Soviet Russia

“ 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. ”

“ You admit that you have been allowed to mingle with the soldiers of Soviet Russia, that you have been unhampered in making your investigation. You have had a very good opportunity to understand the temper of the rank and file. You have seen thousands of men living from day to day on black bread and tea. You have probably seen more suffering in Soviet Russia than you had ever thought possible, and all this because of the unjust war being made upon us, including the economic blockade, in all of which your own country is playing a large part. ”

“ I have dwelt upon the organization and spirit of the Red Army and upon the education and care of the children more than upon anything else, because these are the things that made the strongest impression upon me during my stay in Soviet Russia. They stand out above all else in the memory of weeks crowded with a multitude of rapid and various observations. The soldiers and the children come first in the consideration of the government. ”

“ If the Russian people waken from the daze into which they have been thrust, it will not come. Jewish voices loudly proclaim that Soviet Russia has come to stay. The only authoritative voice on that subject is the voice of Russia, and Russia has not yet spoken. Today the world is trembling on the very verge of Real Russia’s awakening, and with it a retribution most terrible upon the Sovietists. ”

“ These first three months of the existence of Soviet Russia constituted a period of amazingly rapid successes of the new system, of the almost concurrent spread of the workers' and peasants' revolution through the whole territory of Russia, and of decisive victories on the internal fronts. ”

“ There are no more blockades, no more fighting fronts, no more counter-revolution. Soviet Russia has secured the recognition of all the great governments of the world. It emphasizes its good will toward the bourgeois states, solicits their cooperation and is doing a large business with them. In fact, the Soviet government is on terms of friendship even with Mussolini and Hitler, those famous champions of liberty. It is helping capitalism to weather its economic storms by buying millions of dollars' worth of products and opening new markets to it. ”

“ In spite of all this, Soviet Russia confronts its world of enemies, eight years young, and proud and confident. It has restored its agriculture to the pre-war standard, and its industry to nearly 80 per cent of this standard, with the certainty of passing it in 1926 or 1927 if peace is maintained. It has turned one-sixth of the earth’s surface from a militarist empire into a federated group of commonwealths, governed under a new system, in which the voters are classified according to their occupations. ”

“ In this country, in Russia, for the first time in the world history, the government of the country is so organised that only the workers and the working peasants, to the exclusion of the exploiters, constitute those mass organisations known as Soviets, and these Soviets wield all state power. That is why, in spite of the slander that the representatives of the bourgeoisie in all countries spread about Russia, the word "Soviet" has now become not only intelligible but popular all over the world, has become the favourite word of the workers, and of all working people. ”

“ Then again came that never-ending praise of Soviet Russia, which, under the absolute rule of a little group of men, mostly Russian or German Jews obeying the orders of Lenin—the new Ivan the Terrible—and his war minister, Trotsky, was, it was said, converting Russia into a terrestrial paradise. ”

“ Every day its growth is becoming more and more noticeable in England, France and America. All central Europe is on the threshold of great new events. The foreign policy of Soviet Russia conforms more and more to the universal struggle between the revolution and the old world. ”

“ Whoever appeals against these assertions to the speeches of the Soviet leaders and to articles in the Soviet Press, forgets the aim of those pessimistic descriptions printed in the Soviet Press. Soviet Russia is waging a life-and-death struggle. ”

“ New Soviets were always springing up and others dying out. Many existed only in name, on paper. There never has been an accurate list of the Soviets existing in Russia. Many lists have been made, but always by the time they could be tabulated and published there have been many changes. For these and other reasons which will suggest themselves to the mind of any thoughtful reader, many of the leaders of the revolutionary movement in Russia have doubted the value of the Soviet as a unit of government, while highly valuing it as a unit of working-class organization and struggle. ”

“ Cannon shots announce the breaking of the blockade against Soviet Russia, and the victory of the World Proletariat. The Red Army returns from the front, and passes in triumphant review before the leaders of the Revolution. At their feet lie the crowns of kings and the gold of the bankers. Ships draped with flags are seen carrying workers from the west. The workers of the whole world, with the emblems of labour, gather for the celebration of the World Commune. ”

“ Any country would in the circumstances show the best it had, and Soviet Russia is no exception. One can allow for that.
Our dominant impression of things Russian is an impression of a vast irreparable breakdown. The great monarchy that was here in 1914 and the administrative, social, financial, and commercial systems connected with it have, under the strains of six years of incessant war, fallen down and smashed utterly. Never in all history has there been so great a débâcle before. The fact of the Revolution is, to our minds, altogether dwarfed by the fact of this downfall. ”

“ In consequence of this, we have in Russia today a population which is physically and spiritually tired. The mass of the people are disillusioned, skeptical and no longer as accessible as they once were to the magical attraction which Soviet power still radiates to its followers abroad. ”

“ Today the major part of the structure of Soviet power is committed to the perfection of the dictatorship and to the maintenance of the concept of Russia as in a state of siege, with the enemy lowering beyond the walls. And the millions of human beings who form that part of the structure of power must defend at all costs this concept of Russia's position, for without it they are themselves superfluous. ”

“ For we have seen that Soviet power is only concealing an amorphous mass of human beings among whom no independent organizational structure is tolerated. In Russia there is not even such a thing as local government. The present generation of Russians have never known spontaneity of collective action. If, consequently, anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies. ”

