V. THE BOLSHEVIK "BOMB": Difference between revisions
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<CENTER><FONT SIZE="+4" FACE="Times">V</FONT><FONT SIZE="+2"></FONT><br><br> | |||
<FONT SIZE="+2">THE BOLSHEVIK "BOMB "</FONT></center> | |||
<br><br>T0 a meeting of American business men Robins recently said: | <br><br>T0 a meeting of American business men Robins recently said: | ||
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in honor and standing in success. Choose the policy in which a | in honor and standing in success. Choose the policy in which a | ||
free economic system can prove itself free and keep the world | free economic system can prove itself free and keep the world | ||
free. Choose intercourse with Russia." | free. Choose intercourse with Russia."<br><br> | ||
<P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">THE END</FONT><HR> | <P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT SIZE="+2">THE END</FONT><HR> | ||
Latest revision as of 23:49, 1 October 2008
THE BOLSHEVIK "BOMB "
T0 a meeting of American business men Robins recently said:
"You believe that private property has a great and useful
mission in the world. So do I. You believe that free capital is
absolutely necessary to the world's best progress. So do I. That
is why I am talking to you to-day. There is a bomb under this
room and under every other room in the world; and it can blow
our system---your system and my system---into the eternal past
with the Bourbons and the Pharaohs.
"I saw this bomb make its first explosion---in Russia.
I am not responsible for any more brains than God has been willing
to put into my head, and I cannot tell you the whole Russian situation
in every part and in every light, but I have been saying one thing
about this bomb now for eighteen months, and every new big development
in Russia has proved that I am telling the truth. This bomb is
a real bomb. It is not simply a great lot of riots and robberies
and mobs and massacres. If it were, it would be no bomb at all.
We are talking now of something that can destroy the present social
system. Riots and robberies and mobs and massacres cannot destroy
the present social system or any social system. They can be stopped
by force. They can be stopped by the strong arm of government
in command of the physical power of government. The only thing
that can destroy a social system is a rival social system---a
real rival system---a system thought out and worked out and capable
of making an organized orderly social life of its own.
"Gentlemen, this bomb is that kind of proposition. The
danger of the Soviet system to the American system is that the
Soviet system is genuinely a system on its own account.
"There was more law and order, gentlemen, in Petrograd
and Moscow under the Bolshevik Nikolai Lenin than under the anti-Bolshevik
Alexander Kerensky. I saw it with my own eyes. The methods used
by the Bolsheviks to get law and order were drastic. They were
ruthless. I am not speaking now of the Terror. I shall speak of
the Terror later. Here I speak of the enforcement of all law against
all lawless elements, whether rebels or sneak-thieves or highway
robbers or persons insisting on drinking alcoholic liquors when
the drinking of alcoholic liquors was, and is, forbidden. All
such persons were pursued with a great pursuit---altogether remarkable
in a time of so many other demands and troubles---and, when caught,
they were dealt with mighty shortly and suddenly. Orderliness
was produced. I saw it with my own eyes, down to May of 1918.
"A year later Mr. Frazier Hunt of The Chicago Tribune
and Mr. Isaac Don Levine of The Chicago Daily News go
to Russia. It is 1919. There has been a Terror. There has been
a war. There has been a blockade. There has been starvation. There
has been daily hell, with men's hearts stirred to frenzy by the
sufferings of their wives and children, and with men's hands reaching
out by the instinct of such circumstances to any stores of food
and fuel anywhere in any government warehouse or in any private
cellar. But what do Mr. Hunt and Mr. Levine see? They see what
I saw. They see a population in which the instinct of personal
self-preservation in hunger and agony is held in steady and successful
check by the social control of the Soviet power. They see a population
as orderly, fully as orderly, as the population of New York or
of San Francisco.
"Gentlemen, the people who tell you that the Soviet system
is nothing but riots and robberies and mobs and massacres are
leading you to your own destruction. They are giving you your
enemy's wrong address and starting you off on an expedition which
can never reach him and never hurt him. To hurt Bolshevism you
need at least to get its number. Bolshevism is a system which
in practice, on its record, can put human beings, in millions,
into an ordered social group and can get loyalty from them and
obedience and organized consent, sometimes by free will, sometimes
by compulsion, but always in furtherance of an organized idea---an
idea thought out and worked out and living in human thought and
human purpose as the plan of a city not yet made with hands, but
already blue-printed, street by street, to be the millennial city
of assembled mankind.
"Gentlemen, it is a real fight. We have to fight it with
the weapons with which it can be fought. Against idea there must
be idea. Against millennial plan there must be millennial plan.
Against self-sacrifice to a dream there must be self-sacrifice
to a higher and nobler dream. Do you say that Lenin is nothing
but Red Guards? Gentlemen, let me tell you something. I have seen
a little piece of paper with some words on it by Nikolai Lenin,
read and re-read and then instantly and scrupulously obeyed in
Russian cities thousands of miles beyond the last Red Guard in
Lenin's army."
Robins was alluding to his experience on his way out from Russia
back to the United States. He left Moscow on May 14, 1918, with
a Bolshevik pass, but also with five rifles and one hundred and
fifty rounds of ammunition in his special car. The rifles and
the ammunition were the property of the Soviet government. To
get them Robins had to get a most special permit. He went to the
Soviet government, and got the permit, and went around to say
good-by to his friends and acquaintances in Moscow. He told them
he was going out by Vladivostok.
PRESIDENT PEOPLE'S COMMSSIONERS
Moscow
KREMLIN
5-11-1918
To all councils of deputies and other Soviet organization:
I beg you to give every kind of assistance to Colonel Robins and other members of the American Red Cross Mission for an unhindered and speediest journey from Moscow to Vladivostok.
PRESIDENT C.P.C.
V. ULIANOV (LENIN).
"What? " said the experts in boulevard upper-world
underground information. "What? Going out by Vladivostok?
