r 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 contemporary, Joseph Mazzini (1805–1872). In an essay on “The Economic Question” written in 1858 and addressed to the workers of Italy, Mazzini not only defended private property as an institution essential to human progress and well-being; he also denounced socialism with passion: “The liberty, the dignity, the conscience of the individual would all disappear in an organization of productive machines. Physical life might be satisfied by it, but moral and intellectual life would perish, and with it emulation, free choice of work, free association, stimulus to production, joys of property, and all incentives to progress. Under such a system the human family would become a herd. . . . Which of you would resign himself to such a system?” (The Duties of Man, 1961).
In addition, Mazzini pointed out, the establishment of a socialist society would, ironically, create the very worst form of inequality, because universal State ownership would require the establishment of an all-powerful ruling bureaucracy. “Working-men, my Brothers,” he asked, “are you disposed to accept a hierarchy of lords and masters of the common property? . . . Is not this a return to ancient slavery?”
The prophetic discernment of the nineteenth-century classical-liberal critics of socialism is again very apparent in the writings of Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850), the leading French economist and free-trade activist of his generation. A constant critic of statism in general, and socialism in particular, Bastiat summarized his objections in The Law, a short but lucid pamphlet published in 1850—the same decade, curiously enough, during which Mill and Mazzini raised their warning voices.
In this comprehensive analysis, Bastiat offered many valuable insights, of which three deserve particular mention. The first drew attention to a fatal contradiction within the ideology of democratic socialism, one which continues to characterize many of the attitudes of present-day European leftists and American “liberals.” On the one hand, complained Bastiat, socialists are passi