Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (4 page)

With the Tsarist empire disintegrating, the struggle in 1917–18 with the breakaway Ukrainian and Finnish assemblies helped to push them in favour of the second possibility. Even more important were the results of the Constituent Assembly elections, which represented a vote for the Left but a considerable defeat for the Bolsheviks, who gained under one fourth of the total votes cast, and less than half as many deputies as the Socialist Revolutionaries. In the face of this rejection by the electorate, Lenin adjusted his position: according to his
Theses on the Constituent Assembly
it was true that “in a bourgeois republic the constituent assembly [is] the highest form of the democratic principle”; however, it now appeared that according to “revolutionary social-democracy … a republic of Soviets [is] a higher form of the democratic principle.” The Assembly became an anachronistic symbol of “bourgeois counter-revolution”; its members were written off as “men from another world.” Lenin did not prevent its meeting in
January 1918; but one day after it opened, he closed it down by force. This was bad Marxism, according to more moderate Social Democrats, but Lenin hardly cared.
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His triumph, like Mussolini’s later from the Right, was really the consequence of liberalism’s failure. Russia’s liberals turned out to be the first, but not the last, to assume mistakenly that a deep-rooted social crisis could be solved by offering “the people” constitutional liberties. Such liberties were not what “the people”—and especially Russia’s fifteen million peasant conscripts—wanted. They were more interested in peace and land, and the liberals offered them neither, just as they had little to offer the country’s urban working class either. In the factories, in the countryside and in the ranks, social order was collapsing, and the middle ground in Russian politics disappeared. Kerensky’s Provisional Government had become an empty shell well before Trotsky’s Red Guards seized power in Petrograd.

The hopes of Russian constitutionalists lingered on, nevertheless, and in June 1918 they established a short-lived Committee of Members of the Constitutional Assembly in Samara. After the end of the civil war, “bourgeois counter-revolutionaries” formed a rump Assembly of Members of the Constituent Assembly in Paris—but this bore little relation to the balance of power inside what had by now become the Soviet Union, where the overwhelming desire was not for constitutional liberties but for socio-economic transformation, national consolidation and an end to lawlessness and social anarchy through decisive state action. Thus Russia, liberalism’s first wartime triumph, became the scene of its first and most frightening defeat.

In Bolshevik hands, even constitutionalism could be used against the bourgeoisie: why should
their
form of constitution be regarded as the last word? Perhaps it was outmoded and class-ridden, and needed to be replaced by something more modern? “We’ll tell the people that its interests are higher than the interests of democratic institutions,” insisted Lenin in December 1917. Shortly after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, he contrasted the “dead bourgeois parliamentarism” of the assembly, with the “proletarian, simple, in many ways disorderly and incomplete, but alive and vital Soviet
apparat
.” And it was upon the basis of his Declaration of Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People that the Fifth Congress of Soviets approved its own
constitution for the Russian Federated Republic. Through this document the congress sought the creation of socialism by ending exploitation, “crushing completely” the bourgeoisie and vesting power in the working population as expressed through the Soviets.
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Citizenship in this new state was unrestricted—at least in theory—according to sex and place of birth, so that women and some foreigners were enfranchised. It was, however, restricted according to social background in favour of “the urban and rural proletariat” and “the poorest peasants”: at least seven categories of persons—including rentiers, monks and commercial traders—were denied the vote. Moreover, all rights in law were conditional: they could be withdrawn by the government if their exercise was deemed to prejudice the socialist revolution. When in December 1919, the Menshevik Martov criticized the Revolution’s repeated violations of its own constitution, Lenin rejoined that what Martov demanded meant “back to bourgeois democracy and nothing else,” insisting that “both terror and the Cheka are … indispensable.” One year later, he was clearer still. “The scientific term ‘dictatorship,’ ” he wrote, “means nothing more or less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force.” Thus, well before Stalin, the absolutist character of communist rule was made manifest; as in Tsarist times, the regime preserved an administrative conception of law rather than one consistent with the “bourgeois” separation of powers. It differed, of course, both from Tsarist times and, more important, from constitutional innovations elsewhere in Europe, in the priority it gave to socio-economic benefits for the masses—public housing, medical care and schooling, liberalized marriage and divorce laws—over the classical individual freedoms. But it differed too in its conception of revolutionary politics as civil war, wherein state terror had a special role as an instrument of class struggle.
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Yet the development of the Soviet system had a less immediate impact on the rest of Europe than seemed likely in 1918. The West’s intervention in the Russian Civil War failed to topple the communist regime. But equally across the rest of Europe, the much-feared revolution either failed to materialize, or was easily put down. Despite the wave of soviets, strikes, mutinies and insurrections which swept
Europe in 1918–19 from Scotland to the Adriatic, with street fighting in Germany and a violent civil war in Finland, there was only one other country where a Bolshevik regime actually seized power for any length of time, and that was Hungary. As in Russia, civil war was the consequence; the outcome, however, was very different.

