Communism and Science

Abstract

“You doubtless know the old adage, ‘Primo vivere, deinde philosophari.’ I do this last, but the first part, ‘vivere,’ is more than uncertain for us who have the misfortune to be a little civilised, as one never knows what our wild, wild taskmasters are going to do next. The higher schools of Petrograd are under the control of a former apprentice of the dockyards of Gronstatft, who has learned to talk glibly and to sign his name with an appropriate flourish. He has not the remotest notions as to what is a seat of high learning; but that does not trouble him in the least, he just governs according to his lights, and actually does his best to destroy all culture, all real science, in our institutes. It is just the same everywhere, and the results are glaringly apparent in the utter failure of crops in the east and south of Russia, due not so much to exceptional climatic causes as to the countless requisitions of ‘surplus’ wheat, ‘surplus’ bullocks and horses, and other kindred measures of the reigning proletariat. The population of some twenty provinces, which supplied once upon a time almost all Russia with bread and exported thousands of tons of wheat to foreign lands, is now leaving their houses arid fleeing to the east, the north, and the west of Russia, where there is still something to eat; they spread desolation wider and wider—also cholera and other diseases; tens of thousands perish daily. Almost nothing is left in the devastated provinces; they must now be colonised a new. We are fortunate for the nonce in being sufficiently far from, these places, but the outlook for us is anything but reassuring.