Arthur
L. Frothingham
Handbook of War Facts and Peace Problems
CHAPTER X.
BOLSHEVISM.
The New War for Civilization.---The Bolshevik government of Russia has openly and defiantly thrown down the gauntlet and has declared its intention to destroy all the existing governments of the world and all existing forms of society. This world triumph is an absolute necessity for its continued existence. Communism would be impossible, its leaders believe, in one backward country surrounded by a world based on democratic individualism with competition. Hence the immediate, desperate, and universal use of Bolshevik propaganda outside Russia, organized under the leaders Joffe and Radek. The earliest use of armed attempts at outside Bolshevik revolution were those in Germany headed by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and resulting in their death. Next came the transfer of the government of Hungary to the Bolsheviki by Count Karolyi, because his administration would not sign a treaty with the Allies which dismembered the country. Rumania and Poland were next to be attacked, both from within and without Meanwhile every land has been honeycombed with every type of propagandist aided by unlimited funds, largely stolen.
In this propaganda the Bolsheviki leaders know that they can hardly follow the policy of mass terror and murder which they have used in Russia. They openly declare that certain compromises with their absolute principles and logical practises are necessary to enable Bolshevism to live and grow and conquer the world. But they believe such compromises are only temporary and to be stopped as soon as possible. Their leaders preach diplomatic treachery and hope to deceive the unwary. Their spokesman, Zinovief, declares that any treaty they made would be treated as a "scrap of paper" whenever convenient.
Evidently, then, any government, organization, or individual willing to accept such compromises with Bolshevism, to acknowledge its status as a reputable government, to approve of many and excuse others of its actions, is helping on the world triumph of Bolshevism. This triumph would mean an entirely new world; not an improvement or development of our present world. Do we know what Bolshevism is? Do we know what its new world would be like? We must decide now, at once, for the new war has not only begun, it is well under way. Do we want the United States to go Bolshevik? Or must we rise up and fight Bolshevism here and everywhere because it is a greater and more destructive enemy of democracy than was Germany with her plan for world enslavement?
Our first enquiry must be: How did Bolshevism arise? Our next will be: What are its principles? Our third is: What have been its practises and their results?
The Rise of Bolshevism.---Lenine (a Slav and a "bourgeois," whose real name is Ulyanov) is responsible for the formation of the Bolsheviki party and its tenets. His work, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia," published in 1899, was for many years a classic. He was an uncompromising follower of Karl Marx, the German founder of a revolutionary Communism to be established by violence, which its votaries call "direct action." He became the most prominent leader of the Social-Democratic party of Russia, especially after he began his editorial work in 1901. His essays were considered the clearest exposition of the aims of the Russian working-class movement. When a general convention of the Russian Socialist party was held in 1903, the majority adopted the program presented by Lenine, and this party then first coined the name of "Bolsheviki;' meaning "those of the majority," while "those of the minority, "the moderate socialists, were called "Mensheviki" The word "Bolsheviki" may be taken as the Russian equivalent of "Maximalists," namely those who demanded the maximum social change. Until recently the Bolsheviki kept this name, though they almost at once became actually quite a small minority of the party. Lenine demanded immediate action, including confiscation of all property. The revolution of 1905, put Lenine and his extremists on the shelf. In 1911, however, when all hope in reform through the Duma had been lost, there began a revival on account of dissatisfaction with the reactionaries in power, which grew in strength until, in 1913, there were six Bolsheviki in the Duma.
Lenine himself was forced to spend most of his time in exile. He carried on an active propaganda in Austria and Switzerland. But when Germany decided to make use of him, during the third year of the war, in order to bring on a revolution and general anarchy, he was sent back to Russia through Germany, arriving in Petrograd soon after the overthrow of the Czar in March, 1917. Lenine at once started a Bolshevist propaganda. In a document he then divided Russians politically into four groups: (1) feudal landholders and conservative bourgeoisie; (2) Constitutional democrats (so-called Cadets) and other liberals, including the majority of the bourgeoisie, and industrial leaders; (3) moderate socialists, including rich peasants, small landowners, shopkeepers, small business men, and workers with the bourgeois point of view; (4) the Bolsheviki or Communists, then forming the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, composed of class-conscious workers, day laborers, and the poorer peasants.
The Russian Revolution.---When the Czar's autocracy was overthrown the Bolsheviki formed a perfectly insignificant part of the liberal and radical groups that took charge of the Revolution. Of these groups the more important were: (1) The Constitutional-Democrats, led by Prof. Paul N. Miliukov, and Prince Lvov. They are not Socialists and are the most conservative of all the groups; (2) The Socialist-Revolutionists who are the non-Marxian Socialists, representing the rural districts (the peasantry), who were opposed to violence and confiscation, with such leaders as Kerensky and Maria Breshkovsky. Its center party was led by Tchernov and its left wing by Maria Spiridonova; (3) The Social-Democrats or "Mensheviki", the moderate section of the Social Democratic Labor Party, of which the "Bolsheviki" form the radical section. They also are Marxian Socialists but differ from the Bolsheviki as to methods. One section was headed by Plechanov (nationalist); the other by Martov (Internationalist). Tzeretelli was its representative in the Kerensky cabinet and Tcheidze its most eloquent spokesman.
The Russian revolution was controlled during its first eight months, to all appearances, by a combination of the men who led the above three parties. The cabinet headed first by Prince Lvov and then by Kerensky contained representatives of them all. It planned loyally to carry on the war against Germany; to establish a democratic republic based on universal suffrage; to gradually eliminate all the injustices of Czarism. But almost immediately the Bolsheviki began a campaign to undermine the new government. As a part of the Protopopoff conspiracy in the last days of the Czar, the Duma had been dissolved and had not been reconvened at the proper time. The Rodzianko committee was appointed by a sort of rump Duma, resulting from an unofficial meeting of most of the members of the old Duma at Moscow. The Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Delegates was not a substitute for the Duma, but was revived by the Social Democratic leaders as a check on what they feared would be undue conservatism of the Lvov government. Until a new and freely elected assembly should meet, the cabinet was supplemented by this temporary organization, planned mainly by Tcheidze and Tzeretelli. But this Council, planned by them as a small body, was packed by insidious methods of German and Bolshevik propagandists, with a large body of their agents, and turned into an unmanageable body of over 2,000 members leaning more and more toward Bolshevism.
The only capital punishment that had existed in Russia since the time of Nicholas I. was for so-called treason, and this was the capital punishment which the Social Democrats wanted to see abolished, and which the reactionaries, Germans, and Bolsheviki now arranged to have abolished. Thus the fundamental errors were made of abolishing capital punishment and all discipline in the army, of degrading the officers, and putting committees of soldiers in charge. The same was done for the fleet by a revolt of the sailors. These pro-German acts were the death-blow of both the Russian army and navy and opened up Russia to German assault.
In May came the meeting in Petrograd of the first All-Russian Congress of Peasants, with over a thousand delegates from every part of Russia. It was overwhelmingly Socialist-Revolutionary and opposed to Bolshevism.
In July the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Councils of Workmen's, Soldiers' and Peasants delegates had also condemned Bolshevism by a vote of 300 to 11.
Meanwhile the call was issued for a Constituent Assembly to be elected by universal suffrage, which was to meet in January, 1918 and determine the form and constitution of the government of new Russia. Kerensky, who had assumed more and more power, was making a losing fight against the rising tide of Bolshevism, which was carrying on an active propaganda of misrepresentation and corruption.
The Fall of Kerensky.---On November 7, 1917, he was overthrown and with difficulty escaped in disguise. He had had a splendid chance to consolidate the new republic by allowing Korniloff to suppress Bolshevism by force. He vacillated and was lost.
The weakness of Kerensky toward the Bolsheviki, his periodical concessions to them, his betrayal of Korniloff at the last moment, his reliance on talk instead of action, made the triumph of Bolshevism inevitable in a few weeks after Lenine's campaign was well started. To its success German money largely contributed. The Bolsheviki took German money quite openly, as their leaders have frequently and boastingly admitted and the documents published in Washington show some of the ways in which it was done. Germany through the Bolsheviki got Russia out of the war, destroyed the Russian army, destroyed the Russian state, divided Russia into disorganized units of which Germany could take what she pleased, placed Russia's economic resources at the disposal of Germany, and made it possible for German agents to organize, through the Bolsheviki, a class war that involved the murder of tens of thousands of prominent Russians who might oppose the strangIe-hold of Germany on Russia. The German ambassador, Mirbach, in Russia, gave his orders to the Bolshevist leaders. Germans were openly in charge of Russian government offices. How did the Bolsheviki acquit themselves of guilt in thus playing Germany's game against their own country? They did it on the basis of the argument that they were using Germany's money to gain control of Russia for the great cause of the pan-Proletariat, and that this once accomplished they would turn around and use Russia's money to Socialize or Bolshevize the whole world, including Germany.
While the Bolsheviki kept urging international peace they preached and practised relentless class warfare. Their international peace proposals were unpractical because they refused to recognize any of the existing governments as representing their peoples. They stated officially: "The Bolsheviki refuse to leave to capitalist governments the task of expressing the desire of the nations for peace." Again they say: "Any promise of a capitalist government to renounce annexations is a huge fraud." It must be remembered that they consider every existing government, including that of the United States, as "capitalist." Every government, therefore, must be overturned. They proclaimed a class world war.
The genuine socialists of Russia, the "'Mensheviki," and the bulk of the Social-Democratic party, opposed Bolshevism. Miss Spiridonova, the leader of the left wing of the Social Revolutionists, at the All-Russian Soviet Congress, July 16, 1918, repudiated Bolshevism, denounced Lenine, said the majority of workmen and peasants were not with him, opposed the terrible war he was inducing the poorer to make on the richer peasants, accused Lenine of being a German tool and denounced the Germans. She has been in prison ever since, suffering as she never suffered under the Czar. Elsewhere is given (11. Ex.) a repudiation by the Russian Social-Democrats of the Bolsheviki and an appeal to the socialists of the world to look into the truth of the tremendous indictment the genuine Russian socialists bring against the Bolsheviki as a band of murderous criminals, who oppose universal suffrage and the will of the people and destroy every kind of freedom.
