BOLSHEVISM, to use the convenient word,* started with exactly the same view. It believed that you could build a new world with human beings as if they were little square blocks in a child’s box of bricks. Karl Marx, from whom it derived much of its dogma, interpreted history as only the result of economic forces and desired to re-create society on a purely economic basis.
Bolshevism, though it wandered very far from Marx’s doctrine, had a similar point of view. It sought with one sweep of the sponge to blot out all past history, and imagined that it could build its castles of bricks without troubling about foundations. It also was a tyranny, the worse tyranny of the two, perhaps because it was the stupider.* It has had its triumphs and its failures, and would now appear to be declining; but it, or something of the sort, will come again, since it represents the eternal instinct of theorists who disregard history and who would mechanise and unduly simplify human life.*
That is, the politics of the Bolsheviks (большевики), the ‘majority’ faction in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split from the Mensheviks (‘minority’ faction) in 1903. The Bolsheviks went on to dominate in the February and October revolutions of 1917, and to form the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Worse, that is, than the Prussianism of Otto von Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II. Buchan was writing in 1935, before the despotisms of Communism and Fascism had reached their peak. Knowing what we know now, trying to weigh up which of Fascism and Communism is worse or more stupid is depressing and risks diminishing the irremediable evil of both.