Not by Archangel? Not by Murmansk? Not by Finland? Do you mean
it? By Siberia? My dear man, don't you know that Lenin stops having
any say-so about anything at all when you get to a point five
hundred miles east of here? Don't you know that all Siberia is
overrun with Soviets who pay no attention to Lenin and with brigands
who pay no attention to the Soviets? Don't you know that the Soviets
and the brigands between them will take all your money and probably
all your clothes?"
"No, I do not," said Robins. He was weary of answering
such questions in any other way. "No, I do not," he
said, and boarded his train.
He got to Vladivostok. He got there in a running-time only
a few hours greater than would have been consumed by the running-time
of the Siberian Railway under the old régime. He himself
has seen the Siberian Railway under the Kerensky regime. The Bolsheviks
were doing better by it. There was less clutter. There was more
energy. Incidentally, there was food at every station. And, above
all, the local governments were not raising their heads against
Lenin as they had raised them against Kerensky.
In 1917, when Robins came into Russia through Siberia, the
Red Cross Mission with which he traveled was stopped at Chita
by a local government and had to run by stealth through Krasnoyarsk
in order to avoid being stopped by a local government there. In
1918, when Robins came out of Russia, his Red Cross car was stopped
nowhere. Nowhere did any local government interrupt it. Nowhere
did any local government, after Robins had shown his credentials
from Moscow, even attempt to examine it.
Between Moscow and Vladivostok Robins passed through fifteen
different successive Soviet jurisdictions. At the first town within
each jurisdiction there would be a commissioner and a platoon
of soldiers. They would start going through the train to which
Robins' car was attached. They would arrest persons whom they
called rebels---counter-revolutionaries. They would confiscate
property---vodka, for instance, and rifles---which they called
contraband. Robins had no vodka, but he had rifles. Moreover,
he was a bourgeois. According to the boulevards he was entitled
to be shot at sight by any true Soviet anywhere. Nevertheless,
he would venture to show the commissioner a certain paper. The
commissioner would sit in Robins' car, with his soldiers outside,
and read this paper. Having read it, he would rise and bow and
say, "Please, thank you, good day." And that would be
the last Robins ever saw of him, and the soldiers never came into
the car, and nothing in the car was ever examined or censored
or in any slightest way subjected to any local stoppage, interference,
or scrutiny.
The paper was a wish by Lenin. He could not physically enforce
it, because at that time his Red Army was not large enough to
reach so far; but it was a wish by Lenin. It said in effect that
courtesy to Colonel Robins of the American Red Cross was desired
by Lenin. It bore the words Vladimir I. Ulianov and then in parentheses
the word Lenin. It was enough.
It was enough on the Volga, and it was enough on the Amur.
On the Amur, at Khabarovsk, Robins came to a Soviet farther away
from Moscow than any other Soviet on Russian soil. It was "The
Soviet of the Far Eastern District," bordering the Arctic,
bordering the Pacific. Its president-commissioner, A. M. Krasnotshokov,
read Lenin's letter and at once in due form gave Colonel Robins
of the American Red Cross the official freedom of the city of
Khabarovsk and took him to attend a conference of the local Council
of People's Commissioners, since Lenin wished him to have courtesy.
On the Amur, four thousand five hundred miles beyond the farthest
line then reached by any soldier in Lenin's Guard, Lenin's name
was enough. It was the name of the revolution, of the Soviet idea,
of the Soviet system.
At Vladivostok Robins took his rifles and his cartridges and
surrendered them to the Vladivostok Soviet. He had not fired one
shot. He had not heard one shot fired by anybody else.
That was Siberia of the Bolsheviks.
To-day in Siberia the anti-Bolshevik ruler, Kolchak, cannot
get obedience from the Siberian population and cannot keep the
Siberian Railway for one day free from raiders and marauders without
the help of scores of thousands of foreign Allied and associated
troops. In May of 1918 a letter from Lenin, without even a headquarters
policeman behind it, could send a car across all Siberia from
Cheliabinsk to Vladivostok unmolested and unsearched and could
get from every local governmental capital an immediate response
of loyal fellowship.
Robins sat on the deck of a steamer going out of Vladivostok
and watched the headlands of Asia dimming and said to himself:
"Back there, in that country, a dark country, I have seen
a new social binder among men."
Oddly, very oddly, the Allied and Associated governments seemed
at that time, in certain ways, to entertain a quite similar opinion.
Robins, on his steamer, thought back over certain strange things
recently done by the Allied and Associated governments---things
strange, indeed, if the Soviet republic was really thought by
them to be nothing but Russian anarchism venally serving German
militarism.
There was the matter of the American Railway Mission in Russia.
It was despatched to Russia in 1917. In March of 1918 part of
it was in Harbin in Manchuria and part of it was in Nagasaki in
Japan. In that same month of March the Bolsheviks ratified the
peace of Brest-Litovsk. The worst about them was known. The American
ambassador, Mr. David R. Francis, was in Russia, at Vologda, to
know it. Yet on March 27th, eleven days after the ratification
of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk, and in the full light of the full
meaning of that event, Mr. Francis wired Mr. Stevens of the American
Railway Mission in Harbin to send Mr. Emerson and a party of a
hundred other American railway experts on into Soviet Russia to
serve the Soviet government in the operation of the Soviet railway
system. And on April 6th, from Vologda, Mr. Francis informed Robins
by wire at Moscow that he had cabled Washington, urging the American
government to support and promote this plan.
Mr. Francis now talks as if no representative of a respectable
government could ever have extended a finger toward the Soviet
government except by way of reprobation. He extended a whole hand
of friendship to it in the vital matter of the technical improvement
of its transportation. He must have regarded it as a government
worthy of his hand.