All the Russians who during the last generation have been prominent as revolutionary leaders have denounced Bolshevism. These include the "Grandmother of the Revolution," Catherine Breshkovsky, Vladimir Bourtseff, Kropotkin, Tchaikovsky, etc.
Bolshevik Rule.---Between November 7, 1917, and August, 1918, the Bolshevist leaders were several times in danger, both from within and without. They found that the elections to the Constitutional Assembly were strongly against them and in favor of the moderate socialists. They arrested many deputies of the other her parties on their way to the opening of the Assembly in January in Petrograd but, notwithstanding this, when it met there were 244 anti-Bolsheviki to only 151 Bolsheviki. therefore Lenine dissolved it at its first meeting by the bayonets of his Red Guards. He then established Karl Marx's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat," the absolute rule of 180,000,000 people by a body of 200,000 Bolsheviki under the autocratic duumvirate of Lenine and Trotsky. This is his own statement. He declared frankly against majority rule, against universal suffrage, against democracy; against ally Assembly elected by this means. He promulgated a Communistic Constitution. His power was enforced by the Red Guard, who received high pay and were well fed. They were largely not Russians but Letts and Chinese, and of the Russians the majority were criminals and riff-raff. The prisons were emptied: 260,000 criminals were thus freed and either enrolled in the Red Army or made Bolshevist employees and agents. Later he enrolled large numbers of Austrian and German prisoners and had his troops trained by German officers and by Russian officers whose families were held as hostages to be killed on any suspicion of disloyalty. German discipline was introduced and the death penalty re-established. Nearly all the high Bolsheviki officials are renegade Jews. The greatest of them is Trotsky (whose real name is Bronstein), who is even more extreme than Lenine.
The rebellion of the Social-Revolutionist party and their assassination of the Bolshevist leader Uritsky, led to the increase of the Red Terror, with mass murders. Over 500 innocent persons were executed by the Red Guards to avenge Uritsky (who was found afterward to have embezzled about 50,000,000 rubles from his own government'). The extermination of the so-called "Bourgeoisie" was determined on through two methods: by wholesale executions, in order to ensure terror and obedience, and by famine, as the surest and easiest way to extirpate the odd ten millions whom the Bolsheviki regarded as their main enemies, aside from the aristocracy. This extermination is progressing well: the big cities are, of course, the main sufferers. Moscow has lost over one million people and Petrograd nearly one million and a half, and the death rate is increasing all the time through epidemics and diseases brought on by famine. Soon the greater part of intelligent Russia will have perished leaving mainly only the peasants and industrial workmen. This result has been obtained by rationing food under death penalty for breaking the rules and by dividing the people into four classes in relation to food. The ration allowed to the "Bourgeoisie" classes is far too small to sustain life.
During the first half of 1918 a military campaign was organized by Anti-Bolshevist Russian elements in the north-east, the south, Siberia. the Caucasus and Georgia, aided by Allied forces sent to Siberia and Archangel, and especially by the Czecho-Slovak army. It was so successful that in August there was a good chance to advance on Moscow from Kazan and put an end to the Bolsheviki government. A few thousand men added to the forces under Lebedeff and the Czecho-Slovak leaders on the Volga front could have accomplished it. The Allied lack of initiative and vigor was fatal, and their vacillating policy caused the disastrous defeat of the offensive in October and the resulting momentous danger to the whole world of the fastening of the Bolshevik autocratic and bloody tyranny on the helpless masses of Russia. The testimony that comes out of Russia is to the effect that Bolshevism is almost universally hated, not only by the peasants but even by the majority of the industrial workmen, the "Proletariat," whose interests the Bolsheviki claim to represent. But it has established itself by the iron rule of hired mercenaries and imprisons and kills all who venture to differ.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.---These three fundamental tenets of the French Revolution, which are also our own, are all of them opposed by Bolshevism. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, legislation directed against large sections of the population, the preaching of the gospel of hate and class war, the attempt by force and extermination to make people conduct their lives against their own free will, these and other tenets that will be described, are the antithesis of the foundations of our American belief.
Freedom of Speech, of Assemblage, and of the Press.---The entire press of Russia has been suppressed: only Bolsheviki official organs can be published. This is a confessed policy, and is outlined elsewhere by a Bolshevik leader. The same writer explains why freedom of assemblage and freedom of speech have also been abolished. Even meetings of recognized representatives of the "Proletariat" have been forbidden and their attendants arrested and kept in prison. Freedom of thought, even unexpressed, is often punished by death. Anyone thought to be a non-Bolshevist can be executed without any form of trial or imprisoned without specified reason. Only those who absolutely accept every tenet and act of the government are allowed to meet, speak, write, or vote.
Religion, Morality, Law.---The government not only decreed the separation of Church and State but proclaimed itself as agnostic and would not recognize any form of religion. Religious instruction is forbidden; all religious schools and institutions are destroyed. Monasteries and nunneries are attacked. Archbishops, bishops, priests, monks, and nuns have been murdered and tortured by the thousands. Many churches have been sacked and ruined: some have been bombarded, as at the Kremlin and in Kiev. The Pope's protest against such atrocities was scorned. In fact religion is not merely ignored, it is hated and feared. Machine gun fire is turned on religious processions. Sacrilegious instruction is given, orally and in text-books. The Archbishop of Omsk wrote to the Archbiship of Canterbury: "Wherever the Bolshevists are in power the Christian Church is persecuted with even greater ferocity than in the first three centuries of the Christian Era." The Christian code of ethics is opposed. The abolition of property right has led to the assumption of a right to get pay for doing nothing; the abolition of the sacredness of a man's domicile and person as well as property and the freedom to kill on the slightest pretext without trial or even accusation, has put a premium on immorality and crime of every kind. There no longer exist any ethical standards for the Bolsheviki. In consequence the entire structure of Law---its courts, its code, its officials---has been abolished as an obsolete relic of the past. There being no such thing as theft, there is no punishment for it. What new improvised courts there are, are a farce usually conducted by perfectly ignorant persons. The inevitable result is an orgy of crime. Not those whom the world considers criminals now throng the jails. These are now filled only with professors, artists, shopkeepers, landholders, professional men, army officers, property owners, big and little, shut up without cause for the crime of being what they are. Business is largely a matter of bribery.
The Family and Woman.---With the downfall of all moral standards, all family ties are naturally loosened. With the Communistic idea of property is naturally associated the communization of women. While it is true that the famous communizing decree of Saratov was not an official Bolshevik decree, still there have been many signs that this logical consequence has not remained a theory. Whole schools of girls have been turned over to Soviet employees or Red Guards. Women owning houses have been ordered to "double up" with men assigned to live in their houses. A half dozen at least of local city Soviets have issued decrees nationalizing women: that is, any girl unmarried at 18 is forced to choose or be chosen by a man, their children to belong to the State. No religious or legal marriage ceremony being any longer recognized, it is considered sufficient to issue a notice of co-habitation.
Of course there being no private property there is no inheritance, and if a man dies leaving a family that cannot earn its living it is dependent on the State. Is this the kind of family we want to have?
Class War. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.---The aim of Lenine is to abolish human nature with its natural diversities, by forcing every person into one class and one groove: the so-called "proletariat." Every person must do some sort of manual labor; nobody is allowed to employ another person. Nobody can have a "career," or rise to a position above that of his neighbor. If by industry any one makes more money than is absolutely necessary for a pre-determined standard of daily expenditure, that is considered a surplus and is taken away from him by the State. Logically this is a premium on laziness and unfitness. Also it will kill and is killing all the incentive to any of the works of genius, to all the discoveries that advance civilization. The aim to produce, by legislation and extermination, a nation of primitive tribesmen is, of course, a piece of preposterous lunacy. If the man who by night-work and industry qualifies himself to be a foreman or manager can get no more than the laziest shirker in the shop, why should he waste his effort? Apparently the man who is judged unfit to have any share in the government is the man who has shown ability to rise in the world, who has by thrift managed to save some money to make his family comfortable or to buy some property; who has built up a business enabling him to hire one or more helpers. In a word Lenine's "Dictatorship of the Proletariat"---an idea and title coined by Karl Marx---means the Rule of the Unfit, of the shirker, the failure, the shiftless, the spendthrift.
The big difference between it and our American scheme, is that we aim to rise and level up, while it aims to fall and level down. We foster ambition to achieve and have a career: it forbids a career and confiscates any results of ambitious efforts. We want to increase the standard of living universally---they wish to depress it equally universally. The higher the standard of living, the more employment there is---the lower the standard of living, the more unemployment.
Who Form the Bourgeois Class that Must Be Destroyed Throughout the World?---The term "bourgeoisie" is used in its widest sense to include all who do not belong to the "proletariat" (that is the "urban industrial workman") or the "near-proletariat" (that is the poorest peasantry). All the thrifty peasantry, all the farmers, landowners, shop-keepers, business and professional men, artists, writers and teachers (except where they are government employees), all employers, of whatever description, and all other classes of persons, rich or poor belong to the "hated category of the bourgeoisie," which has no right to live and must be exterminated by force.
Do the Bolsheviki Represent the Majority of the Russian People?---The answer is unanimous. They do not. This answer is given by the Russian Bolshevik leaders themselves as well as by non-Bolsheviki, both Russian and foreign. The only question is just what percentage of the Russian people are Bolsheviki? Dr. W. C. Huntington, U. S. attaché in Petrograd, reckons it at not more than 8 per cent." This would give them 14,500,000 out of about 180,000,000 Russians. Lenine himself makes no such claim. In his "Letter to American workingmen" he claims to represent not more than "ten million plain workingmen and peasants." He does not claim, however, that these ten million are consciously supporters of Bolsheviki theories, but only that they accept these theories as imposed on them by "200,000 members of the Bolshevik party," who take the place of the 150,000 members of the autocratic bureaucracy of the Czar, and impose their will just as autocratically on the 180,000,000 without receiving any democratic electoral mandate to do so. The people themselves, when consulted in 1917 at the elections for the Constituent Assembly, in perfect freedom, after the fall of Czardom, showed an overwhelming anti-Bolshevik majority. Lenine and Trotzky do not dare consult the people. They openly declare they never will do so. They have disfranchised the majority of the population. Only the "wage-earner (proletarian), the hired man, the factory hand and the house-worker can vote. If a peasant employs even one man as a helper he is disfranchised. The Bolsheviki came in on a triple promise of peace, food, and land. The results have been disappointing not only to the peasants but to the working men and indications are strong that the majority even of the proletariat want to get rid of Bolshevism. The peasants have discovered that the Bolsheviki, after promising to give them the land as their property, have broken this promise and deny them any land ownership, because it is contrary to the gospel according to Marx.
