ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how far the Bolshevists have been successful with their patent designs in equipping the old tumbledown Russian mansion and turning it into an ideal home for workers. Bold and purposeful power of action certainly was once the distinguishing feature of Bolshevism and its surest guarantee of progress. It, more than anything else, put the power into Bolshevist hands in 1917. The Bolshevist energy and power of action have become entangled in a machine of this kind, faulty in construction and impossible in its working. Once the Bolshevists stepped forward to cut with one stroke of their steady hands the Russian Gordian knot; now even the simplest things turn, in their fumbling fingers, into tangled skeins. In an incredible way, they have managed to confuse and complicate everything belonging to their domain. Bolshevism, that combination of strength and hope, has become a dry, pale-faced, impersonal officialism, weighed down with all the inherited sins of a degenerate bureaucracy.