Again there was the matter of the training of the Soviet government's
Red Army. The American ambassador lent his countenance and his
active assistance to the training of that army. So did all the
representatives in Russia of Britain, France, and Italy. In March
of 1918, after the ratification of the shameful peace and the
so-called betrayal of Russia to Germany by the Bolsheviks, the
representatives of the Allied and Associated governments conferred
earnestly and frequently with the Bolshevik Secretary of War---Trotzky
himself---and with Bolshevik generals, regarding the best methods
of providing military instruction and "revolutionary discipline"
for the new Red Army; and Allied infantry officers, artillery
officers, aviation officers, hastened up from South Russia to
Moscow to take part in the giving of that instruction and in the
imparting of that discipline.
Mr. Francis now seems to regard the Red Army as a very vicious
array. It was just as vicious in the spring of 1918. But on March
26, 1918, Mr. Francis from Vologda solicitously inquired from
Robins at Moscow, "What progress in formation of new army?"
And on May 3, 1918, he called attention to his sympathetic attitude
toward the Soviet republic by saying (among other things) in a
letter to Robins: "You are aware of my action in bringing
about the aid of the military missions toward organizing an army."
Why did Mr. Francis want to help organize an army of anarchists
and pro-Germans? In justice to him one is forced to conclude that
he did not think it was an army of anarchists and pro-Germans.
It was not; and the ambassador, previous to the time when intervention
was ordered at London and Paris and Washington, said by his actions
that it was not.
Also there was the matter of the co-operation between the Allies
and the Bolsheviks at Murmansk. This co-operation was witnessed
by a member of Robins' Red Cross staff---Major Thomas D. Thacher.
Major Thacher was secretary of the American Red Cross Mission
in Russia under Colonel Billings, and then under Colonel Thompson,
and finally under Robins. He was especially assigned to have charge
of "distribution of civilian relief"---the distribution
of milk, for instance, in Petrograd. He is by private occupation
a lawyer, in New York. He left Russia in March of 1918 because
of the serious illness of his father, and he went out by way of
Murmansk.
In March, at Murmansk, there was the following state of things:
There was a Soviet there, headed by a man named Youriev, formerly
a fireman on board a Russian ship belonging to the Russian Volunteer
Fleet. There was also a British admiral there---Admiral Kemp---in
command of His Majesty's war-ship Glory. There was also
a French commanding officer there with some French forces. These
three persons---the Soviet commissioner, the British admiral,
and the French commanding officer---were co-operating in a project
of war against the White Finns and the Germans along the line
of the Murmansk Railway. The supreme control of the project was
in the hands of the Soviet, headed by the ex-fireman. The British
admiral honored the ex-fireman. He fired a formal salute from
the Glory to the ex-fireman's flag, the flag of the Soviet
republic, the Red flag. Would Admiral Kemp have fired a salute
to a pro-German anarchist flag? One cannot believe it. The salute
he fired must have been to a Red flag remotely worthy of association
with Britain's own red ensign.
This association, this co-operation, at Murmansk, was witnessed
by Major Thacher down to March 26, 1918. It was sanctioned by
Trotzky. In and by itself it wrecks the theory of an Allied and
associated diplomacy believing the theory of a Soviet republic
created and operated by the German General Staff.
But again---and in climax---there was the matter of the Black
Sea Fleet. Did that fleet fall into the hands of the Germans?
It did. Was that pro-German? Well, before the Black Sea Fleet
fell into the hands of the Germans, there was a certain offer
made. It was made by the Soviet government to the British. The
Soviet government deliberately and distinctly offered to the British,
through the British commissioner at Moscow, the opportunity to
send British naval officers to take charge of the Russian Bolshevik
Black Sea Fleet! "If those officers," said Trotzky,
"find that they can do nothing else, they can at least sink
the fleet before the Germans get it."
The British commissioner will not deny that this offer was
made. He mentioned it in a letter to Robins. Like the American
ambassador, the British commissioner now wears the look of a man
who always knew that those Bolsheviks could not be tolerated.
But also like the ambassador, he wrote himself down as knowing
no such thing at a time when the Bolsheviks were under their thickest
cloud of alleged pro-Germanism. In his letter to Robins, on May
5, 1918, he signed his name---R. H. Bruce Lockhart---to the following
explicit statement, covering the Black Sea Fleet incident and
also certain other incidents, convincing then and equally convincing
now:
Moscow, 5th May, 1918.
DEAR COLONEL,---I am afraid you will have left for Vologda before I have a chance of seeing you. Do let me, in support of my view of things here, put before you the following definite instances in which Trotzky has shown his willingness to work with the Allies.
(1) He has invited Allied officers to co-operate in the reorganization of the New Army.
(2) He invited us to send a commission of British Naval officers to save the Black Sea Fleet.
(3) On every occasion when we have asked him for papers and assistance for our naval officers and our evacuation officers at Petrograd he has always given us exactly what we wanted.
(4) He has given every facility so far for Allied Co-operation at Murmansk.
(5) He has agreed to send the Czech Corps to Murmansk and Archangel.
(6) Finally, he has to-day come to a full agreement with us regarding the Allied stores at Archangel whereby we shall be allowed to retain those stores which we require for ourselves.
You will agree that this does not look like the action of a pro-German agent, and that a policy of Allied intervention with the co-operation and consent of the Bolshevik government is feasible and possible. Yours very sincerely,
R. H. BRUCE LOCKHART.
Mr. Lockhart was Mr. Lloyd George's special personal representative
in Russia. If Mr. Lockhart told Mr. Lloyd George what he told
Robins, then Mr. Lloyd George had reason to know that the Soviet
government was precisely what Robins has always said it was---a
government on its own account, having its own stake and playing
its own hand in the world, co-operating here and refusing to co-operate
there, with this foreign government or with that foreign government,
indifferently, according to its own vision of its own Socialist
revolutionary interest.
