RUSSIA: CAPITAL AND COUNTRY

A LOST PREDOMINANCE

FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT. PETROGRAD, WEDNESDAY

Petrograd is now certainly the most interesting town in Russia. It is seething with plots and counter-plots, real and fictitious, with big and little comedies and tragedies, with the crowded, turbulent passions that as often as not suddenly evaporate into the chilly nothingness, the psychological vacuum, familiar to readers of Dostoevsky’s novels. But that is not the immediately important fact about Petrograd. Of much more permanent importance is the circumstance that, for Russia as a whole, the spell of Petrograd is broken. Before the revolution, Russia was highly centralised; all the vast spaces between the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Northern Pacific were absolutely dependent on Petrograd. It was the keystone of the Empire; its fiat was law; it reduced the rest of Russia to its will; it wove perpetually a strange, cold spell, with the aim of moulding all the infinite variety of Russia after a chosen bureaucratic archetype. And to a large extent it succeeded. Petrograd was the capital; all the rest of Russia, including even Moscow, despite its protests, was provincial. The possession of Petrograd meant the possession of Russia. That was why the Petrograd revolution immediately became an all-russian revolution. The changing moods of Petrograd continually received a belated reflection in the changing moods of Russia. But the eccentricities of Petrograd during the revolution had an unsettling effect. The provinces could not keep pace with the vagaries of the capital, and when finally the Bolsheviks captured Petrograd, the situation was suddenly changed. The spell of Petrograd was broken; Petrograd ceased to represent and command Russia as a whole; and there began a wholly new process of formation of local centres independent of the capital. This is one of the results of Bolshevik rule. Whether, in effecting this, the Bolsheviks have done Russia a service or a disservice, whether they have only precipitated an inevitable process, or whether they are ruining Russia we shall see later. I doubt the latter. Altogether, it is early to judge the work of Lenin and Trotsky, those fantastic products of the underworld of our civilisation. When the smoke, confusion, and passion of conflict have cleared away it is quite possible we shall discover that their reckless iconoclasm, highly uncomfortable as it is for their contemporaries, has swept away much of the decaying inheritance of the past that was in any case doomed, sooner or later, to extinction.

PROCESS OF DECENTRALISATION

Anyhow, I should like to insist on the fact which is essential to a true and practical view of the present state of Russia, that Petrograd no longer represents the whole country; that Russia is already decentralised. Living here, we correspondents are compelled to describe in some detail the turmoils, brawls, arrests and all the social somersaults that constitute the life we see before our eyes. But I personally feel that all this is declining more and more to the level of mere local politics. It is as though one had to do with the life of a medieval Italian city republic, while all over Russia there are looming up new republics, with their own forces, aims and tendencies, of which, so far, we have only a vague general knowledge. These centres are citadels of self-defence; they are devices for maintaining a tottering political authority; and at the same time they are factors in the reconstruction of Russia on new lines. Local initiative, so long paralysed by the dictatorship of Petrograd, is now roused to action by the stimulus of necessity. The actual state of affairs is this. The Bolsheviks are the de facto rulers of Petrograd and Moscow, and, to a certain extent, of an illdefined territory in the neighbourhood of these cities. The Rada rules the Ukraine, again with incompletely defined frontiers. The Cossacks control the Northern Caucasus, and an independent coalition, composed of the local Nationalist and Moderate Socialist parties, rules Transcaucasia. The Ural territory is largely controlled by the local Cossacks, who have in the Tartars semi-rivals and semi-allies. An independent Government is gradually taking root in Siberia, and other formations are in process, of which it will be time to speak when they take effective action. Finland has declared its independence with great emphasis.

EMBRYO REPUBLICS

These various movements are some more and some less separatist in character, and the relations between them vary in kind and intensity. The Bolsheviks alone claim authority over the whole of Russia, though now they are showing a tendency to admit an independent Ukraine. As to the rupture of Ukraine with the Bolsheviks, and its alliance with the Cossacks, neither are as yet absolutely definitive and formal. The demarcation of frontiers is not complete, and in the territory of each embryo State there are insubordinate garrisons, Bolshevik or Ukrainian as the case may be. There are secluded communities, too, that have attracted the attention of no authority, and live their own placid life outside the hurly-burly. But, generally speaking, all these States are falling into a certain system of which the principal manifestation is that the loose southern Confederation is in a state of guerrilla warfare with that shifting quantity, the Bolshevik North True, the transition from centralism to independent local organs is not made so easily; the tradition and habit of centralism, with all its concrete forms, is not to be broken in a day. In Petrograd are still collected the chief central institutions, the Senate, the State Bank, the foreign Embassies, the great Chanceries. But the functions of most of these are paralysed by Bolshevik rule, and their action is suspended. The Senate, like all the law courts, has been driven underground for self-preservation; the Ministries are on strike. And as for the State Bank, as far as the Bolsheviks are able to operate it, it is serving local purpose, and the Ukrainians have been compelled to begin the issue of paper money of their own. There is simmering an attempt at recentralisation in the form of the Constituent Assembly, whose members are gradually assembling in Petrograd, and around which agitation is growing. But the Constituent Assembly is also paralysed by the Bolsheviks, and it is a question whether it will wish or try to reverse the process of decentralisation. At most it will serve as a coordinating factor. This is the present position. It is full of extraordinary possibilities. It does not mean the ruin of Russia, but it may very proudly mean the recuperation and more effective distribution of her forces, not for war, because Russia has practically ceased to be a military force in the war, but for very multifarious political developments in that new historical phase into which the war, in a sense broader than that of a mere military contest, is now developing.