f socialism, wedded as they are to a benevolent vision of the State and the dream of using its power to create a more just society. Consequently, despite all the evidence to date, many of them still pursue the phantom of “democratic socialism,” believing that democratic institutions can be relied on to prevent socialism from degenerating into tyranny. The great classical-liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century, by contrast, harbored no such illusions. Every single one of them discerned the incompatibility of state socialism with the maintenance of free and democratic institutions. They did so, moreover, long before the advent of the socialist tyrannies of the twentieth century.
One of the earliest warnings was sounded by John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) more than 50 years before the Russian Revolution. In a now-famous passage in his essay On Liberty (1859), Mill declared: “If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities and the public charities, were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free other than in name.”
As Mill understood, you cannot maintain freedom of speech and of the press, or freedom of assembly and association, if all the means of communication—newsprint, meeting halls, radio stations, and more—are in the hands of the State. It is equally impossible, in such conditions, for opposition parties to win elections, particularly since a State-controlled economy prevents them, in any case, from acquiring the capital to finance their campaigns. That is why democratic socialism is a contradiction in terms. Either socialism must be diluted or abandoned for the sake of democracy, or democracy (as well as liberty) will be sacrificed on the altar of socialism.
The Truth about Pre-Revolutionary Russia
What is so tragic about the Russian Revolution is that the triumph of communism in October 1917 aborted the embryo of a developing liberal society. As Szamuely points out, “[F]ew people in the West are aware of the extent of freedom in Tsarist Russia before the Revolution, in the early part of our century. It enjoyed full freedom of the press—censorship had been abolished, and even Bolshevik publications appeared without restrictions—full freedom of foreign travel, independent trade unions, independent courts, trial by jury . . . a parliament, a Duma with MPs representing parties of every political shade, including the Bolsheviks.”
By the early 1920s, by contrast, all this had been swept away. To quote Solzhenitsyn’s summary of the first period of communist rule under Lenin: “It dispersed the [democratically elected] Constituent Assembly. . . . It introduced execution without trial. It crushed workers’ strikes. It plundered the villagers to such an unbelievable extent that the peasants revolted, and when this happened it crushed the peasants in the bloodiest possible way. It shattered the Church. It reduced 20 provinces of our country to a condition of famine” (Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom, 1975).
Democratic socialists may object at this point that prerevolutionary Russia was not as free and democratic as Britain or the United States, and that the cause of socialism was compromised by the Bolsheviks’ violent seizure of power. But even if Lenin had triumphed in a peaceful election, his subsequent takeover of the economy and nationalization of all previously independent institutions would eventually have produced the same totalitarian outcome.
The inherently despotic nature of socialism, so vividly confirmed by the history of the Russian Revolution and all subsequent socialist revolutions, was clearly perceived by Mill’s great Italian liberal contempor