Yet, as Robins crossed the Pacific on his way back to the United
States, he could see the fog of Allied intervention closing down
over Soviet Russia. The training of the Red Army by the Allied
and American missions was stopped. The offer of the Black Sea
Fleet to the British was refused. Intervention was in the air.
Its causes were a fog. And it itself turned out to be, in method,
a fog. Robins hoped that at Washington he might be able to penetrate
it and perhaps to dissipate it.
He hoped also that he might be able to talk to American business
men about the message conveyed to American business by the victory
of Bolshevism over capitalism in Russia. It was capitalism's first
defeat---its first first-class defeat---in the world. Capitalism
would be absurd---and therefore doomed---if it could not learn
something from that experience. What is the strength, what are
the weaknesses, of American capitalism to-day? How can it best
prepare itself for its approaching competition with the Soviet
idea and with the Soviet system in the world's future? On that
theme Robins has spoken now to many audiences of American business
men. He has tried to express both his objective conclusions and
the personal routes by which he came to them, candidly. He has
said: "I want you to understand my approach to this problem.
For years I was a wage-earner, living on my own manual labor.
For years now I have been a capitalist, living on my earnings
invested, living on dividends. I come to this problem, therefore,
gentlemen, from both approaches. So, fortunately, do many of you---perhaps
most of you. This is America. We are wage-earners to-day and capitalists
to-morrow. A Bolshevik once said to me: 'You Americans have a
bourgeoisie with working-class traditions and a working-class
with a bourgeois temperament.' I could not contradict him. I did
not want to contradict him. I hope that forever and forever we
may have an America in which when you scratch a bourgeois or scratch
a wage-earner you find simply an American.
"The problem is, how to make sure of such an America?
"You are proud, gentlemen, of American industry. You have
a right to be proud. American industry has the primary and fundamental
virtue of being able to make the wheels go round, and go round
fast . It can produce. I do not believe that any Socialist system
could produce so rapidly and so abundantly. I held that disbelief
about Socialism when I went to Russia. Having returned from Russia,
I still hold it. My conclusion is that the American system is
the system that deserves to survive, for productivity, for delivering
the goods.
"And why is it able to deliver the goods? Surely the reason
is the familiar one:
"It summons, it welcomes, personal individual leadership.
To the man who has a great industrial value it gives a great financial
reward; but it gives him more than a reward. It gives him command.
It takes a Henry Ford and, without the aid or consent of the electorate
of Michigan, or of commissions and sub-commissions, or of investigations
and further investigations, it puts him, by proof of his own efforts,
into a position in which he can make motor-cars the way Henry
Ford wants to make motorcars.
"Some industries---like water-works---are not fitted to
that kind of individual command. Manufacturing industries---the
originative industries---are. In them lies the creative force
of the industrial world; and in them the American system, at its
best, gets prodigious productivity by summoning and welcoming
a leadership highly individual, highly personal, clothed with
opportunity and with authority to put that personality into product
and into the organization of men. This strength, surely, we ought
never to abandon. It is a mighty strength.
"But American industry has two weaknesses, frequently
disclosed. They might be fatal. I do not think they need to be
fatal. They can be overcome.
"Gentlemen, you have just gone through a war. During that
war you lived by a new standard. You lived by a standard forbidding
at least one of the two weaknesses of American industry. It was
not enough for you during the war to be able to show that your
business was successful. You had to show that your business was
successful for the United States. If it was not successful for
the United States, you had at least to pretend that it was. You
forgot the old boasts. You learned new boasts.
"Your sons were on the Western front. They had nothing
to do with making this war. They are still, many of them, on the
Western front to-day. They do not survive to enjoy what they earned.
You have their earnings. I used to speak, before we were in the
war, and before I was sent to Russia I used to speak to Canadians
at enlistment meetings. I saw the faces of the men as they came
up to enlist. What did I see on those faces? Youth. Youth unknowing
of the past and unknowing of the future. Youth which there in
Canada---and afterward here in the United States---took ship for
France to die, still unknowing, for institutions which were not
of their hands and which were never to be in their hands, but
which they preserved to make life for you and me now livable.
In the presence of that atonement, by the innocent for the old,
you did not dare to express any standard for your business except
a new standard. It came to your lips. You spoke it then. You have
to speak it now. It has to be kept. It was---it is---the standard
of public service.
"Gentlemen, when American industry turns from free personality
to an artificial control of prices, when it turns from free productivity
to a concerted partition of markets, when it turns from leadership
to pure profit-taking, then it abandons service and exposes a
weak point, a point of dangerous weakness, to the attacks of the
Soviet system. The Soviet system, feeble as I think it is in its
economic mechanism) has nevertheless a great strength in its economic
aim. Its economic aim is public use, public benefit. To compete
with it we must have in American industry a similar continuous
aim of public use, of public benefit; and what we learned about
service in a time of war we must learn to perpetuate for all time.
"That is our first need, in my observation, to check our
first weakness. Our second need, out of our second weakness, is
again, I think, a vital change of standard and view.
"We must altogether abolish the commodity view of labor.
It is not labor that is the commodity. It is capital. I send my
capital to distant places to work for me and do not go myself.
When I used to send my labor to work for me, in the field or in
the mine, I always went right along with it. I was always right
there. Capital is matter, and must have the rank of matter. Labor
is life and must outrank capital in the consideration of managers
of industry.
"I want to read you a certain statement of the comparative
social values of labor and capital.
"'Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital
is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor
had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves
much the highest consideration.'
"I hope you agree with this statement. I hope you find
it American. It was written by the most American of all the Americans
that have ever lived. It was said to the American people by Abraham
Lincoln as President of the American people. I call it Americanism
and I call it the spirit which must be added among us to American
individualistic capitalism in order to make it fully American
and fully secure.
"You may ask me, What would this spirit do in practice?
I say it would do two things.
