Pitirim A. Sorokin - Leaves from a Russian Diary—and Thirty Years After [Enlarged Edition]

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Text originally published in 1950 under the same title.

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LEAVES FROM A RUSSIAN DIARYAND THIRTY YEARS AFTER

BY

PITIRIM A. SOROKIN

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

At the time of the first publication of this book in 1924, several Don Quixotes of the Revolution accused the author of distorting the beautiful Dulcinea of the Revolution into a bloody slut of Toboso. At present there are few, if any, such naive Don Quixotes, except, of course, the Communists. Being panders of the Revolution, it is their mtier to glorify it. The events have proved my close-up of the Revolution to be correct. Millions of victims of the Revolution, its unsatiable bloodthirstiness, its overcrowded prisons and concentration or labor campsall this has become too obvious during the past thirty years not to dispel all quixotic illusions about the Revolutions beauty, humaneness, virtue, and generosity.

If anything, public opinion in the West suffers now from the opposite one-sidedness, ascribing to the Revolution many sins it does not have and denying some of its actual virtues. This opinion suffers also from two other errors: it views the Russian Revolution as a self-sufficient phenomenon, dangerous to an otherwise sound Western culture; and it regards it as an especially vicious type of revolution, quite different from other revolutions, of which the reactionary posterity of our own revolutionary forefathersthe Sons and Daughters of This or That Revolutionare proud. The naked truth is that the horrors of the Russian Revolution are not peculiar to it, but are typical of practically all violent revolutions, regardless of time, place, race, creed, or nationality. Likewise, the Russian Revolution is not an isolated disease, miraculously produced by the evil genius of Lenin, but is one of the four clearest manifestations of the disintegration of our Western sensate socio-cultural order, the others being the two World Wars and the Fascist-Nazi revolutions. It is not the Russian Revolution that produced the endless calamities of humanity after 1914, but it is this basic process of decay of our sensate order that produced the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Fascist-Nazi revolutions, the Second World War, and the numerous revolts and anarchy in the Orient and the Occident. As long as this disintegration of the Western sensate order continues, all attempts to prevent revolutionary and war processes are bound to fail.

It is futile to try to stop these processes by building a cordon sanitaire around the Soviet bloc: since the germs of the disintegration are as virulent and numerous in the West as in the East, a cordon sanitaire will not eliminate them. An even greater folly is to attempt to cure the disease by mutual aggressiveness, toughness, cold war, and preparations for an apocalyptic new war. All such policies are but twin brothers of the Revolutionof its destructiveness, its bloodiness, its tyranny, its totalitarianism. All such crusades, no matter how conservative their names and how highfalutin their mottoes, merely reinforce, multiply, and spread the germs of the disease. Only a basic reintegration of our culture can stop the diffusion and growth of these destructive processes. This reintegration can be achieved neither by the methods of the Revolution nor by the essentially similar techniques of the vociferous Crusaders against the Revolution, The techniques of love instead of hate, of creative construction rather than destruction, of reverence for life in place of serving death, of real freedom instead of coercion and pseudo-freedomsuch are the techniques needed for rebuilding the house of humanity. The essay, Thirty Years After, somewhat substantiates the main propositions of this forewordthe propositions distasteful equally to the proponents and to the opponents of the Russian Revolution. The only excuse I have for being disagreeable to both parties is the old maxim: Amico Plato sed veritas amicissima .

Winchester, Mass., 1950.

January-February, 1917

KEEPING a diary is a childish habit, but this childish habit may now be worthwhile even to a serious man. It is clear that we are now entering the storm of the Revolution. The authority of the Czar, the Czarina, and all of Government has terribly broken down. Defeat of Russian arms, poverty and wide discontent of the people inevitably call forth anew revolutionary clamor. The speeches of Shulgin, Milyukoff, and Kerensky in the Duma, and especially Milyukoffs denunciation of the stupidity and treason of the Government, have awakened a dangerous echo throughout the country.

At a meeting yesterday of deputies, politicians, scholars, and writers at the house of Shubin-Posdeef, even the most conservative men talked about the coming Revolution as a certainty. Counts and barons, landlords and business men all applauded scathing criticisms of the Government and acclaimed the approaching Revolution. These men, weary, effeminized, accustomed to lives of comfort, calling for revolution, presented a curious spectacle. Like heedless children, they manifested a curiosity and a joy in meeting such an interesting development. I had a vision of the French ruling classes before the eighteenth-century Revolution. Like these Russians, their emasculated aristocracy, too, greeted the storm with laughter, not reflecting that it might rob them of their property and even of their lives.

In my lecture rooms it was the same. Those parts of my lectures in which I scored the defects of aristocratic societies were met by the students with ardent applause. University life tends to become more and more disorderly. On the walls of lavatories one reads such sentences as: Down with the Czar! Death to the Czarina of Rasputin! Long life to the Revolution! These have been erased by the police, but immediately they reappear. The newspapers have become audacious in attacking the Government.

Do you think that the guillotine will be necessary for us also in the near future? asked one of my students in the Workers University of the Viborg district of Petrograd.

I do not know, I replied. But I am certain that if you contemplate the guillotine for your enemies, the same guillotine will cut off your head a little later. The guillotine always kills first the well-fed, but later on it gets the poor also. Do not forget this. It may be useful to you if revolution really comes.