224
JOHN STRACHEY
In the pre-nuclear age the Leninist prognosis did not, then, prove
far wrong in one sense. Nor, it is certain, would Lenin have flinched
from the view that it was only by means of world war-and very
likely a series of world wars-that the goal of world communism
could be reached. He was entirely convinced that until and unless
that goal was reached, violence was the inevitable means of social
progress. It was not, to be sure, that the revolutionists deliberately
chose
violence. There was no such choice open to them. Every decisive
encounter in which the vital interests of social classes were involved
had invariably been decided by violence. True, secondary and in–
decisive advantages might be won by non-violent means and these
should not be neglected. But equally, it was cowardice and treachery
of the worst sort when the leaders of the workers flinched from violent
means when these, as they always would be at the point of crisis,
became inevitable. Lenin wrote one of his most forceful
pa~es
defining exactly this attitude to violence. He does so mainly in the
context of internal, revolutionary violence. But he adopted exactly
the same attitude to international violence, which was in the last
resort for him always an expression, however indirect, of the conflict
of social classes:
Today there is no revolutionary situation apparent ; there are no such condi–
tions as would cause a ferment among the masses or heighten their activities;
today you are given an election ballot-take it. Understand how to organize
for
it,
to hit your enemies with it, and not to place men in soft parliamentary
berths who cling to their seat in fear of prison. Tomorrow you are deprived
of the election ballot, you are given a rifle and a splendid machine gun
equipped according to the last word of machine technique--take this weapon
of death and destruction, do not listen to the sentimental whiners who are
afraid of war. Much has been left in the world that
must
be destroyed by
fire and iron for the liberation of the working class.
(Lenin Collected Works.
Vol. XVIII-po 316.)
Here we have the communist view of the matter expressed with
matchless vigor. Nor is there any proof that Lenin would have taken
the view that the development of nuclear weapons was, in itself, a
reason for revising this basic doctrine as to the nature of human society
and its methods of development. The question is, however, not so
much whether in the nuclear age Lenin would or would not have
modified
this
orthodox communist attitude to violence in general,
and in particular to the question of the inevitability of further general