"First, it would remove from every wage-earner's home,
by the regularizing of industry and by insurance, the monstrous
terrors of unemployment and of the indefensible destitution which
falls upon that home with sickness, old age, sudden death. The
means by which this end can be reached are well known. What we
lack is the will. The spirit of Abraham Lincoln would give us
the will.
"In the second place, it would set us at once to devising
the best and largest free co-operation possible between the managers
of industry and the rank-and-file employees of industry in the
technical and social purposes of industry.
"A labor leader was walking by the Pennsylvania Railway
station in New York. He pointed to it and said:
"'The men who put the stones together in that station
saw only the stones. They were given only the stones. Some day
labor will be given the plan of the beauty its hands are making.'
"That is the principle. Human beings have to know, and
have to share, the plan as well as the stones of their labor;
and today we have to go one step beyond the step which my people
in the Southland of these States were made to take in 1863.
"We thought, we Southerners, and we thought sincerely,
that cotton could not be grown without slave labor. We knew the
negro. We knew you could not make the negro work except as a slave.
We knew all about it. And we were just exactly one hundred per
cent. wrong. In the Southern states to-day, with the free negro
labor, I know men who are raising so much cotton per acre and
making so much money per acre that an old ante-bellum slave-owner
would cry to see it.
"Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves; and, in the words I
have quoted from him, he prophesied the next step. He was the
greatest among us for many reasons, but for none more than this,
that he divined the answer to a day he never saw.
"In that day, to-day, by enlightenment or by another cataclysm,
we will take that next step. We will advance the free wage-earner
from having a freedom of person to having additionally the freedom
of industry. He is to-day, in matters of management, an industrial
outsider. We will make him an insider. We will give him a responsible
citizenship in industry. By voluntary shop organization, by committees
not of governmental bureaucrats, but of managers and employees
in their own workrooms, we will produce a free co-operation of
human beings in industry not only for hours and wages, but for
problems of production and for divisions of profit among investors
and managers and employees and for extensions of service to the
public.
"The supreme task of American industry to-day is to cure
its two weaknesses and yet to retain its primary fundamental strength---free
leadership. American industry has to combine free leadership with
the obligation of service. It has to combine free leadership with
the obligation of partnership between the leaders and the led.
It has to do it.
"In just one set of circumstances could the Soviet system
out-compete the American system. Let the American system be operated
purely for private aims and with a labor outside management, and
driven, not cooperating. Let the Soviet system, on the other hand,
be operated for public purposes and with a labor co-operating
because conscious of partnership and participation and responsibility.
Then the industrially poorer system might out-compete the industrially
better system; because it would have a better social psychological
driving-engine in it.
"Our task is to equal that engine---and to improve upon
it. We can. The Soviet engine, after all, goes back to a class
dictatorship and a coercive state. We, out of freedom, out of
traditions of freedom and of free effort not known to Russia (or,
in truth, to any other European country), ought to be able to
make an engine as superior to Lenin's as consent is to force.
"Force, relatively to consent, does not create. Force,
if continued to its utmost, is death. Consent, if continued to
its utmost, is life almost illimitable. We have a better start
than any other country in the world toward a system based on consent.
Let us proceed to get by consent, morally, the going power which
other countries are trying to get by force, mechanically. Then
I should have no fear of the outcome. Then I should say that the
American system, retaining free leadership and retaining personality----personality---and
with the added lift in it of service to the public and of co-operation
with labor, voluntary service and voluntary co-operation, could
face any competition in the world and emerge not merely secure,
but triumphant, dominant, the world's model and imitated master.
May it be!"
With such thoughts in mind about the answer of Americanism
to the challenge of Bolshevism, Robins landed at Seattle and there
received a message from Washington saying that the State Department
desired him not to talk for publication. He had already received
a similar message at Vladivostok and another similar one at Tokyo.
They amounted to an order. Robins had represented the American
government---an official branch of the American government---in
Russia. The American government now requested him to be silent,
in public, about Russia. He obeyed, and proceeded to Washington.
There he talked to various officials, highly placed within
the administration. Some of them, having heard him, would at once
say that of course the President must hear him too, straight off.
They would say that they would speak to the President immediately.
The President would send for him. Later, meeting Robins again,
they would be reticent about the President. The President did
not send for him.
Robins was then in this position:
He was the only American who personally intimately knew the
leaders of the existing Russia. He had come to know them as an
agent of the American government. Returning, he could not speak
to the man in the White House who was acting for the American
people toward Russia; and, by order of that man's State Department,
he could not speak to the people.
In July intervention came. Still Robins remained silent. The
great war was on. He remained silent as long as it lasted. He
remained silent even after it had ended, because for some time
the administration seemed likely to withdraw from intervention,
and Robins naturally did not wish to make unnecessary revelations
of American misadventures abroad. In silence he looked on till
all hope of withdrawal from intervention by will of the administration
had passed and till the Overman Senate Committee officially summoned
him to speak. Then and thereafter he spoke, and spoke at liberty,
in public, with the same facts with which he had previously spoken,
in private, to Washington officials.
It is to be noted that he spoke to those officials privately
but fully. Those officials then knew, and it was open to the President
to know, in June of last year, the reasons why intervention in
Russia was bound to bring forth the results now spread before
us.
Intervention has fed the flame of Bolshevism in Russia and
has scattered its sparks on a high wind through the world.
In Russia, with the first authentic mutterings of intervention,
the Terror---the Mass-Terror---began. Russians were in arms against
Russians. Reactionary Russians, Russians the enemies of all human
democratic liberty, were getting secret Allied help and were soon
to get open Allied help. By themselves they had not been dangerous.
With Allied help they genuinely threatened the revolution. The
revolution rose against them. It rose against all counter-revolutionary
leaders, reactionary or democratic. It rose against them not only
as counter-revolutionaries, but as traitors. If the anti-Bolsheviks
said to the Bolsheviks, " You have served the German foreigners,"
the Bolsheviks said to the anti-Bolsheviks: "You are serving
the Allied foreigner, and you are doing something we never did.
