William C. Bullitt

“ If by any chance Kolchak and Denikin were to win, they would have to kill in tens of thousands where the Bolsheviki have had to kill in hundreds and the result would be the complete ruin and collapse of Russia into anarchy. Has not the Ukraine been enough to teach the allies that occupation by non-Bolshevik troops merely turns into Bolsheviki those of the population who were not Bolsheviki before? It is clear to us that the Bolshiviki are really fighting against bourgeois dictatorship, We are, therefore, prepared to help them in every possible way. ”

“ And Russia, the center, has made a proposition to you for peace, for a separate peace; made it officially; made it after thought; made it proudly, not in fear, but in pitiful sympathy with its suffering people and for the sake of a vision of the future in which it verily believes. They are practical men—those that made it. You met them. We talked with them. We measured their power. They are all idealists, but they are idealists sobered by the responsibility of power. Sentiment has passed out of them into work—hard work. ”

“ POLITICAL SITUATION The Soviet form of government is firmly established. Perhaps the most striking fact in Russia today is the general support which is given the government by the people in spite of their starvation. Indeed, the people lay the blame for their distress wholly on the blockade and on the governments which maintain it. The Soviet form of government seems to have become to the Russian people the symbol of their revolution. ”

“ But you must not treat us as a conquered nation. We are not conquered. We are prepared to join in a revolutionary, civil war all over all of Europe and the world, if this good thing has to be done in this bad way of force. But we would prefer to have our time and our energy to work to make sure that our young, good thing is good. We have proved that we can share misery, and sickness, and poverty; it has helped us to have these things to share, and we think we shall be able to share the wealth of Russia as we gradually develop it. ”

“ And this is what is making Lenin and his sobered communist government ask for peace. They think they have carried a revolution through for once to the logical conclusion. All other revolutions have stopped when they had revolved through the political phase to political democracy. This one has turned once more clear through the economic phase to economic democracy, to self-government in the factory, shop, and on the land, and has laid a foundation for universal profit sharing, for the universal division of food, clothes, and all goods, equally among all. ”

“ Capital and labor in the United States are not friends. Still they are not enemies in the sense that they are thinking of resorting to physical force to settle their differences. But they are distrustful, each of the other. Society can not go on that plane. On the one hand, there is a minority possessing capital and brains; on the other, a majority consisting of the great bodies of workers who are essential to the minority, but do not trust the minority, and feel that the minority will never render them their rights. A way must be found to put trust and cooperation between these two. ”

“ And especially are we sick of the propaganda by the sword. We want to stop fighting. We know that each country must evolve its own revolution out of its own conditions and in its own imagination. To force it by war is not scientific, not democratic, not socialistic. And we are fighting now only in self-defense. We will stop fighting, if you will let us stop. We will call back our troops, if you will withdraw yours. We will demobilize. We need the picked organizers and the skilled workers now in the army for our shops, factories, and farms. ”

“ I believe that, if we take their offer, there will be such an outcry of rage and disappointment from the Left Socialists of Germany, Italy, France, and the world, that Lenin and Trotsky will be astonished. The Red Revolution—the class war—will be broken, and evolution will have its chance once more in the rest of Europe. And you and I know that the men we met in Moscow see this thus, and that they believe the peace conference will not, can not, see it, but will go on to make war and so bring on the European revolution. ”

“ The policy of the present government has resulted in eliminating throughout Russia, I am told, this horrible outgrowth of modern civilization.
Begging has decreased. I have asked to be taken to the poorest parts of the city to see how the people in the slums live, and both the communists and bourgeoisie have held up their hands and said, "But you fail to understand there are no such places." There is poverty, but it is scattered and exists among those of the former poor or of the former rich who have been unable to adapt themselves to the conditions which require everyone to do something. ”

“ This it is that is making men and women work with a new interest, and a new incentive, not to earn high wages and short hours, but to produce an abundance for all. This is what is making a people, sick of war, send their ablest and strongest men into the new, high-spirited, hard-drilled army to defend, not their borders, but their new working system of common living. ”

“ Intervention of any kind will prolong the régime of the Bolsheviki by compelling us, like all honorable Russians, to drop opposition and rally round the Soviet Government in defense of the revolution. With regard to help to individual groups or governments fighting against soviet Russia, we see no difference between such intervention and the sending of troops. If the allies come to an agreement with the Soviet Government, sooner or later the peasant masses will make their will felt and they are alike against the bourgeoisie and the Bolsheviki. ”

“ Family life has been absolutely unchanged by the revolution. I have never heard more genuinely mirthful laughter than when I told Lenin, Tchitcherin, and Litvinov that much of the world believed that women had been "nationalized." This lie is so wildly fantastic that they will not even take the trouble to deny it. Respect for womanhood was never greater than in Russia to-day. Indeed, the day I reached Petrograd was a holiday in honor of wives and mothers. ”

“ This is what the lower-class culture has been slowly teaching the people of the world for 50 years: that it is not some particular evil, but the whole system of running business and railroads, shops, banks, and exchanges, for speculation and profit that must be changed. This is what causes poverty and riches, they teach, misery, corruption, vice, and war. ”

“ The present food situation in Russia, where hundreds of thousands of people are dying monthly from sheer starvation and disease, is one of the problems now uppermost in all men's minds. As it appears that no solution of this food and disease question has so far been reached in any direction, I would like to make a suggestion from a neutral point of view for the alleviation of this gigantic misery on purely humanitarian grounds. ”