Practices and Results of Bolshevism.
Theory and Practice.---The rule of Lenine in Russia illustrates for the first time in history the carrying out in practice on a grand scale of a system of sociology evolved out of the brain of a literary fanatic. It is Karl Marxism in action. The laboratory experiment is on the body of the whole Russian people. It is a pitiless major operation conducted without regard to the suffering of the patient. The people were not consulted. The theory of Soviet rule (Russian word for Committee or Council) is embodied in Lenine's Constitution of July, 1918, with its pyramid in four stories of (a) Local Soviets, (b) Provincial Soviets, (c) the All-Russian Soviet, (d) People's Commissars and Committees. We have already seen, and the text quoted later will show, how relatively restricted at present is the number of persons in Russia who have the right to vote and take part in the government---only the industrial workers and the poorer peasants. But the Constitution furnishes an even more tyrannical safeguard for Bolshevik rule in paragraph 23 which gives the Bolsheviki the power to expel from the Soviets and deprive of all political rights any persons who are not openly professed Bolsheviki, and are not members in good standing of the Trades Associations, from which they can exclude whom they choose. That is, all other Socialists and Revolutionists, even of the working classes, may be so treated. As a matter of fact it is common knowledge that this was done and that all "Mensheviki" and Socialist-Revolutionists were expelled from the Soviets, imprisoned or executed, without any specific charges. Also, voting is not by secret ballot, but open and by raising of hands, so that anti-Bolshevists can be spotted and disposed of.
As a matter of practice, then, the Soviets are virtually appointed from above by a Dictator, and not elected freely by the masses.
In this government by the Soviets, the Bolsbeviki do not even pretend to allow freedom of action to the local Soviets---which is the name given to town or village councils or committees. They are "packed" by terrorization: so are the provincial Soviets. The choice of delegates to the All-Russian Soviet is commonly dictated by Lenine and Trotzky, who also appoint in this way the People's Commissars and Committees.
After about a half-year of rule Lenine made, in April, 1918, to the All-Russian Soviet, a "Program Address" which is both an accusation and a confession. In it he says that the situation is critical because destruction and appropriation of the "Bourgeoisie" and of capital have not been accompanied by corresponding reconstruction of industry on the new communistic basis. Theoretically there should have been an increase of production with the taking over of all plants by the workmen. But instead of this there has been inefficiency, lack of proper management and organization. Greater productivity is absolutely necessary, he proclaims, for the success of Bolshevism, and this he says, the Russian people have not yet learned. Until then the situation will remain almost hopeless. He announces that "bourgeois" specialists must temporarily be employed to teach the "proletariat" until it has learned, perhaps in a year! Compulsion, iron discipline, absolute obedience to the single autocratic will of a Bolshevik Dictator must be imposed on the masses to insure efficiency.
An illuminating commentary on this confession of failure in this most important purpose of Bolshevist Communism is given in the illustrative extracts below. Production in April, 1919, had practically ceased throughout Russia. Lenine's appeal did not apparently produce any appreciable results, if we are to believe the testimony given to the Berne Socialist Conference in February, 1919.
To secure the predominance of the urban over the country population, the Constitution gives five times as many delegates to the city workmen (proletariat) as it does to the peasants.
In order to secure the downward levelling to the common average it has been reported that in a great many towns the educated persons are rounded up and executed by the Red Guards.
The revolt of the classes supposed to be most benefited---the workmen and the peasants---has been quite general and has been put down with great severity by machine gun massacres, poison gas, and platoon firing. The reason given for the ill-success of these uprisings is that the suppression of a free press, suppression of the right of assemblage and free speech, combined with the habit of executing on the slightest suspicion, has made anti-Bolshevik organization almost impossible.
Bolshevism in the United States and Canada.
There is a well-organized Bolshevist propaganda in the United States. It has. many sections. There is Albert Rhys Williams, accredited agent of the Bolshevik government; also Santeri Nuorteva, who was ostensibly a representative of the Finnish worker's Republic. A Mr. Martens, early in 1919, announced himself as the official representative in this country of the Soviet Government. He established a bureau---one of its members being Nuorteva---a real central Soviet for the United States through which to organize unity of attack on our government. Red propaganda obtained partial possession of the American Socialist party and of the I. W. W. organization. It helped in starting the anarchistic Labor movements and arrangements for a Labor party to enter the American political arena, such as was begun at Bridgeport. It is working against the American Federation of Labor and seeking to destroy it and put in its place an enlarged I. W. W. union to be called "The One Big Union." A left wing of the Socialist party has been organized to prepare for the overthrow of our government and for the establishment of Communism by civil war in the United States as in Russia. The Labor Unions of Western Canada have severed relations with the American Federation of Labor and have declared in favor of the Bolshevik program of Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Communism. Secretary of Labor Wilson has declared officially that such labor troubles as those of Portland, Butte, Seattle, Lawrence, Bridgeport, Paterson and elsewhere, are not of economic but of Bolshevik origin. This is supported by the Portland declaration quoted later, by the program of the Bridgeport Labor party led by Lavit, and by the movements in Waterbury and Butte. In other words this is not a political but an economic revolution, a war to the death against society.
There is a systematic completeness in the educational work of the Bolshevist propaganda. It begins in Kindergarten organizations: it permeates the Public Schools: it has a press in every language which includes not only dailies but weeklies and monthlies; it has many adherents in the faculties of colleges and universities. Such organizations as the Rand School provide every kind of literature as well as every form of instruction, including night school work for workmen and young people. Presses like the Kerr Co. in Chicago send out tons of revolutionary literature every day. What cannot be sent by mail goes by express and distributing centres are scattered over all our big cities.
"Parlor Bolsheviki" are used not only to infect high social circles like the "Junior League" but to skilfully misrepresent the facts everywhere. The staffs of such publications as the "Nation," the "New Republic . . . The Survey," "The Intercollegiate Socialist," and the "Dial," as well as the writers for the Rand School, the Socialist and I. W. W. presses, the "Call," the N. Y. "Liberator," the N. Y. "Communist," the "Soviet World" of Philadelphia, the N. Y. "Class Struggle," the "Revolutionary Age," the "Proletarian," the "Labor News," the "Rebel Worker," "Bread and Freedom . . . Workman and Peasant," "Freedom," "Novi Mir," and many more are busy dressing tip Bolshevism to suit perverted American ideas. They form societies for discovering the "Truth About Russia," and "The New School for Social Research," and deny all the evidence brought out of Russia by eye-witnesses. They have the effrontery to declare that the Soviet government is more representative of the people, more truly democratic than the government of the United States. Knowing how few are free to have their votes counted in Russia, what shall we call the American writer who asserts that 95% of the Russians can vote? We thought until recently that Germany should be given the palm for disingenuous statements, but "American Bolshevist" advocates are qualifying. Many young and inexperienced school teachers and rich or poor dilettanti---would-be advanced thinkers---do so ignorantly. But one cannot acquit propagandists like John Reed, Louise Bryant (his wife), Arthur Ransome, A. R. Williams, Evans Clark, and many others of deliberately misrepresenting the facts in order to persuade the American people that Bolshevism stands for just what it does not stand for---democracy, peace, freedom, majority rule, parliamentary government and all representative institutions. According to the statements of its own leaders---Lenine, Trotzky, Zinovieff, Radek, Sverdlov, etc., etc., it stands for extreme militarism, bloody class war, dictatorship, tyranny of a minority, force, suppression, of all forms of freedom.
Among the popular inflammatory orators in America, Kirkpatrick, Larkin, and Elizabeth Flynn are prominent. Since the police have stopped the open distribution of seditious literature at factories and elsewhere, there is secret distribution at night at houses, and by throwing from elevated trains. Russian Bolshevists are smuggled in through Canada and as fictitious members of crews, who are able to land without passports and apparently desert their ships. Secretary Wilson defines the aliens who come to this country to overthrow our government as open enemies who are treated most leniently if they are simply deported. Of the eleven leaders in the Seattle revolt ten were aliens and only one an American citizen. Nearly all the Communist direct-actionist leaders everywhere are aliens and not citizens.
Every month sees increasing solidarity between the various branches whose common aim is the overthrow of the government---whether they are Anarchists, syndicalists (I. W. W. and Socialist Labor Party), or Revolutionary Socialists---Socialists of the Left Wing of the party---their minor differences being overlooked in preparation for "The Day" when they will cause the storm to break loose.
Every month now sees the founding of new magazines, dailies, or weeklies, devoted to Bolshevist propaganda; sees the organizing of the extremists in an attempt to gain control of labor organizations; sees new efforts of the "intelligencia," the highbrow theorists, who have so little understanding of the awful disaster that would result from the accomplishment of their sophomore yearnings. One of the strangest things is the way unbalanced members of the clergy are making themselves sponsors of the movement as a proof that the Church is keeping abreast of the times. They appear not to understand that Bolshevism is the absolute negation of every form of Christianity and morality---that it denies God, disrupts the family and kills patriotism, that its internationalism is founded not on brotherly love but on hate.
The greatest efforts are being made to gain possession of and destroy the loyal American Federation of Labor, in order to replace it by the "One Big Union," based on I. W. W. principles and on representation by occupations, so as to make strikes nation-wide.
The Left Wing of the Socialist party acquired control or increased strength in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland and many smaller centres during the first half of 1919. It was pledged to oppose all proposed reforms in present institutions and conditions and to insist on the violent revolutionary overthrow of our present institutions. Of course this includes the practice of "sabotage" in all its forms, with which we have been made familiar by the I. W. W., and the killing of obnoxious officials or persons in authority.
