Don Quixote of Moscow
In the Workshop of the Revolution.
by I. N. Steinberg.
Rinehart. 306 pp. $4.00.
Would anyone dare to suggest that our age is—of all things—an age of romance? How can the spirit of the romantic and the visionary breathe in the atmosphere of realism, tension, and foreboding? The experience of the past might reassure us, for what fantastic and utopian dreams—the so-called Utopian socialist systems themselves—did not burgeon in the blood-spattered fields of the French Revolution! In any case, we have the witness of the career of Dr. Isaac N. Steinberg.
At the turn of the century, Dr. Steinberg was growing up in the rarefied air of traditional Judaism. When he journeyed from Moscow to Heidelberg to take a degree in law, his Talmudic tutor accompanied him; no secular interest must be allowed to interfere with the daily pursuit of the wisdom of the Torah. His thesis, on a subject of Jewish law, reflected the dualism of his training.
Returned home, and a practicing attorney, Dr. Steinberg was caught up in the storm that was brewing behind the still imposing façade of Czarism before the First World War. If he was to become a socialist, it could not be one of the Marxist persuasion; if he was to become—as befitted a young and ardent idealist—a revolutionary, the violence of overthrow and the terror of revolution must be measured in the scales of spiritual travail. Dr. Steinberg found his place naturally on the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. They were the party of the terrorists and of the saints (we need no quotation marks, they were true saints): the Spiridonovas, Kalayevs, Sazonovs, who tempered assassination with suicide, activism with self-abasement, and violence with love. (Gregory Gershuni told the military judges who condemned him to death: “We hate you not because you shed our blood, but because you force us to shed yours.”)
The next stage of Dr. Steinberg’s spiritual odyssey was that of trial and purgation “in the Workshop of the Revolution.” The flaming idealists made a pact with the icy materialists. At the end of 1917, as a junior leader of the Left S.R.’s, now an independent party, Dr. Steinberg became People’s Commissar for Justice in the only, and shortlived, coalition government of the Bolsheviks. The Orthodox Jew and revolutionary sat at the desk at which the legal darknesses of Czarism had formulated the decrees of anti-Semitism and illiberalism. He broke no unkosher “bread” with his comrades. He kept the Sabbath holy. In the dreadful winter of 1917-18, the line between permissible ethical violence and sinful systematic terror became difficult to draw. It seemed to recede into mysticism. Dr. Steinberg’s justice was Lenin’s extermination. The idealists resigned, and saved their souls in the nick of time.
An exile in Germany from totalitarian Communism, an exile in England from totalitarian Nazism, where was Dr. Steinberg to turn, apart from émigré politics? He was still a revolutionist, still a socialist, and still a practicing Orthodox Jew. Was it that in the Western world the blend of the three was rarer, and especially rare in Germany? Had he settled to begin with in England, or, as he eventually did, in the United States, would the religious populist have found a more congenial atmosphere? Religion and radical politics are in those countries no strangers to each other; witness the careers—alas, not altogether triumphant—of George Lansbury of the Labor party and William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party. The rise of anti-Semitism, and particularly of Hitlerism, naturally accented Dr. Steinberg’s Jewish interests. His religious studies made him at home in Hebrew; his populist tendencies made him favorable to Yiddish. Zionism was too nationalistic; was Labor Zionism too Marxist? The fact is that he assumed the leadership of the territorialist movement, and became the successor of Israel Zangwill and Ben Adir. He spent several years in Australia laboring to prepare the ground for a socialist and cultural settlement. He was hardly back when the government put an end to the project by discountenancing collective migration for autonomous communities. This had been all along the explicit policy of Anglo Saxon colonial countries. And then the trial and triumph of Zionism monopolized Jewish attention and drained the support of rival and alternative plans. No territorialist proposal has materialized although the searchers have worn the map to tatters. But Dr. Steinberg, and a small but pious following, are still holding high the flag.
How much would not a searching spiritual autobiography of such an experience enlighten some of the cross-currents of our time! Does Dr. Steinberg belong to those unself-conscious men who cannot reveal themselves? In the Workshop of the Revolution deals with the triumph of the Bolsheviks and the fall of their colleagues and rivals. The bulk of the book is a condensed version of a fuller and more factual account published in Yiddish and German in the 20’s. We still get valuable glimpses of Lenin and most of the older Bolshevik leaders, of Djerjinsky, of the inner tensions of the cabinet, and particularly of the efforts of Dr. Steinberg and his comrades to arrest the growing system of terror. Some of the value of the eyewitness’ report has been lost in compression and in the intrusion of hindsight. For example, the account of the dismissal of the Constituent Assembly is more critical of the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, and more sympathetic to the coalition government, in the present than in the older vision. In compensation Dr. Steinberg has written a few topical essays on totalitarianism and Marxism.
We have still to get an adequate explanation of how sensitive ethical revolutionists came to trust the Bolsheviks, if only for a short time. We still seek for the rationale of the synthesis of religion, Utopian socialism, and revolution that Dr. Steinberg has striven to embody. In a study of types of revolutionists, he rejects the revolutionists from “compassion,” “science,” and aesthetic feeling; he accepts only the revolutionist from “love.” But “love” turns out to be an exalted and fine-spun, and also somber and narrow, ethical puritanism.
“Now perhaps the mysterious saying of the Talmud might be better understood: ‘He who walketh on the road and studies the Law and interrupts his learning and sayeth how beautiful is this tree, how beautiful is this field, is as if he had forfeited his life.’
“How often did men, confronted with this saying, attempt to draw the conclusion that aesthetic values are alien to the Jewish spirit. But it was not against art and beauty that the Talmud warned; but rather against a mingling of the Law with the enjoyment of nature. Study, particularly when one is on the ‘road’ to a great goal, demands such moral concentration on the part of the traveller that he may not dissipate it on the enjoyment of life—not even for a short, passing moment. There are no clear frontiers in nature, no wide gulfs between good and evil. Nature is sublime and neutral, whereas the Law is a refining furnace in which the good is ever separated from evil. Man must therefore always be on guard, lest, God forbid, he loses his footing, mistaking the right for the wrong. Once man treads on the hard road of revolution, he dare not confound the ethical law with aesthetic feeling, lest the ethical is cast aside. And if that happens, he forfeits life itself, endangering the future of that moment of human liberation so rare in history.”
Do we not have here too sharp a distinction between art and action, art and ethics? Is the message of the Psalmist reduced by his music, or enhanced? Was Milton a greater ethical force when he translated Cromwell’s messages into good Latin for transmission to foreign courts, than when he translated his inner vision into Paradise Lost? Was Lunacharsky so wrong when he protested, during the fighting of the November Revolution, against the destruction of priceless church architecture? “His sensitive artistic soul,” remarks Dr. Steinberg sharply, “could not bear such sacrilege even while the fratricidal war was in progress.” Why should it? What good does it do a revolution, or any political enterprise, to destroy without discrimination? Were Lenin and Steinberg so superior when they laughed at Lunacharsky? After all, they, as much as he, had sanctioned the fratricidal war, but only he was concerned to save the artistic heritage.
Does Dr. Steinberg mean that action is closer to the good than is the beautiful? Is that what Judaism means? May it not be that Dr. Steinberg’s notion of Judaism, like Lenin’s notion of Marxism, is an unfortunate deviation from the best reading of the tradition?
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