That the Puritans were in some sense puritanical we can take in stride as a reasonable assumption. Indeed, at present it is probably more useful to try to show that the historical Puritans both in old and new England were not quite the complete killjoys the school of H. L. Mencken would make them out to have been. As for the Jacobins, their legislation and above all their somewhat informal administration in 1793-94 had striking analogies with the kind of things the English Puritans tried to put over. The Jacobins were in principle against gambling, drunkenness, sexual irregularities of all sorts, ostentatious display of poverty, idleness, thieving, and of course in general all sorts of crimes. In practice they felt at liberty to enforce abstention from these vices and to insist with force on the carrying out of positive acts of virtue--such as selling goods always at the legal fixed maximum price, even if a little bootlegging seemed quite safe, attending celebrations in honor of the Supreme Being on _décadi_, expressing in public the opinion that William Pitt was a corrupt villain, and the English nation a lot of pathetic slaves. Such a system of action they sought to enforce by making each man his own detective, God’s own private spy, much as was said to have been done in Calvin’s own Geneva.
Those who chiefly did the prying were the members of the local clubs, urged on by the local leaders, just as with the Puritans it was the parish clergy, aided by the active elders of the church, who saw to it that the sheep were properly shepherded. The most undignified matters, apparently the most insignificant also, might under these conditions set a parish or a community on end. The first dissension in the English Separatist Church at Amsterdam, we are told, arose not over any point of doctrine or ritual, but over the lace on Mrs. Francis Johnson’s sleeve. One could find dozens of parallels for this in the behavior of the Jacobins. There was the lively debate in a little club in Normandy over the question whether citizen doctor X wasn’t making his professional calls on aristocrats too long, his calls on patriots too short. And the great row at Bourgoin when the secretary announced that he wasn’t going to wear the red Liberty cap because it didn’t become him. This shocking display of vanity overcoming patriotism unleashed the full fury of the virtuous Republicans of Bourgoin, and the secretary was lucky to escape with his life.
The other-worldliness of the Russian revolutionists affords a problem more apparent than important, or even real. It is quite true that “philosophically” modern Communism is based on materialism, that it denies the immortality of the soul and indeed the existence of a soul, that it insists men must be happy here on earth, enjoying the good things of this earth. But surely it is most important if you wish to understand the problems of men in society to find out what men do, how they behave, as well as what they say on paper or in the pulpit that they are doing, or want to do, or ought to do. It is also quite true that Communists, fellow-travelers, as the Communists like to call their sentimental followers among the intellectuals, and the brethren of the Left in general in this country tend to be extremely indignant when their behavior is analyzed as we propose to analyze it. Here, as so often, indignation is not refutation.
That the Bolshevik leaders were almost all ascetics is perhaps a commonplace. Lenin was notably austere and contemptuous of ordinary comfort, and at the height of his power his apartments in the Kremlin were of barrack-like simplicity. Some of Lenin’s sayings sound like the bourgeois Calvinists as analyzed by Max Weber, or even by Mr. R. H. Tawney: “Carry out an accurate and honest account of money, manage economically, don’t loaf, don’t steal, maintain the strictest discipline in labor.” Indeed, the general tone among the high command of Bolshevism was in those early years that of a consecrated and almost monastic group. In a Russia where men were starving or freezing it was for one thing pretty impolitic for leaders to look too sleek and well-fed. But just as the pressure of the war is not a complete explanation for the Terror, so neither necessity nor policy explains the asceticism of the Bolsheviks. They felt, as the Puritans had felt, that the ordinary vices and weaknesses of human beings are disgusting, that the good life cannot be led until they are eliminated. Early the Bolsheviks prohibited the national drink, vodka, and almost all the early soviets took steps against prostitution, gambling, night life, and so on. Theoretically the Bolsheviks thought women should be free, for instance, free from the shocking limitations bourgeois laws had put upon them; hence the notable freedom allowed in Russia as to marriage, divorce, abortion, and other phases of family and sex relationships. But the Bolsheviks did not intend by this that women were to be free to behave as they were sure they secretly behaved--or wanted to behave--in dissolute old bourgeois society. On the contrary, they expected their women to behave as they would behave in the classless society--and though vague, that is a pretty strict canon.