In a number of States, beginning with New Hampshire, Ohio, Massachusetts arid New York, legislation has been framed to oppose the anti-patriotic activities of the "Reds." Hundreds of "Soviets" are reported to be organized throughout a large part of the States and in each ward of large cities, especially Philadelphia. Special propaganda has been started among the returning soldiers and the negroes, and "Red" literature is printed in over a dozen languages, the "High Brows" furnishing a large part of the ammunition.
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ILLUSTRATIVE EXTRACTS.
Bolshevist Program of Class War and Conquest.
The chief task which we set ourselves at the very beginning of the war was to turn the imperialist war into a civil war.---(Lenine and Zinovieff, "Against the Current," Petrograd, 1918.)
Not civil peace, but civil war---that is our watchword.---(Letter of Liebknecht to the Zimmerwald Conference, 1915.)
The program of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) is the program not only of the liberation of the proletariat of one country. It is the program of the liberation of the proletariat of all countries, because it is the program of international revolution. The overthrow of imperialist governments by means of armed revolt is the road to international dictatorship of the working-class.---(Bolshevik Leader Bucharin in Program of the Communists, Moscow, 1918, Round Table, March, 1919, "Bolshevik Aims and Bolshevik Ideals.")
General Soviet Constitution-July 19, 1918---Section 23. Guided by the interests of the working class as a whole the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic deprives all individuals and groups of their rights, which are used by them contrary to the interests of the Socialist Republic.
Official Bolsheviki Statement of Steps Taken.
(1) Abolition of property in land, declaration of the entire soil to be national property, and the distribution of it to the workmen without purchase money, upon the principle of equality in utilizing it.
(2) Declaration as national property of all the forests, treasures of the earth and waters of general public utility, and all the belongings, whether animals or things, of the farms and agricultural undertakings.
(3) Introduction of a law for the control of workmen and for the nationalization of a number of branches of industry.
(4) Nationalization of banks, which heretofore were one of the mightiest instruments for the spoliation of society by capital.
(5) Repudiation of the loans which were contracted by the Czar's government upon account of the Russian people, thereby to deal a blow to international capital as one of the factors chiefly responsible for the war.
(6) Arming the laborers and peasants and disarming of the propertied classes.
(7) Besides all this, the introduction of a universal obligation to work, for the purpose of eliminating the parasitic strata of society, is planned.---(From "Declaration of Rights" issued in the summer of 1918 by the Russian Council of People's commissaries. See Nation, Jan. 4, 1919.)
Karl Marx Against National Loyalty, Law, Morality, Religion.
Modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital . . . has stripped him [the proletarian] of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests. . . . The working men have no country.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists . . . . The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course . . . We replace home education by social . . . The bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed corelation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder.
Karl Marx Would Communize Women.
But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeois chorus! . . . The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial . . . our bourgeois . . . take the greatest pleasure in seducing each others' wives. Bourgeois marriages is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women.
[Three quotations from the famous Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Fred. Engels, issued in 1848, and constituting the Program of the Bolsheviki and of all the Communists, as Marx's "Das Kapital" constitutes their Bible.]
Bolsheviki Socialization of Women.
A girt having reached her eighteenth year is to be announced as the property of the State.
Any girl having reached her eighteenth year and not having married is obliged, subject to the most severe penalty, to register at the Bureau of Free Love in the Commissariat of Surveillance.
Having registered at the Bureau of Free Love, she has the right to choose from among men between the ages of nineteen and fifty a cohabitant husband.
Remarks: (1) the consent of the men in the said choice is unnecessary; (2) the man on whom such a choice falls has no right to make any protest whatever.
The right to choose from a number of girls who have reached their eighteenth year is given also to men.
The opportunity to choose a husband or a wife is to be presented once a month.
The Bureau of Free Love is autonomous.
Men between the ages of nineteen and fifty have the right to choose from among the registered women even without the consent of the latter, in the interests of the State.
Children who are the issue of these unions are to become the property of the State.---(Decree issued by the Bolsheviki of Vladimir and published in the official Soviet organ "Izvestiya." Similar decrees issued at Luga, Kolpin, Hvelinsk, etc. Reprinted in the New Europe, Oct. 31, 1918, and the N. Y. Tribune, Nov. 26, 1918.)
Nationalization of Women at Briansk.
Comrade Kropoff is hereby authorized, by the Soviet of Briansk, to nationalize at his choice among the women and girls belonging to the Bourgeois classes of the city of Briansk sixty women for the requirements of the Red regiment of artillery camped in the environs of the city.---(Signed by President of Soviet of Briansk, with seal of Soviet of Briansk, July, 1918. Translation furnished by the American-Russian Committee for the Relief and Salvation of Russia.)
Results of Nationalization of Women.
The law providing for the nationalization of women in northeast Russia has been suspended in one province as the result of popular outcry. . . .
The commissar of Vladimir has, by decree, appointed a committee of women who are to inquire into the operations of the law, and make a report with the least possible delay. His action has been approved by the local soviet.
The Krasnaya Gazeta publishes an account of the results of nationalization. The system provides that every girl on reaching the age of eighteen must register her name in the bureau of free love, after which she is compelled to select a partner from among men between nineteen and fifty years old. "The law led to lamentable confusion," says the Gazeta, in "judicial notions as to personal inviolability."
A few days after the Soviet's decree, which women very generally ignored, two men, known to nobody, arrived in the town, and seized the two daughters of a "well known non-bourgeois comrade," declaring they had chosen them as wives and that the girls, without further ceremony, must submit, as they had not observed the registration rule.
"Comrades Yablonovski and Gurlakin," who sat as judges on the claim, decided the men were right, and the girls were carried off. They have not since been heard of by the village folk.
This, says the Gazeta, was done in the name of the nationalization of women.
Many other instances of the fantastic operation of the law, not to speak of its inhumanities, are cited by the Gazeta. Enthusiasts for nationalization, naturally all males, raid whole villages, seize young girls and demand proof that they are not over eighteen. As this proof is difficult to give, many of the girls are carried off, and there have been suicides and murders as a result.
In the town of Kovrov, a campaign was waged between the vengeful relatives of an abducted nationalized girl and her persecutors.
In this town the "register of nationalized women" was opened on December 1, but up to February 1 (1919) only two women, both over forty, and neither of whom had ever been married, registered themselves as willing to accept the first husband the State sent along,
On the committee which is now to revise the nationalization decree or to recommend its complete abrogation, sits Mme. 'Vera Arkadieff, a Bolshevik enthusiast, who commanded a detachment of women soldiers during the recent operations against Admiral Kolchak's army at Perm. She has been twice wounded---(Associated Press Dispatch from Stockholm, April 15, '19.)
Classes Entitled to Vote in Russia.
The following can vote and be voted for, according to the Russian Constitution.
All who have acquired the means of living through labor that is productive and useful to society and are members of the Trades Associations, namely:
(a) Laborers and employees of classes who are employed in industry, trade, and agriculture.
(b) Peasants and Cossack agricultural laborers who hire no labor.
(c) Employees and laborers in the offices of the Soviet government.
(d) Soldiers of the army and navy of the Soviets.
(e) Citizens of the two previous categories who have to any degree lost their capacity to work.---(Pamphlet published by the N. Y. Nation.)
Classes of Russians Disfranchised by Bolsheviki Law.
The following cannot vote or be voted for, or have any part in the life of the country.
1. Persons who employ hired labor in order to obtain from it an increase of profit.
2. Persons who have an income without doing any work, such as interest from capital, receipts from property, and so on.
3. Private merchants, trade and commercial intermediaries.
4. Employees of communities for religious worship.
5. Employees and agents of the former police, the gendarmerie corps, and the Ochrana,: also members of the dynasty that formerly ruled in Russia.---(From the Bolsheviki "Declaration of Rights"; see N. Y. Times Current History, Sept., 1918, also especially the Nation of Jan. 4, 1919, containing the complete text of the Soviet constitution of Russia.)
Official Bolsheviki Massacre Orders.
All Right Social-Revolutionists known to the local Soviet should be arrested immediately, numerous hostages taken from the bourgeois officer classes, and at the slightest attempt to resist or the slightest movement among the White Guards the shooting of masses of the hostages should be begun without fail.
The initiative rests especially with the local Executive Committees . . . arrest persons hiding under false names and shoot without fail anybody connected with the White Guards.
All the above measures should be put immediately into execution. Indecisive action on the part of local Soviets must be immediately reported to the People's Commissar of Home Affairs. Not the slightest hesitation will be tolerated in the using of mass terror.---(Extract from telegram sent to all the Soviets of Russia by Petrovsky, Commissary for Home Affairs, in September, 1918; published in the Moscow Izvestia, N. Y. Times Current History, December, 1918, p. 505.)
The murder mania is so strong among the Bolshevist officials that they even shoot their own officials. Firing squads take delight in forcing condemned men to jump from automobiles and in shooting them before the eyes of other victims. Many executions take place on the Khodynka parade grounds. These are in charge of Lettish troops. The victims are shot with revolvers, and the bodies fall into open trenches, wet concrete immediately is thrown over them so that it is impossible for relatives to identify and claim the bodies.---(Statement by British refugees from Moscow, in Stockholm, N. Y. Times Currrent History, December, 1918.)
Bolshevism the Enemy of Religion.
The Bolsheviki are disrupting and seeking to totally destroy not only the organization of the Orthodox Russian Church, but all religious forms and beliefs. All religious property is, of course, confiscated. All religious ceremonies and meetings are forbidden. The clergy are disfranchised. Many dignitaries of the church have been murdered. The monasteries have been abolished and the schools closed and no religious education allowed--- (Alfons Paquet in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Oct. 9, 1918.)
In Revolutionary Russia a struggle against religion is in full force. At Moscow the doors of the churches are nailed shut and on the doors of the cathedral of Vassily Blagenny and upon the image of the Blessed Virgin a placard has been affixed with the following inscription: "Religion is the opium of the people."
