In his place, you would be even more stubborn.”
“I have a backbone, which he hasn’t” said Gletkin.
“But you’re an idiot,” said Ivanov.
“For that answer you ought to be shot before him.”
He hobbled to the door and banged it from outside.
Gletkin sat down to his desk again.
He did not believe Ivanov would succeed, and at the same time he was afraid of it.
Ivanov’s last sentence had sounded like a threat, and with him one never knew what was a joke and what serious.
Perhaps he did not know himself—like all these intellectual cynics. ...
Gletkin shrugged his shoulders, shoved his collar and crackling cuffs into place, and went on with his work on the pile of documents.
The Third Hearing
Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts.
But this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it, or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand, to be produced immediately.
MACHIAVELLI: Instructions to Raffaello Girolami
But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay; for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
Matt. v.
37
1
Extract from N. S. Rubashov’s diary,
20th Day of Prison.
“... VLADIMIR BOGROV has fallen out of the swing.
A hundred and fifty Years ago, the day of the storming of the Bastille, the European swing, after long inaction, again started to move.
It had pushed o,$ from tyranny with gusto; with an apparently uncheckable impetus, it had swung up towards the blue sky of freedom.
For a hundred years it had risen higher and higher into the spheres of liberalism and democracy.
But, see, gradually the pace slowed down, the swing neared the summit and turning-point of its course; then, after a second of immobility, it started the movement backwards, with ever-increasing speed With the same Impetus as on the way up, the swing carried its passengers back from freedom to tyranny again.
He who had gazed upwards instead of clinging on, became dizzy and fell out.
“Whoever wishes to avoid becoming dizzy must try to find out the swing’s law of motion.
We seem to be faced with a pendulum movement in history, swinging from absolutism to democracy, from democracy back to absolute dictatorship.
“The amount of individual freedom which a people may conquer and keep, depends on the degree of its political maturity.
The aforementioned pendulum motion seems to indicate that the political maturing of the masses does not follow a continuous rising curve, as does the growing up of an individual, but that it is governed by more complicated laws.
“The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests.
This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods.
A people’s capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and functioning of the whole social body.
“Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time.
Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer.
It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.
Hence the political maturity of the masses cannot be measured by an absolute figure, but only relatively, i.e. in proportion to the stage of civilization at that moment.
“When the level of mass-consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force.
Until the next jump of technical civilization—the discovery of the mechanical loom, for example—again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity, and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership.
“This process might be compared to the lifting of a ship through a lock with several chambers.
When it first enters a lock chamber, the ship is on a low level relative to the capacity of the chamber; it is slowly lifted up until the water-level reaches its highest point.
But this grandeur is illusory, the next lock chamber is higher still, the levelling process has to start again.
The walls of the lock chambers represent the objective state of control of natural forces, of the technical civilization; the water-level in the lock chamber represents the political maturity of the masses.
It would be meaningless to measure the latter as an absolute height above sea-level; what counts is the relative height of the level in the lock chamber.
“The discovery of the steam engine started a period of rapid objective progress, and, consequently, of equally rapid subjective political retrogression.
The industrial era is still young in history, the discrepancy is still great between its extremely. complicated economic structure and the masses’ understanding of it.
Thus it is comprehensible that the relative political maturity of the nations in the first half of the twentieth century is less than it was 200 B.C. or at the end of the feudal epoch.
“The mistake in socialist theory was to believe that the level of mass-consciousness rose constantly and steadily.
Hence its helplessness before the latest swing of the pendulum, the ideological self-mutilation of the peoples.
We believed that the adaptation of the masses’ conception of the world to changed circumstances was a simple process, which one could measure in years; whereas, according to all historical experience, it would have been more suitable to measure it by centuries.