We can, however, say that in all our societies these radicals were very conscious, and usually very proud, of their small numbers. They felt definitely set off from their countrymen, consecrated to a cause which their countrymen were certainly not consciously and actively equal to. Some of the radicals may have satisfied themselves that they really represented the better selves of their fellow-countrymen, that they were the reality of which the others were the potentiality. But here and now they were very sure that they were superior to the inert and flabby many. The English saints of the seventeenth century, the elect of a God more exclusive than any poor worldly king, made no attempt to conceal their contempt for the damned masses--and dukes and earls were of course masses for these determined Puritans. The Jacobins inherited from the Enlightenment a belief in the natural goodness or the natural reasonableness of the common man, and this belief put a limit to their expressed scorn for their fellows. But the scorn is there, and the Jacobin was almost as loftily consecrated as was the Independent. The Bolsheviks were brought up to believe that dialectical materialism works through an elite of the laboring classes, and that the peasants in particular were incapable of working out their own salvation. The Bolsheviks therefore took their fewness naturally enough, and their superiority as well.
There is also a good deal of evidence that as the revolutions go on, a very large number of people just drop out of active politics, make no attempt to register their votes. Now it may be that most of these people again are at heart in sympathy with the active radicals; but on the whole it looks as if most of them were cowed conservatives or moderates, men and women not anxious for martyrdom, but quite incapable of the mental and moral as well as physical strain of being a devoted extremist in the crisis of a revolution. We have very clear evidence of this dropping out of the ordinary man in two of our revolutions, and we may assume that it is one of the uniformities we are seeking.
In Russia, the February revolution brought in universal suffrage as a matter of course. Russia had at last caught up with the West. At the first elections almost everybody, men and women alike, took the opportunity to vote in various local elections. But very shortly there set in a noticeable decline in the total number of votes cast. In the June, 1917, elections for the Moscow district dumas the Social-Revolutionary groups received 58 per cent of the votes; in the September elections the Bolsheviks received 52 per cent. A clear gain for the Bolsheviks by democratic methods? Not at all. In June the Social-Revolutionaries got 375,000 votes out of 647,000 cast; in September the Bolsheviks got 198,000 out of 381,000 cast. In three months half the electorate dropped out. Trotsky himself has a simple explanation for this; “many small-town people who, in the vapor of the first illusions, had joined the Compromisers fell back soon after into political non-existence.” The same story is graphically recorded in French municipal and national elections between the rosy days of 1789, when everyone who could stagger to the polls voted, and 1793, when in some cases less than a tenth of the qualified voters actually voted. They did not vote for Bolsheviks or Jacobins, and it seems more than likely that if most Englishmen could have voted at all in 1648, they would not have voted for Independents, Levellers, Diggers, Fifth Monarchy Men, or Millenarians. The great numbers of qualified voters just don’t vote; in Trotsky’s compact phrase, they are politically non-existent.
Their political non-existence is not achieved without a good deal of help from the extremists. The elections are supposedly free and open, but the extremists are not hindered by any beliefs in freedom they may have expressed in other days. They soon take to steps familiar in this country through the history of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Tammany Hall. They beat up well-known aristocrats and such-like class enemies, they start riots at polling places or in electoral assemblies, they break windows and start street fights, they howl down moderate candidates, they bring to bear good journalists, skilled at libel and innuendo, and in a hundred ways which any realistic student of politics can uncover with a little study, they make it very difficult for ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women to go to the polls and cast their votes for the moderates to whom ordinary, peaceful, humdrum men and women seem attracted. Not that terrorism alone scares off the ordinary man. Mere laziness, an inability to give to political affairs the ceaseless attention revolutions demand, is also instrumental in keeping the man in the street from expressing himself. He gets fed up with the constant meetings, the deputations, the papers, the elections of dog-catchers, general inspectors, presidents, the committees, the rituals, the ceaseless moil and toil of self-government on a more than Athenian basis. At any rate he quits, and the extremists have the field to themselves.
Their fewness is indeed one of the great sources of the extremists’ strength. Great numbers are almost as unwieldy in politics as on the battlefield. In the politics of revolutions what counts is the ability to move swiftly, to make clear and final decisions, to push through to a goal without regard for injured human dispositions. For such a purpose the active political group must be small. You cannot otherwise obtain the single-mindedness and devotion, the energy and the discipline, necessary to defeat the moderates. You cannot in large numbers maintain the fever of fanaticism long enough to secure the ultimate victory. The masses do not make revolutions. They may be enlisted for some impressive pageantry once the active few have won the revolution. Our contemporary revolutions, both of the Right and the Left, have achieved apparent miracles of mass participation. But the impressive demonstrations the camera records in Germany and Russia ought not to deceive the careful student of politics. Neither Bolshevik nor Nazi victory over the moderates was achieved by the participation of the many; both were achieved by small, disciplined, principled, fanatical bodies.
Nor at this stage of revolution do the victorious radicals make use of the plebiscite. They do not dare risk anything like a free election. Only later, when the crisis is followed by a convalescence, by a return to normal ways, does the plebiscite stage arrive. This interval may not be a very long one, and in the case of Rightist revolutions may be very brief, since the full fury of the Ideal rarely inspires the men of the Right. But certainly for the revolutions we are here studying, the generalization holds: the plebiscite is absent from the struggle between extremists and moderates, and is not used by the extremists even after their accession to power.
The extremists are not only few; they are fanatically devoted to their cause. Their awareness of being few seems correlated with the intensity of their fanaticism. One feeds upon and strengthens the other. With their objects, with the content of their dreams of a better world, we shall concern ourselves later. For those who think that only in the service of a personal God can feelings properly defined as “fanatical” be aroused, our application of the word to Jacobins and Bolsheviks may seem illegitimate. But this is surely an undue narrowing of a clear and useful word. Bolsheviks and Jacobins were as convinced as any Calvinist that they alone were right, that what they proposed was the only possible course. All of our revolutionary radicals displayed a willingness to work hard, to sacrifice their peace and security, to submit to discipline, to submerge their personalities in the group. They were all aware of the spiritual difficulties of keeping “always at the height of revolutionary circumstances,” as the Jacobins used to put it; but to a surprising extent they overcame these difficulties and maintained on this earth an _esprit de corps_, an active moral union, that is far beyond the powers of ordinary men in ordinary circumstances to attain and to maintain.
And they are disciplined. Partly, as we have explained, this is an inheritance from their oppressed past. It correlates with their fewness and with their fanatical strength. The New Model Army is an excellent example. It defeated the haphazard aggregations which the ordinary recruiting methods of the Royalists opposed to it; it defeated the cream of the opposing forces, the cavalry recruited from faithful country gentlemen and their dependents. The New Model was recruited from ardent Puritans, vouched for by men who knew them; and it was submitted to a brief but effective course of training incomparably more severe than any that had yet been used in English military history. The result was a fine army--and a compact body of hard revolutionists who could cut through the best intentions and the best rhetoric of the moderates. The discipline of the Jacobins was not military, but it was very rigorous, and indeed resembled the kind of discipline which a militant religious body imposes on its members. The Jacobins were always scrutinizing their own membership, submitting to the ordeal of an _épuration_, literally a “purification,” perhaps in contemporary terms a “purge.” The slightest deviation from the established order of the day might bring a warning and possible expulsion. With the Spartan ways of the Russian Communist party in the early days of the soviet state most of us are familiar; it is a point on which all reporters, kindly and unkindly, are agreed.