As can be seen, the revolutionary proletariat begins at last to understand that religion is not a matter of the free choice of the individual as the Socialists claim, but on the contrary it is a social evil, a reactionary factor and a disease against which it is necessary to fight to the end. just so long as the public believes in God in heaven there will be slavery on earth.---(From Russian N. Y. Weekly Bread and Liberty, March 5, 1919.)
President Wilson's Condemnation of Bolshevism.
This Government is in receipt of information from reliable sources revealing that the peaceable Russian citizens of Moscow, Petrograd, and other cities are suffering from an openly avowed campaign of mass terrorism and are subject to wholesale executions. Thousands of persons have been shot without even a form of trial; ill-administered prisons are filled beyond capacity, and every night scores of Russian citizens are recklessly put to death; and irresponsible hands are venting their brutal passions in the daily massacres of untold innocents.(From the telegram of the U. S. Government sent Sept. 21, 1918, to the Allied and neutral governments asking them to join in a protest against the Bolshevist terror.)
Bolsheviki Condemned by the Social Revolutionary and Social Democratic Parties of Russia.
1. Are we right, yes or no, when we declare that the Bolshevist Government has degenerated into an instrument of reaction, and, although it hides behind the words "the will of the workmen and peasants," does not shrink from the most extreme and violent measures of oppression directed against these same workmen and peasants?
2. Are we right when we declare that the Bolshevist Government has now no other aim than to preserve at all costs its own power, and that with this object it is ready to sacrifice all the conquests of the revolution and take refuge in a state of terrorism directed, not against the bourgeoisie but against the other socialist parties and the mass of the proletariat and peasants whom they represent, and that, finally, eager to justify itself in the eyes of the foreign conqueror, it has not hesitated in connection with the Mirbach incident to lay at his feet the dead bodies of 200 of its own Social Revolutionary countrymen?
3. Are we right when we declare that Bolshevism has done nothing to apply Socialist principles and has only succeeded in destroying industry and bringing about universal unemployment and starvation?
4. Are we right when we declare that the Bolshevist Government denies us every possibility to open discussion or to struggle for what we consider to be Russia's only hope of salvation, namely the summoning of the Constituent Assembly and the re-establishing of popular means of local administrationin a word the placing of all power in the hands of the people?
5. Are the Bolsheviki right when they assert that all other Russian Socialist parties are seeking, not to free the working classes from the despotic oppression of a small minority, but, in concert with the bourgeois and monarchist elements, to bring about a counter-revolution---(From Appeal issued by the Social Revolutionary and Social Democratic Parties of Russia, to the Socialists of Europe asking that an International Socialist Commission go to Russia to investigate and answer the above questions. N. Y. Times Current History, 1918.)
Judgment of the Little Grandmother of the Revolution.
(Mme. Catherine Breshkovsky, who has spent more than thirty-two of seventy-three years of life in Russian and Siberian prisons, is so beloved by her people as to rejoice in the title of "Babushka," the "Grandmother of the Russian Revolution," said:)
It is a calamity, not alone for Russia but for the world at large, to permit Bolshevism to flourish and expand. . . .
The situation in Russia is deplorable. There is no exaggeration in cable dispatches which state that our people are literally starving to death. There is bread in some places, but not in all. There are no means of transportation; the railroads have completely broken down. The people in the cities who have some supplies refuse to sell anything. We have no clothes, no tools. no instruments, no medicine, and little or no food. The stocks in the co-operative stores of the villages are almost totally depleted.
At the start the Bolsheviki had the people with them. They promised peace, bread, clothes, education---they gave, ah, they gave only money, and that to themselves. We Russians are ashamed to say that, rich as our country is, we are beggars.
The farmers will not sell to the Bolsheviki, consequently many of the people of Russia are starving. We have no schools, no communication, no transportation, no bread, no peace, no industry, Russia is destroyed. Not even paper have we to print our alphabet. Consequently, education is at a standstill. Even the newspapers have been suppressed, except those of the Bolsheviki. You in America know nothing save what they tell you; the truth is suppressed. . . . The only hope for Russia is the overthrow of the Bolshevist forces and the election of a Constituent Assembly.---(N. Y. Times, Jan. 26, '19.)
Bolshevism, the End of Civilization.
(On his way back to Holland from Russia, Dr. Oudendijk, the Dutch Minister in Petrograd, said:) I wish to give a solemn warning to the working classes of all nations. Bolshevism, I say without exaggeration, is the end of civilization. I have known Russia intimately for twenty years and never have the working classes of Russia suffered as they are suffering at the present moment. I have never seen or dreamed of the possibility of such corruption, tyranny, and the absence of all semblance of freedom as there are in Russia at the present moment.
Translated into practice, the five points of Bolshevism really comes to this: (1) High wages; (2) don't work; (3) take other people's property; (4) no punishment; (5) no taxation; and I suppose there will always be a certain number of people who will adopt a program which in practise amounts to this.---(The Literary Digest, Jan. 11, 1919, from London Times.)
The Bolsheviks, seeing that the problem of supply was growing more and more acute, and realizing that whatever happened to the rest at least the working classes had to be fed, brought into force a sliding scale of rations. Thus for bread:
1st category: Workmen doing hard manual labor, 3/4 lb. per day.
2nd category: Workmen doing light manual labor (postmen), 1/2 lb.
3rd category: People doing brain work (clerks, doctors, etc.) 1/4 lb.
4th category: The "bourgeoisie," termed "parasites," 1/8 lb. The same sliding scale was adopted also for all other victuals, so that, on the basis of the official rations, the unhappy bourgeois had to exist on an occasional smoked herring and a few ounces of black bread. It is quite evident that no human being could possibly live on this amount of food.---(Lubov Hicks in The New Europe, Nov. 28, 1918.)
The Bolshevik Theory of Civil Liberties in Russia.
(N. Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevist leader, has written a pamphlet entitled "The Program of the Communist Party, or Bolsheviki." He explains the stand of the Bolsheviki on civil liberties as follows:)
It is the aim of the workmen and peasants to wipe out the bourgeoisie and to drive out of her the desire to attempt to restore a bourgeois government, there can be no question of great liberties for the bourgeoisie. Neither can there be a question of granting to the bourgeoisie the right of suffrage, or of a change of the Soviets to a bourgeois-democratic parliament.
You hear everywhere the following expressions of indignation or even threats: "You are stopping the publication of papers; you are making arrests; you are prohibiting gatherings; you trample upon freedom of expression and freedom of the press; you are restoring a monarchy; you are violators and murderers," and many other things. This question of "liberties" in the Soviet Republic has to be studied in detail. . . .
The press, assemblies, unions, and so on, are ordinarily instruments of class-struggle. In our revolutionary epoch, however, they are weapons of civil war, just like cannons, powder, or machine guns. The only question is what class is using them and against what class they are directed.--- (Struggling Russia, March 22, 1919.)
Appeal of Russian Press for Freedom.
In endeavoring to fight the "bourgeoisie," the Bolshevist rulers have suppressed not only the liberal, but the entire Socialist press as well. Here is an appeal issued in Petrograd and signed by the following organizations: Committee for the Defense of Freedom of the Press; Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party; Central Committee of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists; Central Committee of the Councils of Peasant Deputies and the Union of Workmen Printers.
Comrades and Citizens! The wicked work of violating democratic rights becomes daily more disastrous, both for the further development of the Revolution and our freedom won by it. Civil War has inflamed the whole country. Cities are being destroyed. The war of brother against brother is consuming the strength of our revolutionary democracy. The cannons, secured to guard the conquests of our Revolution, shatter monuments, homes, and shrines of art. The cities of Russia fall at the hands of her own citizens.
Workmen and Soldiers! The Revolution took place in order to secure and preserve the rights of the people. However, in their blind madness, the irreconcilable fanatics destroy both the achievements of the Revolution and the country, The democratic activities of the laborers are being suppressed. The nation is being driven towards ruin. The people are deprived of all liberties won by the Revolution. Those who claim to be the "Rulers" have enough to hide. Therefore, they make you keep your mouth shut and stifle the Revolution. . . . The press has become an illegal organ. Freedom of the press is now the privilege of only one party, i. e., the Bolsheviki.--- (Struggling Russia, March 22, 1919.)
Lenine's Repudiation of Equality.
While the old bourgeoisie democratic constitutions, for instance, proclaimed formal equality and the right of free assemblage, the constitution of the Soviet Republic repudiates the hypocrisy of a formal equality of all human beings. . . . Since we here are concerned with the task of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only fools or traitors will insist on the formal equality of the bourgeoisie.---(N. Lenine, "A Letter to American Workingmen," in Class Struggle, Dec., 1918.)
Lenine's Program Address, April, 1918.
"Keep accurate and conscientious accounts"; "conduct business economically"; "do not loaf"; "do not steal"; "maintain strict discipline at work." These slogans, which were justly ridiculed by revolutionary proletarians when they were used by the bourgeoisie to cover its domination as a class of exploiters, have now, after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, become the urgent and principal slogans. . . .
[Need to Work.] We have defeated the bourgeoisie. we must turn from the very simple problem of continuing the expropriation of the capitalist to . . . creating conditions under which the bourgeoisie could neither exist nor come anew into existence . . . we have not yet effected accounting and control in those branches and departments of economic effort which we have taken away from the bourgeoisie. Without this there can be no question of the second condition, just as essential to the establishment of Socialism; i. e., to raise the productivity of labor on a national scale.
[Bourgeois Specialists.] At present . . . it is become urgent for the proletarian state authority to make use of the bourgeois specialists for the purpose of replowing the soil so that no bourgeois can grow on it. . . . Without the direction of specialists . . . the transformation towards Socialism is impossible, for Socialism demands a conscious mass movement toward a higher productivity. . . .
The sooner we ourselves, workers and peasants, learn better labor discipline and a higher technique of toil, making use of the bourgeois specialists for this purpose, the sooner we will get rid of the need of paying tribute to these specialists.
[Dictatorship.] The question of principle is, in general, the appointment of dictators, in accord with the fundamental principles of the soviet rule. . . . Every large machine industry ---which is the material productive source and basis of socialism---requires an absolute and strict unity of the will which directs the joint work . . . by subjecting the will of thousands to the will of one.
