So he answered instead:
“To continue with the same metaphor: I see the flayed body of this generation: but I see no trace of the new skin.
We all thought one could treat history like one experiments in physics.
The difference is that in physics one can repeat the experiment a thousand times, but in history only once.
Danton and Saint-Just can be sent to the scaffold only once; and if it should turn out that big submarines would after all have been the right thing, Comrade Bogrov will not come to life again.”
“And what follows?” asked Ivanov.
“Should we sit with idle hands because the consequences of an act are never quite to be foreseen, and hence all action is evil?
We vouch for every act with our heads—more cannot be expected of us.
In the opposite camp they are not so scrupulous.
Any old idiot of a general can experiment with thousands of living bodies; and if he makes a mistake, he will at most be retired.
The forces of reaction and counter-revolution have no scruples or ethical problems.
Imagine a Sulla, a Galliffet, a Koltschak reading Raskolnikov.