The peoples of Europe are still far from having mentally digested the consequences of the steam engine.
The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.
“As to the Fatherland of the Revolution, the masses there are governed by the same laws of thought as anywhere else.
They have reached the next higher lock chamber, but they are still on the lowest level of the new basin.
The new economic system which has taken the place of the old is even more incomprehensible to them.
The laborious and painful rise must start anew.
It will probably be several generations before the people manage to understand the new state of affairs, which they themselves created by the Revolution.
“Until then, however, a democratic form of government is impossible, and the amount of individual freedom which may be accorded is even less than in other countries.
Until then, our leaders are obligated to govern as though in empty space.
Measured by classical liberal standards, this is not a pleasant spectacle.
Yet all the horror, hypocrisy and degradation which leap to the eye are merely the visible and inevitable expression of the law described above.
Woe to the fool and the aesthete who only ask how and not why.
But woe also unto the opposition in a period of relative immaturity of the masses, such as this.
“In periods of maturity it is the duty and the function of the opposition to appeal to the masses.
In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the ‘higher judgment of the people’.
In such situations the opposition has two alternatives: to seize the power by a coup d’etat, without being able to count on the support of the masses or in mute despair to throw themselves out of the swing—‘to die in silence’.
“There is a third choice which is no less consistent, and which in our country has been developed into a system: the denial and suppression of one’s own conviction when there is no prospect of materializing it.
As the only moral criterion which we recognize is that of social utility, the public disavowal of one’s conviction in order to remain in the Party’s ranks is obviously more honourable than the quixotism of carrying on a hopeless struggle.
“Questions of personal pride; prejudices such as exist elsewhere against certain forms of self-abasement; personal feelings of tiredness, disgust and shame—are to be cut off root and branch. ...”
2
Rubashov had begun to write his meditations on the “swing” immediately after the first bugle blast on the morning which followed Bogrov’s execution and Ivanov’s visit.
When his breakfast was brought in, he drank a mouthful of coffee and let the rest get cold.
His handwriting, which during the last few days had borne a somewhat flabby and unsteady character, again became firm and disciplined; the letters became smaller, the swinging open loops gave way to sharp angles.
When he read it through, he noticed the change.
At eleven o’clock in the morning he was fetched for exercise as usual, and had to stop.
Arrived in the courtyard, he was given as neighbour in the roundabout, not old Rip Van Winkle, but a thin peasant with bast shoes.
Rip Van Winkle was not to be seen in the yard, and Rubashov only now remembered that at breakfast he had missed the habitual “Arie, ye wretched of the earth.”
Apparently, the old man had been taken away, God only knew where; a poor, ragged, last year’s moth which had miraculously and uselessly survived its appointed life-term, to reappear at the wrong season, flutter round blindly a couple of times, and in a corner fall to dust.
The peasant at first trotted along in silence beside Rubashov, watching him from the side.
After the first round he cleared his throat several times, and after a further round he said:
“I come from the province D.
Have you ever been there, your honour?”
Rubashov answered in the negative.
D. was an out-of-the-way province in the east, of which he only had a rather vague idea.
“It certainly is a long way to go,” said the peasant. “You must ride on camels to get there.
Are you a political gentleman, your honour?”
Rubashov admitted it.
The peasant’s bast shoes had the soles half torn off; he was walking with bare toes on the trampled snow.
He had a thin neck, and he constantly nodded his head while speaking, as though repeating the amen of a litany.
“I too am a political person,” he said; “namely, I am a reactionary.
They say all reactionaries must be sent away for ten years.
Do you think they will send me away for ten years, your honour?”
He nodded, and squinted anxiously at the warders in the centre of the roundabout, who formed a small group, stamping their feet, and paying no attention to the prisoners.
“What have you done?” asked Rubashov.
“I was unmasked as a reactionary at the pricking of the children,” said the peasant.
“Every year the Government sends a commission out to us.
Two years ago, it sent us papers to read and a whole lot of images of itself.
Last year it sent a threshing machine and brushes for the teeth.
This year it sent little glass pipes with needles, to prick the children.
There was a woman in man’s trousers; she wanted to prick all the children one after the other.