Today the . . . revolution demands the absolute submission of the masses to the single will of those who direct the labor process. . . . It is self-evident that it can be realized only after great upheavals.
We have not yet learned this (i.e., iron discipline during work with absolute submission to the one Soviet director), but we will learn it.---("The Soviets at Work," published by Rand School, N. Y.)
Socialist Report on Bolshevist Industry to the International Convention at Berne.
Socialists collected a great deal of authentic Russian information for the guidance of their recent international convention at Berne. They went to the Bolsheviki themselves for the information, and having digested it they denounced the Bolshevik rule. . . . It was from the files of these [Bolsheviki] publications that the Socialists compiled their report, taking nothing from non-Bolshevik sources, and giving the authority for their statements in each case.
They confined their attention solely to the result of Bolshevism upon the very class in whose exclusive interests it professes to rule---namely, upon the proletariat, or urban wage earners. The Socialists condemned Bolshevism because they found, out of its own mouth, that it was destroying the very class it is supposed to benefit at the expense of all the rest of society.
The Bolsheviki's own reports showed that the population of Petrograd had declined about two-thirds, only about eight hundred thousand inhabitants being left out of about two million four hundred thousand. The population of Moscow had declined about sixty per cent. In one group of Petrograd factories the number of workmen had fallen from two hundred and seventy-seven thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand. Moscow metal workers' unions had lost a hundred and twenty-three thousand members out of a hundred and eighty-three thousand. Chemicals workers' unions had lost three-fourths of their members. Other such instances are cited from Bolshevik reports.
City wage earners have been disappearing into the highly-paid army, drifting out to the villages, turning peddler and petty speculator. Output of a large group of textile factories had declined three-quarters.
Not only has the number of workers greatly decreased but output per man has fallen. The Petrograd Soviet reported that the State had advanced ninety-six million rubles to the famous Putiloff works---formerly one of Russia's leading industrial establishments---of which sixty-six million rubles had been expended in wages, while total output of the works in the same period was valued at only fifteen million rubles. From various reports it seemed that the total factory output equaled only about half the sum drawn from the State treasury, hence an official complaint that the government has been obliged to print paper money at the rate of two hundred million rubles a day, and that the value of its rubles in the interior of the country has fallen ninety-five per cent.
In November, 1918, the Central Executive Committee declared that the food shortage in Moscow was largely due to loafing and plundering. In December a government organ complained that the mass of new industrial officials appeared only twice a month---to draw their salaries. As to an enormous increase in the number of such officials five districts in one province now show four hundred and ninety-five officials where formerly in twelve districts there were only two hundred and seventy-five.
Kautsky (the radical German Socialist Marxian leader) declared: "The great argument for Socialism is that it is more efficient than the Capitalist system, but the Bolsheviki are undermining this argument." For Bolshevism, aside from its Red Terror---that is, on the economic side---is nothing else than orthodox Marxian Socialism put into literal practice.(Saturday Evening Post, March 22, 1919.)
Bolshevist Wrecking of Production.
The Bolshevist Labor Commissariat, quoted in the Novaya Jizn shows that out of 365,000 workmen in 832 Petrograd factories only 144,000 remained on April 1, 1918; of 245,000 metal workers only 64,000 remained; of 23,000 chemical workers only 5,000. A significant fact was that two-thirds of the workmen left Petrograd were trade unionists---that is, were skilled and semi-skilled men. How little the remaining less skilled workmen produce is shown by the records of the famous Maltzev and Kolometz works, mentioned as typical cases at a Moscow conference of state controlled metal works and reported in the Novaja Jizn of May 24, 1918. "In the Maltzev works 600 railway wagons used to be turned out monthly, and now only from 24 to 30 are made. . . . In the Kolometz works the expenses are 5 1/2 million rubles a month and the value of the products only half a million."--- (London Times, Lit. Suppl., Feb. 27, '19.)
During the days of the progress of drunkenness human beings were shot down like dogs and the cold-blooded destruction of human lives came to be a commonplace daily occurrence. In the newspaper Pravda the "pogroms" [massacres] of the drunken mobs are written up as the "provocative acts of the bourgeois," which is clearly a misrepresentation, the employment of a pretty phrase which can only lead to tile further shedding of blood.
Theft and robbery are increasing from day to day. The practice of the art of taking bribes is becoming more and more widely introduced and our new officials are already as well trained in the art as those who served under the czar's government. . . . and all this is done in the name of the "proletariat," in the name of the "social revolution." But in reality it represents only the triumph of the beast over man.
All observers of the village to-day are unanimously of the opinion that the process of disintegration and demoralization is proceeding there with irresistible force. Having plundered the estates of the landowners, having shared out among themselves or simply destroyed the dead and living stocks on those estates, having even taken to pieces the buildings, the peasants are now preparing for war against one another for the division of the spoil. . . . Yes, the process of self-discipline among the masses is proceeding with gigantic strides. The revolutionary army garrison at Sebastopol has already undertaken the last final struggle with the bourgeoisie. Without much ado they decided simply to massacre all the bourgeoisie who lived within their reach. They decided and did it. At first they massacred the inhabitants of the two most bourgeois streets in Sebastopol, then the same operation, in spite of the resistance of the local Soviet, was extended to Simperopol, and then came the turn of Eupatoria. . . .
In Russia conscience is dead. The Russian people, in fact, have lost all sense of right and wrong. "Pillage whatever there is to pillage." Such is the motto of the two groups of Bolsheviki, The Red Guards, constituted to attack the counter-revolutionaries, shoot without trial any one whom they suspect. Pillage in all its forms is the only thing which is organized. In Petrograd every Bolshevik citizen may share in the spoil. The churches, museums, shops, and stores are robbed.
In the provinces still more tragic events are taking place. Almost incredible demands are made upon the population at a few hours' notice. The Crimea is undoubtedly the province which has suffered most. The sailors of the Black Sea Fleet brutally murdered several hundreds of their officers, and repeated these barbarous outrages in several towns, where they also murdered political prisoners. The scenes were such as to cause several cases of insanity among the terrorized population. The slaughter continues and shooting is rife in the towns.
Lenine is . . . very intelligent and possesses all the qualities of a "chief," including the absolute moral indifference which is often necessary for such a part. . . . he has no pity for the mass of the people. And he believes that he has the right to make this terrible experiment on the Russian people.(Gorki, one of Russia's greatest and most radical revolutionary writers, in N. Y. Globe, Jan. 18, '19.)
Catherine Breshkovsky on Bolshevism.
Two years ago we had in Russia, through the legislation of our Provisional Government, the best laws insuring political freedom: freedom of conscience, of speech, of press, of assembly. We had equality of, political rights for both sexes, and autonomy for all the nationalities inhabiting Russia. If the Constituent Assembly had not been dispersed by the Bolshevist bayonets, the land would have been in the possession of those who till it, on the basis of socialization. The workingmen of Russia would be living under the protection of the most progressive social legislation, safeguarding their lives and health and giving them the possibility, as far as possible, to participate in the management of the industrial life. The majority in the Constituent Assembly was held by the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, and under the leadership of this party the Constituent Assembly would have realized the sacred hope of the Russian people.- (Struggling Russia, March 22, 1919.)
This meeting welcomes the fact that mass terror is being used against the white guards and higher bourgeois classes, and declares that any attempt on the life of any of our leaders will be answered by the proletariat by shooting down, not only hundreds, as is the case now, but thousands of white guards, bankers, manufacturers, Constitutional Democrats, and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries. --- (From Resolution of First Urban District Soviet of Petrograd, published Sept. 18, 1918, in the Northern Commune, official organ of the Petrograd Soviet: See London Times, Lit. Suppl., Feb. 27, '19; Struggling Russia, Mar. 29, '19.)
At the Congress of the Soviets, the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Soviets, Sverdlov, said: "We invoke the Soviets not to relent, but to fortify the Terror, no matter how terrible it may. be and what dimensions it may assume."(Struggling Russia, April 5, '19.)
Zinovieff Plans to Murder Ten Million.
To overcome our enemies we must have our own Socialist Militarism. We must win over to our side, 90 millions out of the 100 millions of population of Russia under the Soviets. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them; they must be annihilated.--- led.- (Speech by Zinovieff in Northern Commune of Sept. 19, '18. He is probably the leading Bolshevik after Lenine and Trotzky. See Struggling Russia, March 29, '19.)
British White Paper on Bolshevism.
Effects of Bolshevism.---First, themselves the fiercest upholders of free speech, they suppressed every newspaper which does not approve their policy. In this respect the Socialist press suffered most of all.
Second, the right of holding public meetings had been abolished, the vote had been taken away from every one except workmen in factories and the poorer servants, and even among the workmen those who dared to vote against the Bolsheviki were marked down by Bolshevist secret police as counter-revolutionaries.
Third, the worst crimes of the Bolsheviki have been against their Socialist opponents. Of countless executions which the Bolsheviki have carried out a large percentage has fallen on the heads of Socialists who had waged a lifelong struggle against the old regime, but who are now denounced as counter-revolutionaries merely because they disapprove of the manner in which the Bolsheviki have discredited Socialism.
Fourth, the Bolsheviki have abolished even the most primitive forms of justice. Thousands of men and women have been shot without even the mockery of a trial, and thousands more are left to rot in prisons under conditions to find a parallel to which one must turn to the darkest annals of Indian or Chinese history.
Fifth, the Bolsheviki have restored the barbarous methods of torture.
Sixth, the Bolsheviki have established the odious practice of taking hostages: still worse, they have struck at their political opponents through their women folk.---(From Report of Mr. Lockhart, British Consul General at Petrograd, sent Nov. 10, 1918, to British Foreign Office.)