We surrendered some Russian soil to Germany. We surrendered it
under compulsion, and we shall get it back. But we surrendered
it. Yes. But you! You propose to use foreign bayonets to settle
a domestic Russian question. We overthrew Kerensky with Russian
bayonets. You know it. You know that the Czar fell when the bayonets
of the Russian army left the Czar and went to the men of the March
revolution, and you know that Kerensky fell when the bayonets
of the Russian army left Kerensky and went to the men of the November
revolution. The peoples of foreign countries may not know it,
but their rulers know it, and you know it. You know that those
Russian domestic questions were in fact settled by Russians. Now
you propose to settle the next question with foreign soldiers.
You propose to destroy the Russian revolution with Japanese. Your
days are numbered."
So spoke the revolution at that hour. The counter-revolution
spoke with equal vehemence, with equal cruelty. The White Terror
of the anti-Bolsheviks on the Volga was the full equivalent of
the Red Terror at Moscow and at Petrograd. But the Red Terror
was the stronger. It had behind it now not only the sentiment
of the proletarian revolution, but increasingly the sentiment
of outright old-fashioned Russian nationalism.
It sent the anti-Bolshevik leaders to their graves and it drove
anti-Bolshevik leaders into silence and into hiding. More than
ever the Bolshevik party was the only Russian party left standing.
More than ever the Bolsheviks had their own way, and worked their
own will, in Russia.
Then came the second stage of this political strengthening
of Bolshevism. Anti-Bolshevik leaders, surviving, began to come
out of their hiding and began actually to join themselves to the
Bolsheviks. To-day Chernov himself is reported, and denounced,
by the Kolchak press in America as being an officeholder in the
Bolshevik government. The denunciation is natural. The event which
wrings it out is crushing. When Chernov goes over to the Soviet,
the Soviet has received the chief personal embodiment of all democratic
anti-Sovietism.
Chernov was the president of the All-Russian Constituent Assembly,
which Lenin dispersed. The Constituent Assembly was the alternative
to the Soviet. At the peak of the Soviet stood Lenin. At the peak
of the Constituent Assembly stood Chernov. Now Chernov and Lenin
stand together, within the Soviet, against the foreigner.
What have we done to Lenin? We have manufactured Lenin the
Internationalist into Lenin the great Russian patriot. Also we
have manufactured him into a great war lord.
On the first of May in 1918, at Moscow, Robins saw the first
general official public parade of the new Russian Red Army. It
happened on Hodinka field. There the Czar---each successive Czar
in the whole long line of Romanovs---used to cause vodka to flow
in free streams for his people on the day of his coronation, and,
having thus illustrated a drunken Russia, used to illustrate a
tamed Russia by concluding the celebration with a parade of the
Cossack Guard. On May-day of 1918 the parade was of the Guard
of the Red revolution.
On that day, for the first time, this revolutionary guard wore
its revolutionary symbol---the symbol now displayed on so many
widely extended and widely separated fronts---the button with
the plow, the hammer, and the sword crossed on it, the triple
mark of the republic of peasant, workman, and soldier.
Trotzky came to review the parade. He was now Minister of War.
It was an earnest parade. But it was not terrifying. A few regiments
of Socialist soldiers, most of them better Socialists than soldiers,
straggled across a field in poor equipment and in poor training
under the inspecting eye of a little pacifist Jew.
We destined that little pacifist Jew to become the organizer
of an army of one million fighting---and really fighting---men.
From every front in Russia the word comes back to the Allies,
all the time, that the local population is more Bolshevik than
before and that the national Red Army is better than before.
An Allied observer on the Denikin front last winter was obliged
even then to note the development of the Red Army. He reported:
There are four hundred and thirty thousand Red bayonets against
Denikin on this front. "The fighting value of the Reds improves
every day." Cowards and mutineers in the Red Army are now
executed. The undisciplined mob of a few months back "is
now taking the form of a real military force as the result of
measures which have been well thought out and energetically put
into operation."
What has intervention done? What has capitalism, through intervention,
done? It has taught Socialism the art of war. It has provided
Socialism with a large and a good army.
Even if we get to Moscow now, and kill Lenin, Lenin is not
killed. By pressure we have transfused his spirit into local populations
more Bolshevik than before and into hundreds of thousands of trained
fighting men who will keep in their pockets a little button with
a plow, a hammer, and a sword on it, and bring it out again and
pin it on again the very moment our backs are turned.
That is our political and military contribution to Bolshevism
by intervention. Next comes our propagandist contribution.
Bolshevik Russia, left alone, was a loud enough proclaimer
of Bolshevism. But Bolshevik Russia, blockaded, starved, attacked
by Finns and Poles and Serbs and Czecho-Slovaks and French and
Italians and British and Americans and Senegalese, cries Bolshevism
now with a doubled voice. It cries it as Bolshevism, as a special
philosophy. And it cries it as new, plain, general appeal to every
working-class in the world to rally to the rescue of the world's
only working-class government, beset by all the world's capitalism.
It does not cry in vain. In Italy, in France, in Britain, it
gets a strong response. And how worded? How worded even in Britain?
Worded in threats of strikes which defy the most precious gains
of British democratic political development and which say in effect
to Britain's rulers:
"Here begins, if you want it, the tolling of the passing
bell of constitutional government in the land which gave it its
birth. Here begins the new government of political dictatorship
by industrial force. We have never before struck for a political
purpose. We strike for a political purpose now. We will coerce
you. We are a minority, but we are masters of the strategic points
in England's industrial life, and we are organized. The mass of
the electorate is unorganized and purposeless. We have made ourselves
into a conscious group with purpose and knowledge. You may fool
the mass. You cannot fool us. We know what you are doing, and
we will stop you. If you use force against the international working-class
in Russia, we will use force against you here. We will blockade
the whole British bourgeoisie with a strike, and in one month
you will do what we tell you to do; because in one month the unorganized
and purposeless mass of the electorate would rather take us as
rulers and get bread and coal than keep you as rulers and starve
and freeze. So you will yield, before the month is out; and we
warn you now. If you continue the class war of coercion against
our class in Russia, we will institute the class war of coercion
against your class in Britain; and never forget, my lords and
gentlemen, that this is the country which, besides producing Mr.
