Pat Sloan - Soviet Democracy

SOVIET DEMOCRACY

By PAT SLOAN

LONDON
VICTOR GOLLANGZ LTD
1937

Printed in Great Britain.
The Camelot Press Ltd., London and Southampton

INTRODUCTION

DEMOCRACY AND DICTATORSHIP

A very great deal is being said and written nowadays about democracy and dictatorship. We repeatedly hear it said that democracy must be defended; and as an example of the kind of dictatorship of which we must beware the Soviet Union is often quoted. And yet, at the same time as this Soviet Union is described as a dictatorship, well-known people of different political views make statements which suggest that, in the Soviet Union today, there exists a system of government which possesses all the essential features of democracy.

Perhaps the most popular definition of democracy is that of Abraham Lincoln, who described it as government of the people, by the people, for the people. And this is how the well-known students of public administration, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, write about the Soviet Union:

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics does not consist of a Government and a people confronting each other, as all other great societies have hitherto been [] the U.S.S.R. is a Government instrumented by all the adult inhabitants, organized in a varied array of collectives, having their several distinct functions, and among them carrying on, with a strangely new political economy, nearly the whole wealth production the country (Soviet Communism, p. 450).

If this description is correct, then the Soviet Union would appear to conform to the commonly accepted definition of democracy. But Sidney and Beatrice Webb are well-known Socialists, and therefore their description and conclusions might be prejudiced. It is, therefore, all the more significant that another writer, who has never had any sympathy with Socialism, but who knew Tsarist Russia, has recently confirmed the impression given by the Webbs. This is Sir Bernard Pares.

Sir Bernard Pares lived in Tsarist Russia. After the setting up of the Soviet Government in November 1917 he worked in Russia for the British Government, which spent at that time about 00,000,000 on armed intervention in the hope of suppressing the Soviets. In 1919 Sir Bernard returned to England and set himself to counter the propaganda for an application of the Bolshevist principles and program in this country by giving public lectures in almost every county of England (Moscow Admits a Critic, p. 10).

Only at the end of 1935 did Sir Bernard Pares again visit Russia, now the largest unit in a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. On his return home he wrote a little book on his impressions, and in it he asked: To what extent was the Government a foreigner to the people?

This is his answer: In the times of Tsardom I never failed to feel its almost complete isolation. The Ministers of those times, and more especially in the last days of Tsardom, were for the most part obviously haphazard choices from a very narrow and by no means distinguished circle. I was, of course, one of those who longed to see the Russian public, as a whole, make its way into the precincts of government, and in 1917 for a short time I had that satisfaction. But even then there was the much less definable barrier, though a very real one, which separated the Russian intelligentsia from the great mass of the Russian public.... I have to say that in Moscow today this frontier seems to "have disappeared altogether, and in my visits to public offices and great institutions Government and people were of the same stock (ibid., p. 35).

The contention of the Webbs, then, that the U.S.S.R. is a Government instrumented by all the adult inhabitants is confirmed by the observations of Sir Bernard Pares. Both these authorities agree that the Government of the U.S.S.R. is a Government of the people. Both agree, then, that the Government of the U.S.S.R. contains features which we associate, not with dictatorship, but with democracy.

We are sometimes inclined, I think unwisely, to treat democracy and dictatorship as two mutually exclusive terms, when in actual fact they may often represent two aspects of the same system of government. For example, if we turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, to the article dealing with Democracy, we read: Democracy is that form of government in which the people rules itself, either directly, as in the small city-states of Greece, or through representatives.

But the same writer goes on to say this: All the people in the city-state did not have the right to participate in government, but only those who were citizens, in the legal and original sense. Outside this charmed circle of the privileged were the slaves, who had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled. They had no political and hardly any civil rights; they were not people. Thus the democracy of the Greek city-state was in the strict sense no democracy at all.

The Greek city-state has been cited time and again by historians as the birthplace of democracy. And yet, on reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, we find that in fact this was a democracy only for a charmed circle of the privileged, while the slaves, who did the work of the community, had no voice whatever in the making of the laws under which they toiled.

The classical example of democracy was, then, a democracy only for certain people. For others, for those who did the hard work of the community, it was a dictatorship. At the very birthplace of democracy itself we find that democracy and dictatorship went hand in hand as two aspects of the same political system. To refer to the democracy of the Greek city-state without saying for whom this democracy existed is misleading. To describe the democracy of the Greek city-state without pointing out that it could only exist as a result of the toil of the slaves who had no political and hardly any civil rights falsifies the real history of the origin of democracy.

Democracy, then, from its origin, has not precluded the simultaneous existence of dictatorship. The essential question which must be asked, when social systems appear to include elements both of democracy and dictatorship, is, for whom is there democracy? and over whom is there a dictatorship?

Let us turn to the modern world. The Soviet Union, we have said, is often described as a dictatorship. Yet eminent authorities, describing the Soviet system of government, ascribe to it characteristics which we generally associate with democracy. Can it be that here, too, there is democracy for one section of the community, but dictatorship over another?