Ruin of Russian Industry.---The estimate as to the state of trade conditions in Central Russia in October last is given. The metal trade was practically at a standstill. The linen trade production was 50 per cent. of normal, and being reduced, work people were starving and absenting themselves from their work searching for food. In the woolen trade production was decreased 60 per cent., and so in cotton trade, where 30 per cent. of mills were stopped. The silk trade is practically dead. Coal has fallen 60 per cent. in production, but heavy crops were produced and peasants had made money. Tramway systems in Moscow and Petrograd were down to one-fourth of their normal service. All lands, buildings, machinery, etc., were nationalized without any compensation being paid to the former owners
The result has been an utter deadlock all private interests being killed.
Money is being hidden to an enormous extent, the absence of which is being made good and quickly as possible by the Soviet's printing presses, private printing establishments being taken over for this purpose. It is estimated that the quantity of paper currency in circulation is now over 30,000,000,000 rubles, roughly a hundred times the present gold reserve.
All religious instruction has been abolished, and in its place a form of State socialistic instruction has been substituted. The peasantry now refuse to send their children to State schools and they remain without education. Clothing such as winter overcoats belonging to private people is being confiscated for the benefit of the Red Army. No man is supposed to possess more than one suit of clothes, two changes linen, or two pairs of boots. Anything above this is requistioned for so-called State purposes. All furniture is nationalized.
Revolt of Workmen in Petrograd.---The cry for bread gave place to a new cry, 'Down with Lenine.' In various workshops Bolshevism no longer keeps its hold, though a few factory committees endeavor to keep it alive. The workmen now regard the factory committees as Soviet spies. On March 10 a mass meeting was held at the Putiloff works when 10,000 men were present and a resolution was passed with only twenty-two dissentients. The following extracts show the tenor of the resolution: 'We workmen of the Putiloff Works wharf declare before the laboring classes of Russia and the world that the Bolshevist Government has betrayed the high ideals of the October revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workmen and peasants of Russia; that the Bolshevist Government is not acting as formerly in our names or on the authority of the Proletariat and peasants, but on the authority and under the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the Bolshevist Party, self-governing, with the aid of extraordinary commissions, communists and police. We protest against the compulsion of workmen' to remain at factories and works and attempt to deprive them of all elementary rights, freedom of the press, speech, meetings. inviolability of persons, etc.---(From telegram of March 21, 1919 ---White Paper on Russia presented to British House of Commons, April 5, 1919.)
The Senate's Investigation of Bolshevism.
[The Overman Committee of the judiciary of the Senate undertook a thorough investigation of Bolshevism in Russia as far as was possible by calling witnesses to testify before it. This was done impartially. The witnesses included the Bolshevist agent, A. R. Williams; the Bolshevist apologists, John Reed and Mrs. Reed (Louise Bryant), and the Red Cross representative, Raymond Robins.
Our Ambassador to Russia, Mr. Francis, and several members of the Embassy staff, were called: Dr. Huntington, Mr. R. E. Simmons. Among others were American business men such as R. M. Dennis of Chicago, R. F. Leonard of Minneapolis, and W. W. Welsh of the National City Bank; also a Methodist clergyman, G. A. Simons. All of them had been in Russia under the Bolsheviki. There was general agreement of evidence (except from the Bolsheviki apologists) showing that the Bolsheviki government was one of terrorisation, wholesale murder, destruction of liberty of the press, of liberty of assembly, of liberty of speech: that there was an almost complete cessation of transportation and of production; that nobody's life was safe, that hunger was used as a weapon for exterminating all the population except those that supported the administration, that immorality, robbery and oppression were rampant. The Red Guard were the instruments of oppression. The testimony was supplemented by documents furnished by Major Hume, the Counsel for the Committee, and by several Russians, especially Catherine Breshkowsky. The testimony was given during February, 1919.1
Lenine Calls Democracy a Shackle.
The word "Democracy" cannot be scientifically applied to the Communist Party. (Bolsheviki). Since March, 1917, the word democracy is simply a shackle fastened upon the revolutionary nation and preventing it from establishing boldly, freely, and regardless of all obstacles, a new form of power, the Council of Workmen's, Soldiers, and Peasants' Deputies, harbinger of the abolition of every form of authority.---(From Article by Lenine in New International, April, 1918.)
The Composition of the General Soviet.
Paragraph 25. The All-Russian Congress of Soviets consists of representatives of the Urban Soviets-one delegate for each 25,000 votes---and representatives of the provincial congresses of Soviets (i.e. peasants)---one delegate for each 125,000 voters.
Let us be honest. Who are the leaders of the labor organizations today? Partly worthy, self-sacrificing, and convinced people who therefore have learned nothing and are scarcely able to read and write, but partly all sorts of adventurers and swindlers who take advantage of every great chance to make a position for themselves.---(Trotsky, quoted in Natl. Civic Fed. Review, Jan. 10, 1919, by W. E. Walling. Lenine also, in his "Program Address" of April, 1918, deplores the presence of criminals and adventurers in the administration.)
The Revolutionist Bourtseff's judgment.
In matters outside their party the Bolshevists are completely anti-moral; they are men without a conscience, without honor, without a sense of responsibility for their crimes. They are men without hearts; the sorrow of others does not exist for them. Right and justice are for them only empty words. In political matters outside their party the Bolsheviki are above all things liars. No trust can be put in their words. For months they were hot adherents of the Constituent Assembly; they made it the principal ground of their whole conflict with the other parties; but afterwards they suddenly turned their backs on the Constituent Assembly and dispersed it after its first meeting. They always shrieked against capital punishment, but afterwards they themselves introduced it as a system and preached lynch-law high and low---nearly every one of their decrees ends with a threat to shoot somebody. They have covered all Russia with corpses. They stood for the freedom of the Press, but they have proved themselves such censors and repressors of the Press as Russia has never known before. They were against prisons, but they changed into passionate lovers of the prisons and began, brutal gaolors, to imprison people by hundreds without trial or examination. They spoke of peace, but gave us war over the length and breadth of Russia. They spoke of bread, but gave the people a stone. They spoke of the weight of taxation but themselves have ruined the country to the tune of milliards. They inveighed against secret diplomacy, but they have introduced into their own diplomacy such secrecy as even the Tsardom never knew. . . . The Bolshevists spoke volubly against the army, they destroyed it and the navy irremediably, they took away the officers' authority and murdered them, but now they themselves are attempting . . . to create a new army. In short, every act of the Bolshevists is full of lies! lies! lies! conscious lies!---(Vladimir Bourtseff, the lifelong Russian democrat and revolutionary leader, in his weekly, Cause Commune. See London Times, Lit. Suppl., Feb. 27, '19.)
The Mensheviki Accuse the Bolsheviki.
The imaginary dictatorship of the Proletariat has definitely turned into the dictatorship of the Bolshevist Party, which attracts all sorts of adventurers and suspicious characters and is supported only by the naked force of hired bayonets. Their sham Socialism has resulted in the complete destruction of Russia's industry, in the country's enslavement to foreign capital, in the destruction of all class organizations of the Proletariat, in the suppression of all democratic liberty and of all organs of democratic State life, thus preparing the ground for a bourgeois counter-revolution of the worst and most brutal kind.
The Bolsheviki are unable to solve the food problem, and their attempt to bribe the Proletariat by organizing expeditions into the villages, in order to seize supplies of bread, drives the peasantry into the arms of the counter-revolution and threatens to rouse its hatred towards the town in general, and the Proletariat in particular, for a long time to come. . . .
In continuing the struggle against the Bolshevist tyranny which dishonors the Russian Revolution, Social- Democracy pursues the following aims, etc.---(From Resolution of the Executive and Petrograd Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Mensheviki Section) July 27, 1918, in Rabochy International of August 7, 1918: Suffering Russia, April 5, 1919.)
An American Bolshevist Prefers Soviets to Congress.
What are the advantages of the Soviet form of government over Congress?
(a) A Soviet delegate comes from a group---a shop or a union; meeting regularly. It has a natural unity. A Congressman represents all sorts of people, irrespective of their work, who meet at the polls every two or four or six years; there is no other bond between them.
(b) A Soviet representative is continually in touch with the people he represents. A Congressman has no natural connection with his people.
(c) The Soviets are elected largely by occupations. They are full of miners who know mines; machinists who know machines; peasants who know the land; teachers who know children and education; Congress is full of lawyers and politicians and office-grabbers.
(d) The Soviet is a centre for the transaction of business by men who know their business. Congress is too often a talking-machine, an arena for playing party politics.---(Albert Rhys Williams, "The Bolsheviks and the Soviets.")
(Following is the declaration of principles of what is considered the first Soviet to be made up in America, drawn up by the Council of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors of Portland, Ore., and vicinity. It is reprinted from a recent issue of "The Revolutionary Age":)
The Council of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors declares that society as at present constituted is based upon the ownership of the means of living by the capitalist or master class and the consequent enslavement of the working class, by whose labor alone wealth is produced.
In this society there is an antagonism of interests manifesting itself in a struggle between the master class and the working class, which struggle can only be abolished by the emancipation of the working class from the domination of the master class by the conversion of the means of production and distribution, now held by the master class, into the common property of society, and their democratic control by all of society.
In the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve emancipation; therefore, the emancipation of the working class must be accomplished by the working class itself. We can never expect the master class to introduce any measures that will be of slightest benefit to the working class.
The machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers; therefore, the workers must organize consciously for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into an instrument of emancipation.
The ruling class to-day is absolutely incapable of longer conducting the industrial affairs of the nation in a manner conducive to the welfare of the people. Every act of its official spokesmen in the Congress, the Senate of the United States, and the various state legislatures proves its utter inability to deal with the problems confronting it. Industry has reached such a point of development that the forces of production have come into violent conflict with the existing relations of production; therefore, a period of revolution must ensue in which these relations must be burst asunder.
The working class must organize into a class organization for the purpose of waging unceasing warfare against the capitalist class and its instrument of oppression by any action that has for its object the overthrow of the political state of the master class and the substitution therefor of the dictatorship of the Proletariat.
The purpose of the Council of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors is to organize all members of the working class into one organization and train them in the principles of Mass action in order that we may realize that accumulation of energy, that concentration of force and continuity of resistance necessary to strike the final blow against the capitalist class.---(N. Y. Tribune, March 2, 1919.)