Balfour, also produced Oliver Cromwell, who was as good at dispersing
parliaments as Lenin can ever hope to be; and we now introduce
to you Mr. Robert Smillie, of the miners' Union, whose army of
pitmen is as zealous as Cromwell's army of saints and quite as
able to give the House of Commons a purge. Do you want it? Do
you want another Lord Protector? Do you want another dictatorship,
by a new commonalty? We have it to give you. And now that you
have got us to thinking about it, perhaps we will give it to you
anyway. Your Russian policy proves you to be the incorrigible
enemy of the working-class everywhere. The class war which you
have declared on the banks of the Don, and the method of it, we
accept on the banks of the Thames; and we will revise the Constitution
of England by blockades of docks, blockades of mines, blockades
of railways, famine, cold, suffering, compulsion."
Such is the hideous spirit raised to new power in England,
as in France and Italy, by intervention in Russia. A year ago
in England Mr. Arthur Henderson was a greater leader of British
Labor than Mr. Smillie. He was, and is, more conservative. He
was more influential. To-day, in the contest between Mr. Henderson
and Mr. Smillie---between the idea of action through majority-rule
and the idea of action through strike-force---Mr. Smillie, by
a decision of the British Labor Party, is victor. The decision
was made on a test case; and the test case was the action for
stopping of intervention in Russia.
Intervention, every additional day of it, every additional
day of blockaded suffering for millions of innocent Russian women
and children, gives new power, artificially, to the exponent of
strike-force and of government by compulsion in Allied countries.
The deeper the Allies go into Russia, the deeper they go into
the class war at home. And the deeper they go into the class war
at home, in western Europe, the closer they press it into the
United States.
These results, in Russia and out of Russia, were predictable
and predicted. To see that they were bound to come, one needed
only to see one thing: that the Russian bomb was a bomb with a
social system in it and a social challenge thought out, worked
out, and Marxian.
On Easter day of 1918, in Moscow, when Robins got his Russian
newspapers, he noticed two different greetings of the day in them.
In certain newspapers the old line still ran, with which all Russian
newspapers during the old regime used to announce Easter day to
their readers-the sacred line: "Christ is Risen." But
in the newspapers of the Soviet revolution there was a new line.
It replaced the line "Christ is Risen." It announced
instead: "One Hundred Years Ago To-day Karl Marx was Born."
Reading it, Robins thought of Count Mirbach, German ambassador
at Moscow. He thought of him sitting in his car, at the recent
May-day parade in Moscow, and watching those German war prisoners
who brushed by him with the banner calling "German comrades,
overthrow your Kaiser as the Russian comrades have overthrown
their Czar." He thought of him, he saw him again, replying
to that banner with a face visibly promising soldiers, regiments,
armies, force, hate, to tame these revolted slaves. The Easter-day
greeting of the Soviet newspapers, thought Robins, said something
to Mirbach. To Mirbach and to all persons like him, of all nationalities,
German or French or British or American, it said:
"You want force? You want war? Well, you shall have it.
We will give you more of it than you ever thought could be. We
will give you the war of Karl Marx. We will give you the war of
household against household, of citizen against citizen, of one
tier of people against another tier of people, everywhere, day
and night. You will be violent? Of course. That is just what we
said. It is our own philosophy. We have always said, we Bolsheviks,
that you would never stir an inch from your meal of power and
privilege and plunder except by violence. You want those terms.
Have them. They are our terms. We are ready. We have trained ourselves
to all the forms of force you know and to many you do not know---force
in industry, force in the dark, force far down and hidden. You
sit on the roof of the world, making merry, with all the Philistines.
But Samson is beneath you now. He has ground for you and sweated
for you. But now he puts his arms about the pillars of the house;
and he cracks the pillars; and if he pulls the whole house down
and wrecks it, he will not care. You have hardened him to hardships.
He will not care. He will go on and struggle with you in the world's
ruins. And he will win. He outnumbers you. He outnumbers the people
who have enough property to be willing to lay down their lives
for it. He is multitudinously stronger than you. And now he knows
his strength. You insist on force? You are lost. Samson is upon
you, and his hair is grown now, and his strength is revealed to
him now, and he has the self-knowledge and the self-confidence
now to do you to death. One Hundred Years Ago To-day Karl Marx
was Born."
So spoke the Bolshevik Easter day to men like Mirbach; but
it also spoke, and said something, to men like Robins. It said
something to men of religion.
Robins was elected minister of St. Bernard's congregation at
Nome in Alaska when he was a miner. He is not an ordained minister.
He might be said to be a minister by initiative and referendum.
Having been elected at Nome, he has more or less continued to
hold office at large. For many years now he has divided his time
equally between industrial work, political work, and religious
work. When he saw "Christ is Risen" replaced by "Karl
Marx was Born" he was challenged personally. His reply rose
in his mind in thoughts which carried him back to things he had
seen in his own country as well as to things he had seen in Russia.
"These Bolsheviks," he said to himself, "are
right in a way. They are saying to people like me:
"'See here. You have put in a lot of time in pulpits and
on platforms, professing to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ
saving the world. Now make good. Show us Jesus Christ risen in
your mills and in your banks and by the lathes in your machine-shops
and by the tickers in your promoters' offices. Show Him to us
risen there, or quit.'