“ For all that has happened in Russia since the overthrow of the Czarist Government is inextricably bound up with the attitude of the victors in the World War toward Russia. In the great volume of books and articles on the experiment with Communism one finds an almost universal failure to recognize this fact. Partisans pro and contra have given us pictures of Soviet Russia that are accurate enough impressions of confusion and anarchy, but that are lacking when the attempt is made to explain how and why these things have happened. ”

“ The plight of Soviet Russia is all the worse because it has lost the most fertile districts, which yielded the most abundant harvests. Its armies have been numerous enough to lay waste large tracts of land, but not sufficiently victorious to conquer new territory beyond the borders from which to provision themselves. ”

“ Only to the immense efficiency of anti-Bolshevik propaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic to any one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on the eve of military collapse. ”

“ I come back again and again to the men themselves. Before I left Russia I had seen a great many soldiers. I had lived with them, traveled with them, slept in their barracks, eaten in their mess. To the American of course, the conditions under which the European masses manage to maintain existence, even in normal times, is always a matter of surprise and wonder. The Soviet Government does everything possible for the Red Army. It is their constant thought and care. But the utmost that can be provided, even of bare subsistence, seems painfully inadequate to the westerner. ”

“ They see Soviet Russia slowly retreating from its originally declared policy of pure communism; they see England (notwithstanding the apparent check given the movement by the last elections) going steadily and with seemingly fixed intention away from unrestricted capitalism. ”

“ ENTERING RED LAND “You will never return alive. They will slaughter you. They will rob you of everything. They will take your clothes from your very back.”
With stubborn conviction the dapper young Lettish gentleman spoke to me as he attempted to change my mind about going into Soviet Russia. He was attached to the Foreign Information Bureau of Latvia. He had been in Riga all through the Bolshevist régime, from November, 1918, to May, 1919, when the German army of occupation in the Baltic provinces drove them out. ”

“ When this veiled threat is eliminated and the peasant comes fully into his own I am convinced that he will be found to have developed independent ideas and an unlooked-for capacity for judgment and reflection which will astonish the world, and which with but little practice will thoroughly fit him for all the duties of citizenship.
Shortly after the Baltic republic of Lithuania had come to terms with Soviet Russia, one of the members of the Lithuanian delegation who had just returned from Moscow told me the following incident. ”

“ If the Allies lend help to any minority that cannot overthrow the Soviets without them, they will be impos- ing on Free Russia a government which will be in perpetual need of external help, and will, for simple reasons of geography, be bound to take that help from Germany. Remember that for the German autocracy, conscious of the socialistic mass beneath it, the mere existence of the Soviet Government of Russia is a serious danger. Remember that any non-Soviet Government in Russia would be welcomed by Germany and, reciprocally, could not but regard Germany, as its protector. ”

“ Not only the abstract ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity; but more concrete and more recently popularized ones such as proletariat, bourgeois, soviet, are already surrounded with a sort of fungous growth concealing their real meaning, so that every time they are employed they have to be freshly defined.
The phenomenon of Red Russia is a supreme example of the triumph over reason of the shibboleth, the slogan, and the political catchword. War-weary and politics-weary, the Russian people easily succumbed to those who promised wildly what nobody could give, the promisers least of all. ”

“ However, such is the story of something over a billion colored men with Soviet Russia as their self-appointed leader, a striking phenomenon which every Occidental nation ought to take seriously into account, pondering upon and preparing its defense against an extreme expression of this attitude. ”

“ Trade relations to be restored between soviet Russia and the outside world under conditions which, while respecting the sovereignty of soviet Russia insure that allied supplies are made available on equal terms to all classes of the Russian people. ”

“ The Soviet was the type of organization common to Russia. There were Soviets of peasants, of soldiers, of teachers, of industrial workers, of officers, of professional men, and so on. Every class and every group in the classes had its own Soviet. The Soviet in its simplest form is a delegate body consisting of representatives of a particular group—a peasants' Soviet, for example. Another type, more important, roughly corresponds to the Central Labor Union in an American city, in that it is composed of representatives of workers of all kinds. ”

“ They lauded the exemplary order prevailing in Russia and rejoiced at the happiness, contentment, and devotion to the Soviet Government which they encountered at every 254 step. They predicted the immediate advent of the world revolution and the early establishment of Bolshevism in every country. They all closed their lengthy orations with the same exclamations: “Long live the Third International!” “Down with the bourgeoisie!” “Long live Socialism!” ”

“ There are more classes in Soviet Russia today than in 1917, more than in most other countries in the world. The Bolsheviki have created a vast Soviet bureaucracy, enjoying special privileges and almost unlimited authority over the masses, industrial and agricultural. Above that bureaucracy is the still more privileged class of “responsible comrades,” the new Soviet aristocracy. The industrial class is divided and subdivided into numerous gradations. There are the _udarniki_, the shock troops of labor, entitled to various privileges ”

“ The political excitement of the revolution has passed, and today there were no more spectators than are usually to be found in the gallery of the House of Commons. The character of the Soviet itself had not changed. Practically every man sitting on the benches was obviously a workman and keenly intent on what was being said. Litvinov practically repeated his speech of last night, making it, however, a little more demagogic in character, pointing out that after the Allied victory, the only corner of the world not dominated by Allied capital was Soviet Russia. ”