U Not Gonna Like This

Here are some pdf files on the Russian Revolution of 1917.






The Soviet Republic," by Santeri Nuorteva [July 1919] This eloquent defense of the Bolshevik revolution by the Secretary of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau was published in the pages of an American academic journal. Nuorteva states that all the Soviet government wants is an end to military intervention and trade relations. An organized blockade had disrupted not only supplies into the country, but information from the country as well, he states, quoting an unnamed Western press correspondent who told Nuorteva that 95 percent of his telegraph dispatches from Soviet Russia had been intentionally delayed or stopped, particularly those mentioning in any way positive aspects of Soviet construction. The Russian revolution was not a simple matter of personalities taking specific actions, Nuorteva states, but rather a massive sociological upheaval based upon the land question and the peasant nature of the Russian army.

The Soviet Republic
by Santeri Nuorteva
Published in The Annals, v. 84 (July 1919).
(Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1919), pp. 108-113.

You cannot solve the Russian problem by emotionalism. You cannot explain the situation
there by passion. You cannot settle it by denunciation. You cannot understand Russia by saying that this man did so and so and another did so and so, and if these men had not done so or had not been there everything would be different. The Russian problem is not so simple as that, because it is a sociological problem.

I shall confine myself to pointing out just one outstanding economic fact in this sociological problem — namely, the land question. That has been the fundamental question in Russia for years and years. The peasants have made attempts to confiscate the land in Russia many, many times before the Soviet revolution. The peasants never had enough land. The Tsar’s government was too reactionary to present a solution of the land question even in such forms as have been accepted by so-called liberal capitalism in Western Europe.

I refer to such solutions as, for example, were reached in the Irish land question, where the land lords were bought out and the Irish peasants were placed in a position where they somehow could buy on installment payments that little patch of land they got. The Tsar’s government was too reactionary to offer even such a solution. It stuck stubbornly to the old order for years and years.

And when the day struck, when the peasants were in full physical control of the country, it was too late to offer such solutions. The peasants needed too much land and the finances of Russia were too disrupted to allow arrangements which would have been acceptable to capitalistic conceptions of society. If the land they took had been bought, it would have required tens of billions of rubles, financing of a kind which Russia was unable to do, even if she had wanted at that time. When the revolution came, the army which had been the chief weapon for keeping the peasants down became the chief weapon in the hands of the peasants themselves. And so the peasants just took the land. Whether you approve of it or not, it doesn’t matter because you can’t change it any more than you can change the course of the sun or the moon.

It was, as diplomats say, a fait accompli, which could not be undone.

The Kerensky government fell because it had not courage enough to deal with this fact as an accomplished fact. Nor did it dare to stand for the consequences of this fact. Yet just as naturally many other things resulted therefrom. If you annul the property rights on millions of acres of land, you thereby strike a death blow to the very foundations of capitalistic finance. Land is usually mortgaged. The value of papers in banks ultimately rests on land value. If you annul the mortgages, the banks are bankrupted. The bankruptcy of the banks will influence industrial and commercial life as a whole.