From the review of the book Socialism vs Capitalism by Boris L. Brasol in the New York Times, Sunday, November 21, 1920:
…Mr. Brasol wrote under fear that Bolshevism was conquering, if not already victorious, whereas Bertrand Russel has informed the world, very recently, almost against his will, certainly against his preconception, that “the Soviet system is moribund. No conceivable system of free elections would give majorities to the Communists in either town or country.”
A few interesting points to pull out of this:
- at the time this was published, the outcome of the Russian Revolution was very much in doubt, the Russian Civil War was still in progress with the outcome still very much in doubt;
- it’s likely too early to judge the Soviet system on its merits, as the Revolution had only occurred in 1917 during the last year of World War I and in the midsts of the civil war, though no question there were signs;
- Russel’s insights are correct about elections, as the Communists never won a truly freely-held election during the Twentieth Century; what he didn’t consider, however, was the rigged elections that occurred throughout Soviet and Eastern European times.
[Two examples of Communist candidates winning elections are Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1946, but how free and fair these elections were is debated.]
…Nevertheless, the peasants hold individually the lands which they expropriated from the expropriators” and which were nationalized by the Soviet constitution.
This is significant, because in Russia there was no capitalism in the sense of the word in the rest of the world. As the population figures show, the Russian proletarian is an insignificant minority of the population. Russia never had captains of industry like our Carnegie or Rockefeller, or many like them in many industrialized lands. There could hardly be a country less suffering from capitalism, and, therefore, less in need of salvation by socialism. [my emphasis] … The aristocracy, weakened by losses in the war, were exterminated, and the Soviet leaders had only to deal with the illiterate, who always are more easily controlled than the educated.
If, in fact, the need to save Russia from capitalism didn’t exist and the proletarian was not anywhere near the majority of the population, this proves the dislike of the Tsar and the aristocracy. Marx believed that mass industrialization was required before the revolution of the proletariat, so communism initially taking hold first in Russia would be a surprise, thereby questioning whether the communist takeover was just opportunistic rather than philosophical.