In early 1919, the liberal regime of Count Mihály Károlyi was overthrown by a Bolshevik sympathizer called Béla Kun, who immediately proclaimed the establishment of a Soviet republic. But Kun held Budapest for only several months. Backed by the Entente powers, the Romanian army invaded Hungary and the communists fled. In the autumn of 1919, the gentry class returned to power under the regency of Admiral Horthy, established a regime of terror against suspected radicals and quickly won Allied recognition.

At first, Horthy’s right-wing regime—anti-communist, anti-democratic—seemed an anomaly in an era of growing democratization, a last gasp of European feudalism. Time would show, however, that it was more than a relic from the past; it was also a vision of the future: the democracies were to be squeezed increasingly tightly between the twin extremes of communism and fascism. These new authoritarian models were soon to challenge the pre-eminence of Versailles liberalism.

BOURGEOIS DOUBTS

At a time when ruling elites feared the prospect of peasants and workers joining hands to seize power, one of the main instruments for building up support for democratic successor states across Europe was land reform—sacrificing the aristocracy to save bourgeois society from the Bolshevik threat to do away with private property completely. Thus throughout eastern and central Europe, large estates were parcelled out to create a new class of peasant smallholders. In general it was hoped that they would prove to be independent, democratic but conservative, immune to the blandishments of communism.

Such a political project could only work, however, where the government was prepared to dispossess the landed classes. Where large estates were in the hands of an ethnic minority, as in the Baltic states, in Czechoslovakia and to some extent in the Balkans, politicians were
happier about land reform than in countries like Hungary, where the magnates nipped the reform movement in the bud, or Italy, where landowners were well connected to government. In Weimar Germany, east Elbian Junkers accused the reform-minded Chancellor Brüning of “Agrarian Bolshevism.” In Spain, of course, fear of agrarian reform was to play a large part in fomenting civil war.

The revolutionary wave of 1918–19 did indeed demonstrate the political conservatism of the landowning peasantry. It was in the cities—Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Budapest—that pro-Bolshevik groups sought power. It was in cities—like Turin in 1920—that the power of European pro-Bolsheviks expressed itself in strikes, factory occupations and demonstrations. What limited their potential—outside wartime Russia—was their lack of appeal to the rural population. Rarely in Europe did you encounter peasants in as miserable a condition as was to be found in Russia. Most were uninterested in political radicalism—with the partial exception of the Bulgarian Agrarians. Only where you found a landless agricultural workforce as in the Po valley, in the latifundia of Andalusia, or the Great Plain of Hungary, did the Russian Revolution resonate. Whilst Austrian smallholders denounced Red Vienna, Italian
braccianti
were forming powerful socialist leagues. Unwilling to defuse this rural discontent by the only democratic means possible—land reform—political elites in Italy turned to force. Agrarian civil war paved the way for Mussolini.