Any member, local or branch of a local advocating legislative reforms or supporting organizations formed for the purpose of advocating such reforms shall be expelled from the Socialist Party.---(Amendment to Constitution of Michigan State Socialist Party, February, 1919.)
Program of Left Wing Socialists.
Revolutionary Socialists hold . . . . that there are two dominant classes in society---the bourgeoisie and the Proletariat; that between these two classes a struggle must go on until the working class, through the seizure of the instruments of production and distribution, the abolition of the capitalist state, and the establishment of the dictatorship of the Proletariat, creates a Socialist system. Revolutionary. Socialists do not believe that they can be voted into power. They struggle for the conquest of power by the revolutionary proletariat. . . .
On the basis of the class struggle, therefore, the Socialist Party of America must reorganize itself, must prepare to come to grips with the master class.
Revolutionary Socialism uses the forum of parliament for agitation; but it does not intend to and cannot use the bourgeois state as a means of introducing Socialism: this bourgeois state must be destroyed by the mass action of the revolutionary proletariat. The proletarian dictatorship in the form of a Soviet State is the immediate object of the class struggle. .
The organization of Workmen's Councils; recognition of, and propaganda for these mass organizations of the working class as instruments in the immediate struggle, as the form of expression of the class struggle, and as the instruments for the seizure of the power of the state and the basis of the new proletarian State of the organized producers and the dictatorship of the proletariat. (The program calls for: Workmen's control of industry as against government ownership or state control; repudiation of all national debts; expropriation of the banks; expropriation of railways and trusts; socialization of foreign trade. These are preliminary to the complete expropriation of capital and full Communist Socialism.) -(From "Manifesto and Program of the left wing section Socialist Party: Local Greater New York." It claims the support of the State Socialist organizations of Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Massachusetts; and of locals of Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Essex County, N. J. and many others not yet recorded.)
Bolshevist Intelligencia in the United States.
Perhaps the most important feature of the radical movement, the one deserving of careful study and analysis, is the development of the Intelligencia (that is the "High-brows"). In recent years, and particularly during the war, increasing numbers of college professors, teachers, clergymen and other persons of education have entered the ranks of so-called Advanced Thinkers. "Magazines of Opinion" have been founded for the express purpose of exploiting new theories of social order. It has become the fashion to look with benevolent contempt upon the unprogressive citizens who holds in esteem the Constitution of the United States and those principles of government for which his forebears fought on this continent. Open forums are being held in churches, public schools and elsewhere, where any revolutionary may preach his doctrine of revolt. Radical expression is looked upon with satisfaction by the Intelligencia as an awakening of mass consciousness and the fruit of education.
The danger of these liberals to organized society lies in the use made of their writings and utterances by revolutionaries. The expressions of apologists for the I. W. W., Bolsheviki, and other radical organizations are freely printed and distributed to the masses at Bolsheviki and Revolutionary Socialist meetings. ---(From Report on Bolshevism of the Committee of the Union League Club of New York.)
Bolshevist Declaration of West Canadian Labor.
Industrial Soviet control by selection of representatives from industries is more efficient and of more value to producers than the present form of Canadian political government, and we accept without alteration the principle of proletarian dictatorship as a means of transforming society from a Capitalist to a Communal basis.---(From Resolution for founding of One Big Union, adopted at Ottawa, March 18, 1919, by the Delegates of the Labor Unions of Western Canada.)
Secretary of Labor Wilson on American Bolshevist Strikes.
It is not very generally known, but it is nevertheless a fact that the strikes that took place at Seattle, at Butte, at Paterson, at Lawrence and at a number of other places recently were not industrial, economic disputes, in their origin, no matter how much economics may have been involved in the dispute. A deliberate attempt was made to create a social and political revolution that would establish a Soviet form of Government in the United States and put into effect the economic theories of the Bolsheviki of Russia.
It failed because for two years the Department of Labor and other agencies of the Government have been fighting that false philosophy, not by the utilization of force , but by appeal to the judgment and to the reason of our people.---(From Sec. Wilson's address to the Conference of U. S. Governors and Mayors at Washington, March 3, 1919).
Dilemma of the Peace Conference, April 1, 1919.
We stand in the shadow either of surrender to an enemy who will never rest until he conquers us---that is, Bolshevism---or accommodation with an enemy who is only waiting to resume ---that is Germanism. We who set out to make the world safe for democracy are now hesitating as to whether we shall make it sure, either for the Boche or the Bolshevist.---(Frank H. Simonds in N. Y. Tribune, April 1, 1919.)
Communist Manifesto of New York Socialists.
Whereas we desire to place ourselves clearly on record for, and openly and actively align ourselves with, the revolutionary proletariat the world over, as at present expressed by the policies and tactics of the Communist party of Russia (Bolsheviki), the Communist Labor party of Germany (Spartacus) and other parties in harmony with them; be it
Resolved, that we pledge both financial and moral support to the Left Wing propaganda working to the end that the National (Socialist) organization conforms with the policies of this program.---(From the Resolution adopted by the Queens County Socialists, April 11, 1919.)
Manifesto of the Communist League of New Jersey.
We stand at a crisis, New Social forces have been unloosed. Parliamentary Socialism is out-moded. The hour has struck for action.
The Socialist movement of America has signally failed to meet the occasion . . . . The Party must purge itself of all save proletarian elements . . . we must . . . purge our house of the enemies within. . . . The A. F. of L. has ceased to be a labor union. It has allied itself with the master-class . . . has become a mere branch of the Federal Government . . . we must drive a revolutionary wedge into the membership of the A. F. of L. We must do what the I. W. W. has been doing for thirteen bitter years.
The most immediate and essential duty of the Socialist Party is a frank, uncompromising recognition of, and alliance with our magnificent comrades of Russia, the Bolsheviki. Alone and unaided for a solid year, they have held the power in Russia and battled the united world. And yet, in cowardly opportunism, the American Socialist Party has utterly failed to declare its alliance with the Bolsheviki. While Lenine and his comrades have waged their desperate battle for life in Moscow, our Party has deliberately stayed its hand from assistance. And this has also been true internationally. In all the Socialist world, only a pitiful handful have recognized the international leadership of the Bolsheviki. The communist League calls upon the Socialists of America to follow the leadership of the Bolsheviki. Upon this issue our Party must be reconstituted. All those who will not take this step are false to their faith. This must be the acid test of our Party membership---faith in the Bolsheviki---(From the Program of action issued by "The Communist League" of "red" socialists of New Jersey, issued in "The Rebel Worker" of Feb. 15, 1919.)
Samuel Gompers Against Bolshevism.
All of you who know me or know of my attitude in regard to labor conditions know my absolute opposition to Bolshevism in theory and to Bolshevism in fact.
In theory Bolshevism is an impossibility. In fact, if it were put into operation, or could be put into operation, it would mean the decadence or perversion of the civilization of our time. To me the story of the desperate Samson who pulled the Temple down on his head, is an example of what is meant by Bolshevism. I am not willing that all of the genius of past ages should be flung to the winds . . . be destroyed by maddened desperation. And so I may say to you that it is well for us to see now that our own house is kept in order.---(From a speech, Mr. Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, before the National Civic Federation, April 12, 1919.)
Secretary Wilson on Deporting Enemy Aliens.
These aliens are not being deported without due process of law, nor are they being deported because they are radicals . . . (but) because they have been found advocating the overthrow of our government by force. . . . They have had every possible opportunity . . . to defend themselves against the charges made under the Immigration Law. . . . All of these aliens were freely granted the privilege of employing counsel.
The regulation of the Department (of Labor) relative to the consideration of the cases of members of the I. W. W. is as follows:
First. That we will not arrest, deport or detain any alien simply for joining the I. W. W.
Second. That we will arrest and detain until we can deport any alien, whether a member of the I. W. W. or not who is found advocating or teaching the unlawful destruction of property, or advocating or teaching anarchy, or the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials. . . .
Any foreigner who comes to this country and advocates the overthrow of our form of government by force is an invading enemy, who is treated with great leniency when he is simply deported to the land from which he came. When our own citizens desire to change the form of government they can do so peaceably in the manner provided, by the Constitution.(From letter of Secretary of Labor Wilson to the Brooklyn Lodge of the International Association of Machinists, Feb 17. 1919.)
The Winnipeg Soviet Revolution.
This is not a strike at all in the ordinary sense of that term; it is a revolution. It is a serious attempt to overturn British institutions in the western country and to supplant them with the Russian Bolshevist system of Soviet rule. Winnipeg as a plain fact is governed by the Central Strike Committee of the Trades and Labor Council. . . .
This does not mean that the Trades Union movement as such is a Bolshevist movement, nor that all the present strikers are Bolsheviki. Hundreds, nay thousands, of men and women now on strike honestly believe that the strike is a demonstration of sympathy for the metal trades workers and the principle of collective bargaining. Incidentally, collective bargaining never was the issue; the only issue was the method of applying the principle, whether through trades unions or through shop committees.
Bolshevism and the rule of the Soviet or British institutions and democratic constitutional government? that is the question for every true citizen of Winnipeg to ask, and answer, for this is the parting of the ways.
Why is it that one finds thousands of men and women among the strikers who state quite frankly that they had no wish to strike? . . . It is because the 'Red' element in Winnipeg has assumed the ascendancy in the labor movement, dominating and influencing or stampeding the decent element of that movement which desires the preservation of British institutions. . . .
The only way to defeat Bolshevism is for the people, the injured, the sufferers, those who are put to hardship through this strike, who stand in the position of the proverbially innocent bystander, to organize. They must consolidate and stand solidly behind those public-spirited citizens who are protecting the city from fire, who are helping the constituted authorities in every possible manner, and they must be prepared to answer the call at any time when necessary to defend and uphold the free institutions under which we live.---(From the Citizen of Winnipeg, May, 1919.)
(The one big issue in Winnipeg is this: Is every individual dispute between employers and employees to continue to disrupt the life of the whole community? A labor strike has been set for July 1 for a six-hour working day. The people of this city are not against organized labor as such, but they object to having their bread, their milk, their water supply, their mail shut off and their press abolished at the will of five individuals in the Labor Temple who do not represent constituted authority.)
