The Workshop Of The Revolution. I. N. Steinberg 1953
Never have Soviet goals, intentions and actions seemed as confusing as they are in our time. And never before have we so desperately needed a clear understanding of the ideological, historic and psychological motives that make Communists think and act as they do. Thirty-five years have gone by since Lenin managed to place his party at the helm of the Russian ship of state, yet there is more confusion in the ranks of the free world flow now about the character of the Bolshevik regime in Russia than there was in Lenin’s day.
Today, as our generation watches uneasily the political zigzags that emanate from the Kremlin and that arc based on just such a fanatically held ideology, we have little to guide us in terms of basic political convictions or absolute moral yardsticks. We continue to examine Soviet policies according to yesterday’s and today’s headlines, and therein lies the greatest danger to the survival of the liberties we hold dear.
Dr. I. N. Steinberg, a contemporary-though much younger-of Lenin and Stalin, an active participant in both the February and the October phases of the Russian Revolution, and now the only survivor of the first Soviet Government, is in a unique position to give us an insight into the antecedents and the workings of the Bolshevik mind.
Dr. Steinberg does not claim to have covered all aspects of the Russian Revolution, or even of the period-from February 1917 to March 1921-to which he has limited himself. His greatest problem was to decide which of the valuable and almost unknown material he was to include and which he was to leave out.
He gives us but a few intimations of his own stature as a leader of the non-Bolshevik revolutionists of the October period. The struggle against the beginnings of the “Red Terror,” which Lenin and his colleagues regarded as an inestimable aid in the realization of their plans, was conducted largely by him-both inside the Council of People’s Commissars and outside. When, during the peace negotiations with the Germans in Brest-Litovsk in 1918, Lenin lashed out against his opponents who would have no part of his policy of “withdrawals and compromises,” he aimed his tongue-lashing at Dr. Steinberg, at what he called the “Steinbergian phrases.”
Nowhere does he say that the basic passages of the chapter entitled “What Is the Bolshevik Terror?” were not written recently, with the history of thirty-five years to draw upon. They were written in 1919, on tiny scraps of paper, and were smuggled out to his wife from the Butyrki prison in Moscow.
Neither does Dr. Steinberg tell us that the leaders of his party of Left Social-Revolutionaries had insisted as early as 1919 that he escape the Soviet Union, “so that he might represent our viewpoint in the world.” He does not tell how, during the years 1919 to 1923, when he finally did escape, he lived in semi-legality, maintaining the closest working contact with his comrades underground while evading and misleading the watchful eyes of the Cheka. All these are unimportant details In the light of the bigger story he has to tell; nevertheless, we believe they do add to the picture of the man who relates his experiences In the Workshop of the Revolution, and who provides us with a view of the revolution we have not had until now.
The Revolution, Dr. Steinberg exclaims with a vigor and faith that seem as alive today as they must have been in 1917, was not all disappointment and failure. The spark of ecstatic hope and pure sincerity is still smouldering among the simple people of Russia. These people are the only hope for a new tomorrow.
Long ago, Vissarion Bielinsky, Russia’s great literary critic, had written: “What Russia needs is to awaken in the people a feeling for human dignity, a feeling which had been drowned for so many centuries in filth and morass.” Bielinsky wrote in tsarist Russia; his words are as true today as they were then.
The “feeling for human dignity” must be reawakened in the Russian people, and in this, we believe, lies the importance of this book. By presenting to the world the panorama of the Russian Revolution from a new point of view; by resurrecting, as it were, ideals and ideas that had inspired thousands of honest rank-and-file Russians; by reminding the world of the principles for which the Russian Revolution had originally been fought-Dr. Steinberg opens up new vistas for the future of the Russian people.
THE PUBLISHERS