The rise of Italian Fascism in the early 1920s offers an instructive counter-example to those critics who blamed the new constitutions for democracy’s collapse in Europe. After all, when Mussolini became Premier, Charles Albert’s
Statuto
of 1848 remained the constitutional foundation of the state. What post-war Italy offered was a picture of liberal uncertainty and weakness, a more or less voluntary renunciation of power to the Right in the face of popular discontent and political instability.

In October 1922, when the King invited Mussolini to form a government, the Fascist movement was still relatively small. What helped it into power was not the impression created by the melodramatic, not to say farcical, March on Rome, but rather the widespread fear of socialism in Italy, generated by the results of the new universal male suffrage in the elections of 1919. It was this fear which explains why
such broad strata of the police, the civil service, the Court and parliament looked upon the Fascists with sympathy. Mussolini’s first government was a coalition with three other political parties. Without their support, especially that of the Liberals, Mussolini would have been unable to form a government. Without their support, and that of the Socialists as well, he would have been unable to push through the electoral reform of 1923 which ensured his government’s control of the Chamber of Deputies.

Up to 1925, indeed, many of the Duce’s more radical supporters expressed their disappointment at Fascism’s compromise with the old system. The conservative Gaetano Serventi, in his book
Ascesa della democrazia europea e prime reazioni storiche
(The Ascent of European Democracy and the First Historical Reactions) not only wrote off post-war democracy as a symptom of “the rapid and progressive decadence of European values in the world,” but, less predictably perhaps, attacked what he called “parliamentary Fascism” for “deluding itself that its vitality might exist within a democratic system.” Similarly the Spanish commentator Francisco Cambo warned that Mussolini, by compromising with parliamentarism, had lost his opportunity for a truly revolutionary break with the past. Such criticisms were to be found also within the Fascist movement itself, where calls for revolutionary renewal led to the so-called “second wave” of 1925–6. Only then were laws passed extending the powers of the prefect in the provinces, depriving the regime’s critics of citizenship, suppressing opposition parties and attacking press freedoms and civil liberties. In the fluid political climate of the early 1920s, Fascism no less than democracy was feeling its way.
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Over the next four years the outlines of the Fascist state became clearer. Some features from the past were retained: the King remained head of state (although his powers were whittled down), Parliament continued its ineffectual debates, while the widespread use of police power in the provinces remained as indispensable as it had done under the Liberals. Thus in some ways Fascism followed on quite smoothly from its Liberal predecessors, and post-war mass democracy looked much like a tiny interlude in a longer history of elite government.

Where Fascism differed sharply from liberalism was in its frank
defence of the authoritarian state. “Discipline must be accepted,” stated Mussolini, who had—after all—chosen the
fasces
, a Roman image of authority, as the symbol of his movement. “When it is not accepted, it must be imposed.” Individual and collective rights were, of course, harshly curtailed. The virtues of violence and action were extolled, while Parliament was denounced for ineffectiveness and useless rhetoric. As the Duce himself put it in his inimitable prose:

Fascism rejects in Democracy the conventional lie of political equality, the spirit of collective irresponsibility and the myth of happiness and indefinite progress … One should not exaggerate the importance of Liberalism in the last century and make of it a religion of humanity for all present and future times when in reality it was only one of the many doctrines of that century … Now Liberalism is on the point of closing the doors of its deserted temple … That is why all the political experiments of the contemporary world are anti-Liberal and the desire to exile them from history is supremely ridiculous: as if history was a hunting preserve for Liberalism and professors, as if Liberalism was the last and incomparable word in civilization … The present century is the century of authority, a century of the Right, a Fascist century.
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In its attack on liberal individualism, Fascism proposed a social project revolutionary in its implications: the bourgeois division of life into public and private spheres was to be replaced by a “totalitarian” conception of politics as a complete lived experience: “One cannot be a Fascist in politics … and non-Fascist in school, non-Fascist in the family circle, non-Fascist in the workshop.” Through all the many twists and turns of the Duce’s long period in office, these elements at least of Fascism remained constant.
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