THE RED TERROR IN RUSSIA
INTRODUCTION
In countries where personal freedom renders honest, sincere political controversy possible ... the use of political murder as a weapon in the fight is a manifestation of despotism.—The Executive of the Narodnaya Volya, or Party of Popular Freedom.
I was in Russia during the first five years of the Bolshevist régime, but contrived to leave that country during the October of 1922. Scarcely had I broken my journey at Warsaw before I found myself confronted with a question involving one of the most complex psychological and socio-ethical problems of our day.
For, as I was sitting in a co-operative café run by some Polish ladies, the lady who was serving me with coffee suddenly put to me the question:
“Are you a Russian straight from Russia?”
“Yes—I am a Russian.”
“Then pray tell me how it is that no one there seems willing to assassinate Lenin and Trotsky?”
The unexpected, the point-blank question took me aback, and the more so because during the past five years I had lost the habit of expressing an opinion openly. But at length I contrived to reply that I myself stood opposed to all terrorist acts, and considered them always to fail in attaining their purpose.
“Yet to think that one man’s death might save the lives of thousands who are destined to perish in those ruffians’ torture-chambers! How is it that, though, during Tsarist days, ever so many people were ready to sacrifice their lives for others, even to assassinate, that wrong might be punished, not a soul now will avenge his outraged honour? Yet every victim has a brother, or a son, or a daughter, or a sister, or a wife. How is it that these will not avenge him? Oh, I cannot understand it!”
Leaving out of the question the ethical point of the wrong or the right of physical force,[1] I replied that, even though things in Russia had reached the point that human life had ceased to be of value, it should be remembered by anyone contemplating a terrorist act that revenge, even revenge wreaked out of patriotic motives, would entail thousands of innocent deaths—that though in former days only the political criminal himself, or, at most, he and his associates, had suffered execution, matters now were different, as the past five years had shown.