ABSTRACT
This brings me to my second question: Is the well-being of the Russian people, taking into account both material and moral conditions, greater or less than it used to be? That is, after all, the crucial question. For most of us, this question on the comparative well-being of the people is already answered when we become clear about the answer to the first, i.e., the comparative harshness of the Governments past and present. Those in doubt 17about it must surely forget to what an extent the daily life of the people was overshadowed under the Tsarist régime; to what a degree not only the Government and all its representatives, but the landlords and employers, relied upon brutal and degrading methods of compulsion. To these I have already referred. And nowadays does anyone believe that to live in dread is a good popular education? In Russia, the Communist ‘tyranny,’ though we admit the term, has released the mass of peasants and workers from dread. It is a strictly political tyranny which does not affect the working conditions of daily life nor the management of a very great deal in local affairs. It rigs the more important elections and suppresses opposition candidates, and on those few Socialists whose dissent from Communist methods is regarded as dangerous, it comes down with as much harshness as on the recalcitrant bourgeois. But as regards the happiness of the people in general, including the formerly ‘subject’ Nationalities, there can be no shadow of doubt. It is a commonplace that no worker or peasant desires a return of Tsardom or a victory for the Whites; and even before the Revolution the peasants and workers amounted to over 90 per cent. of the population.
