THE STATE internal struggles for the possession of power, its surface revolutions which only change one tyrant for another, and inevitably, at the en<:{ of this evolution-death! ' To-day we can find little fault in the forecast that culminated Kropotkin's essay. Indeed, for us the warning is more real than for the people to whom it was spoken, for we have experienced a large measure of its fulfilment-in a world of centralised national states that during the past fifty years have travelled with gathering impetus down the primrose path to social destruction. · The degree and rapidity of this evolution can be seen by a comparison of the national states of Kropotkin's day with those of our own. We might even take his own country, Russia. · Tzarist Russia was one of the most tyrannical States of its time, a State that lived by terror and murder, by the secret police and the knouting Cossacks. Yet even within that terrible State there were many surprising interstices in which freedom and free co-operation could live and even thrive. Among the peasants the dominant social form was still the Mir, a kind of village commune which united co-operatively the lives of the villagers. As Kropotkin reveals in this very pamphlet, ·under the tyrannical Tzarist system the peasants were allowed to occupy Siberia in just such a manner as they thought fit and to establish the communistic institutions which they desired. Without wishing to minimise in any way the hard, toiling, oppressed nature of the peasant's life under the Tzars, we can say safely that in spite of this he enjoyed more real freedom than he does now under the Bolsheviks who turned to their own ends the revolution which the peasants made possible. The forced collectivisations, requisitioning of crops, the persecution of independent peasants and the deportation and virtual murder of some millions of the peasant population in the Arctic death camps are crimes beside which the crimes of the Tzarist nobility and police officialsseem milk-and-water. Again, we might compare intellectual life of Tzarist Russia with that of Soviet Russia to-day. In the latter half of the nineteenth century considerable independence of thought flourished among the Russian intelligentsia, and ·even men like Tolstoy, who denounced the State, were often left untouched so long as they attempted no serious political conspiracy. It is, moreover, impossible to deny the richness of the achievement in writing, in music, even in science, of the Russian intelligentsia of the time, an achievement which could not have been reached without at least some freedom of expression and a cultured and independent-minded public. When the new Russian State, however, appeared in 1917, these very intelligentsia were taken away literally in tens of thousands to the prisons which the Bolsheviks took over from the Tzars. The State instituted a system of standards to which art must conform-not only so far as its political content s Biblloteca Gino Bianco
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