“ The peace commission, busy with the settlement of the old war, may not see the new one, or may not measure aright the imminent danger of it. Germany is going over, Hungary has gone, Austria is coming into the economic revolutionary stage. The propaganda for it is old and strong in all countries: Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden—you know. All men know this propaganda. But that is in the rear. Look at the front.
Russia is the center of it. Germany, Austria, Hungary are the wings of the potential war front of—Bolshevism. ”

“ I have been treated in a wonderful manner by the communist representatives, though they know that I am no socialist and though I have admitted to the leaders that my civilian clothing is a disguise. They have the warmest affection for America, believe in President Wilson, and are certain that we are coming to their assistance, and, together with our engineers, our food, our school-teachers, and our supplies, they are going to develop in Russia a government which will emphasize the rights of the common people as no other government has. ”

“ Naturally I have emphasized the brighter side, for the vast amount of absolutely false news manufactured in Helsingfors and Stockholm and sent out through the world seems to me to necessitate the emphasizing of some of the more hopeful features of the present government. Naturally the character of the Russian people has not changed to any great extent in 18 months, and there is doubtless corruption, and there is certainly inefficiency and ignorance and a hopeless failure to grasp the new principles motivating the government on the part of many of the people. ”

“ Indeed, the only ponderable opposition to the communists to-day comes from more radical parties—the left social revolutionaries and the anarchists. These parties, in published statements, call the communists, and particularly Lenin and Tchitcherin, "the paid bourgeois gendarmes of the Entente." They attack the communists because the communists have encouraged scientists, engineers, and industrial experts of the bourgeois class to take important posts under the Soviet Government at high pay. ”

“ Prohibition is universal and absolute. Robberies have been reduced in Petrograd below normal of large cities. Warned against danger before we went in, we felt safe. Prostitution has disappeared with its clientele, who have been driven out by the "no-work-no-food law," enforced by the general want and the labor-card system. Loafing on the job by workers and sabotage by upper-class directors, managers, experts and clerks have been overcome. Russia has settled down to work.
The soviet form of government, which sprang up so spontaneously all over Russia, is established. ”

“ The Governments and the peoples whom we represent, without thought of political, military or financial advantage, would be glad to cooperate in any proposal which would relieve the existing situation in Russia. It seems to us that such a commission as you propose, purely humanitarian in its purpose, would offer a practical means of carrying out the beneficent results which you have in view and could not either in its conception or its operation be considered as having in view any other aim than "the humanitarian purpose of saving life." ”

“ Instead of transferring troops from Murmansk to Archangel, it seems to me that we should at once transfer to Murmansk and bring home the troops which are now at Archangel. Aside from the needless suffering which these men are enduring, aside from the demands of the public in the United States and England for the return of these men, it seems to me that the withdrawal of these troops would be of great value as a proof that we have made the Prinkipos proposal in full good faith. ”

“ SOCIAL CONDITIONS The destructive phase of the revolution is over and all the energy of the Government is turned to constructive work. The terror has ceased. All power of judgment has been taken away from the extraordinary commission for suppression of the counter-revolution, which now merely accuses suspected counter-revolutionaries, who are tried by the regular, established, legal tribunals. ”

“ The real human element in the situation, even supposing all these difficulties to be surmounted, is the problem of distribution, the problem of seeing that the food reaches the starving, the medicines the sick, the clothing the naked. Subject to the supervision of such a commission, this is a problem which should be solely under the control of the people of Russia themselves so far as it is humanly possible to put it under their control. ”

“ If fighting is stopped on all fronts, is the Government of the United States prepared to insist on the reestablishment of economic relations with Russia, subject only to the equitable distribution among all classes of the population of supplies and food and essential commodities which may be sent to Russia? ”

“ The people, the workers, or their State, must own and run these things "for service."
Not political democracy, as with us; economic democracy is the idea; democracy in the shop, factory, business. Bolshevism is a literal interpretation, the actual application of this theory, policy, or program. And so, in the destructive period of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik leaders led the people to destroy the old system, root and branch, fruit and blossom, too. And apparently this was done. The blocks we saw in Petrograd and Moscow of retail shops nailed up were but one sign of it. ”

“ The new government has been so handicapped by the difficulties of securing food and other supplies, by the sabotage of many of the intelligent classes, and by the necessity of directing every energy toward carrying on hostilities against the bourgeoisie and the Allies, that there has been little opportunity to remodel the institutions inherited from the previous régime, therefore neither the strength nor the weakness of these institutions is to any great extent due to the present régime. ”

“ Our generation is to have only the labor, the joy, and the misery of the struggle. We will get none of the material benefits of the new system, and we will probably never all understand and like it. But the children—it is for them and their children that we are fighting, so we are giving them the best of it from the start, and teaching them to take it all naturally. They are getting the idea. They are to be our new propagandists."
The idea is that everybody is to work for the common good, and so, as the children and the American prisoners note, when they all produce more, they all get more. ”

“ A majority of all the Soviets in all Russia would have to be changed in personnel or opinion, recalled, or brought somehow to recognize and represent the altered will of the people.
No student of government likes the soviet as it has developed. Lenin himself doesn't. He calls it a dictatorship, and he opposed it at first. When I was in Russia in the days of Milyoukov and Kerensky, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were demanding the general election of the constituent assembly. ”