September 4, 1936
Hardly a week passes without some dark, sinister event marking the downward movement of Europe, or revealing the intense pressures at work beneath its surface. The Spanish Horror broadens and deepens as the days pass. A sense of indefinable uneasiness, alike about external and internal affairs, broods over France. Hitler decrees the doubling in numbers and quality of the German army. Mussolini boasts that he has armed 8,000,000 Italians. The smaller States reflect these fears and preparations in strange local variants. Everywhere the manufacture of munitions proceeds apace, and science burrows its insulted head in the filth of slaughterous inventions. Only unarmed, unthinking Britain nurses the illusion of security.
What is the meaning and effect in this oppressive scene of the Moscow executions? The modern world is becoming very familiar with the spectacle, aforetime deemed atrocious, of the shooting of political opponents. It has become almost an everyday occurrence to read of public men in powerful, historic countries being set against the wall by scores and dozens to face the firing squads. Certainly if ever human tears were rightly lacking upon such occasions, it would be at the fate of the Bolshevist Old Guard. Here are the fathers of the Russian Communist Revolution; the architects of the logical Utopia to which, we are assured, the whole world will one day conform; the pioneers of progress to the Left; men whose names and crimes are bywords throughout the world-all put to death by their comrade Stalin, the General Secretary of their party.
Did I say all?-well, all but one. Trotsky still survives to embarrass the well-meaning Norwegians, and Lenin's widow waves him signals of despair faintly distinguishable in the Russian twilight. Gone are the heroes of the British Socialist Party. Kameneff, the maker of the first Anglo-Soviet trade agreement, Zinoviev, of the famous election letter, shot to rags by Soviet rifles. Tomsky, with his gold watch from our Trade Union Congress, blows out his brains to escape his sentence. What does it all convey? What does it all portend?
Many people unable to be shocked at the long-delayed expiation of these miscreants who have blithely sent uncounted thousands of good men to their doom, were nevertheless sickened at the elaborate farce of their trial. Its technique throws a gleam of intimate light upon the mysterious nature of a communist State. We see some glimpses of the unknowable; we feel for a moment the weight of the imponderable. A few points are vividly illuminated. First the abnormal behaviour of the accused. They all avow their guilt. They descant upon the enormity of their crimes. They applaud the justice of their punishment. Each in his turn recites the words put in his mouth by processes we cannot pretend to define. Evidently in this grisly charade each has been well coached in his part. The obvious conclusion is, of course, that they were promised their lives at the price of their abjection, and then cheated of that sorry guerdon. The odd tiling is that such an exhibition should be expected to make a good impression outside Russia. We see the gulf between the Communist mentality and the wider world.
The second point to notice is that these victims were nearly all Jews. Evidently the Nationalist elements represented by Stalin and the Soviet armies are developing the same prejudices against the Chosen People as are so painfully evident in Germany. Here again extremes meet, and meet on a common platform of hate and cruelty. But it is the third aspect which has most to do with the Western democracies.
What is the effect of this butchery upon Russia as a military factor in the balance of Europe? Clearly Soviet Russia has moved decidedly away from Communism. This is a lurch to the Right. The theme of a world revolution which animated the Trotskyists is cracked if not broken. Russian nationalism and discrowned Imperialism present themselves more crudely but also more solidly. It may well be that Russia in her old guise of a personal despotism may have more points of contact with the West than the evangelists of the Third International. At any rate it will be less hard to understand. This is in fact less a manifestation of world progapanda than an act of self-preservation by a community which fears, and has reason to fear, the sharp German sword.