Even today, when apparently the crisis stage is over in Russia, there are numerous survivals of the intense asceticism of the true Communist party members of the crisis period. In their innocent book on Soviet Russia, the innocent Webbs declare that there is no asceticism in Russia, of course, and then go on and explain how the Comsomols (Communist Youth) are encouraged to take the pledge--not for any silly evangelical reasons, heavens, no, but because drinking anything alcoholic is “a breach of the rule requiring maintenance of perfect health.” Petting, too, is very definitely discouraged as unworthy of the Communist Youth, especially when it is done in public. “Nothing pornographic is allowed in literature or in any form of art. There is less public sex appeal in evidence in Russia than in any Western land.” Since the Webbs wrote this, the Russians seem to have relaxed a bit in their public restraints, and the Germans, in the freshness of their revolution, have gone very puritanical in such matters. Berlin, which used to provide the broadest range of sexual activity in the world, has now outwardly taken on a Lutheran and Teutonic virtue, while the existence of public prostitution in Moscow and Leningrad can hardly escape even visiting members of the British Labour party.
The Russians of old being notoriously dirty about their public places--almost as dirty as we Americans are--the new regime has made it a point of discipline that no litter, papers, and such-like truck be left in public parks, streets, and stations. Indeed, membership in the Communist party itself, always a very select and disciplined minority, demanded for years, and to a certain extent still demands, the exercise of a great deal of self-restraint, a willingness to live simply, to work hard, to conform to very high standards of personal morality. As usual in such circumstances, and as we have already noted for the Puritans and the Jacobins, self-restraint was apparently not enough, and there grew up in Russia all sorts of official and unofficial methods of spying, prying, checking-up on the actions of individuals, and controlling them by Terrorist methods. Many of these agencies are now serving the Stalinite reaction, as similar agencies in France and in England served the Thermidorean reaction and the Stuart restoration.
Now groups thoroughly disciplined into lives almost as unnaturally ascetic as those our Puritans, Jacobins, and Bolshevists sought to impose have existed for relatively long periods. The Spartiates contrived to support an almost heroic Communism for several centuries. But this discipline is of slow growth, intimately tied up with the kind of behavior in men that changes with geological slowness. A revolution cannot manufacture this kind of discipline overnight, and perhaps the violence--and here is meant rather spiritual violence than mere bloodshed--of the Terror is in some sense an overcompensation for the inability of the extremists to carry their ordinary brothers along with them. The Terror is a desperate overshooting of the mark. Again, the existence in individuals of a certain amount of inclination to meddle with their neighbor’s private affairs is probably a useful thing, part of what cements societies together. But here, too, the ardent revolutionists overshoot the mark and make life unbearable for their neighbors.
There are traces of this kind of organized asceticism, this crusade against the customary vices, even in the American revolution, where the crisis stage was never as intense as in our other revolutions. There were many restrictive measures justified chiefly as necessary to the efficient prosecution of the war against George III. There were others quite as obviously dictated by the traditions of middle-class Protestant ethics which had long been established in the Middle Colonies and in New England. But here and there one encounters the true accent of revolutionary idealism. Here is a passage worthy of Robespierre: “Titles are the offspring of monarchical and arbitrary governments. While the object of the present war with Great Britain was reconciliation, the titles of excellency, honorable, etc., were submitted to by the people of America, but since the Declaration of Independence, the colonies have divorced monarchy forever, and become free, independent states. It becomes then necessary to adopt the simple language of free governments.... Let us leave the titles of excellency and honorable to the abandoned servants of a tyrant King ... while we satisfy ourselves with beholding our senators, governors, and generals rich in real excellence and honor.”