"It is a natural challenge. It is a challenge--- human
and understandable. And I have to say, I have to admit, that I
do not see Jesus Christ risen in the world's workplaces, except
in faintest outline. I think, indeed, that many barbarities of
pagan working life---slaves crucified, great estates cultivated
by prisoners in chains, babies of the poor exposed to die-have
been removed from among us by the presence of a religion teaching
the equality of men and teaching mercy. But I admit that the industrial
process itself is not Christianized. I admit that Jesus Christ
is not present in the chart-room of a capitalism of world-wide
profiteering, of world-wide excess wealth taken from consumer
and from worker, and of world-wide subjugation of foreign markets
among feeble peoples by force.
"I admit further that Karl Marx was born.
"But after those admissions, and because of those admissions,
I more than ever say, knowing that only saying it and wanting
it and believing it in the world of faith can bring it to pass
in the world of sight, 'Christ is risen.'
"For what is Karl Marx? Karl Marx is the naturally and
truly begotten son of an un-Christianized capitalism.
"What made Bolshevism in Russia? When you strip cause
from cause and layer from layer in the foundation of Bolshevism
in Russia, and get to rock-bottom, you will find: Bolshevism in
Russia was made by the social failure of the Russian Church.
"In the stormiest hours of the Russian revolution, when
moral leadership was needed to keep society from social moral
wreck, I heard great assemblies of the Russian Church debating
rituals, and debating ecclesiastical titles to excessive ecclesiastical
accumulations of land, and sending out not one message of guidance
to the Russian people in search of daily justice between man and
man.
"The Russian Church then remained, during the revolution,
as before the revolution, a class church. It had no message to
the state, except in confirmation and sanctification of autocracy.
It had no message to industry except in repetition of the debasing
and enslaving doctrine, loved by every profiteer and sweat-shopper,
that all wrong and all hardship in this present world may be borne
patiently in the light of God's redress to come hereafter. It
was a class church, and it made Jesus Christ the symbol of a class
rule of rich against poor, in hate and blood; and on every Easter
day the newspapers which had just spent another twelve months
keeping the nobleman on the back of the peasant with Cossack whip
and the Gentile on the back of the Jew with public mob, newspapers
of the knout and the pogrom, would most especially as the organs
of Holy Russia, cry: 'Christ is risen.' They erased Christ in
fact. They left a blank page for the Bolsheviks to write on. The
Bolsheviks wrote.
"A class industry and class state, made in the image of
a class church, will produce Bolshevism anywhere. It will produce
a revolt against existing religion along with a revolt against
the existing state and against existing industry. Bolshevism is
loss of faith in progress by Christian means. It is loss of faith
in progress by co-operation between classes, by sympathy between
man and man, by sacrifice of interest to service, by the bearing
of one another's burdens. Bolshevism is the declaration that every
class must bear its own burden and must fight its own fight and
will never get any quarter and must give no quarter.
"The Christian religion, the religion of the doctrine
of the atonement, the religion of the doctrine of vicarious suffering
and of reconciliation by sacrifice and service, is the precise
opposite of that declaration. But it cannot prevent that declaration
unless the spirit of its doctrine is accepted by the industrial
process which produces that declaration.
"It is for the church to show the doctrine, with its social,
practical meaning. Industry must make the decision of acceptance
or rejection. The parting of the ways is lighted now as it was
never lighted before. It is lighted by the fires of Russia. The
sign-post seems to me to say with the greatest clearness:
"'Either the spirit of Jesus Christ regenerating the present
system, or the spirit of Karl Marx creating a new system. Either
a capitalism turned from profiteering and sweating to sacrifice
and service and voluntary co-operation, or socialism introduced
by class war and class coercion.'
"I do not see how the choice can be avoided. 'Karl Marx
was born.' 'Christ is risen.' It is a day as the day of St. Paul
when he said, 'How can ye escape so great a salvation?' and added,
'Ye cannot escape.'
"The choice must be made. And if we wish to check the
doctrine of force, and if we wish to develop and to secure an
industrial system of free personality in leadership and of co-operation
in freedom and of the virtues of free self-controlling, self-giving
men, surely, with a sureness unquestionable, the choice must be,
'Christ is risen.'"
In any case, the Allied effort to check the doctrine of Bolshevism
and to check the Soviet republic by methods devoid of Christianity
and devoid of healing grace and full only of an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth cannot be said to have brought us anything
but woe and danger for ourselves at our own firesides and in our
own social order. I ended by asking Robins what policy, in his
judgment, should supersede the policy of intervention in the future.
He replies that in his judgment the American policy toward
the Soviet republic in the future should simply be what it actually
originally was when it was American and before it was Europeanized
by pressure from London and Paris. One of the strongest arguments
ever made against intervention in Russia is in a communication
proceeding from our State Department and bearing the imprint of
the President's own English style, put there either by himself
or by a faithful official copyist.
This argument rests itself on a sound, simple, native American
perception of the truth that we did not enjoy the effort of British
statesmen in the 'sixties of the last century to intervene in
humanity's name in our American Civil War, and that other races
and peoples also like to keep their civil wars to themselves.
It is an argument, crediting Russians with human instincts. It
went to Russia by cable, as a copy of a note to Japan, previously
communicated to representatives of Britain, France, and Italy.
It did not fall within the category of notes entitled, by the
unwritten canons of open diplomacy, to be published. But it deserved
publication. It was an able document. It assumed that of course
the Japanese would give assurances of their excellent intentions
in Siberia, but it remembered that the Germans had given assurances
of their excellent intentions in the Ukraine, and it said:
It [the American government] is bound in frankness to
say that the wisdom of intervention seems to it most questionable.
If it were undertaken, emphasizing the assumption that the most
explicit assurances would be given that it was undertaken by Japan
as an ally of Russia in Russia's interest ... the Central Powers
could and would make it appear that Japan was doing in the East
precisely what Germany is doing in the West and so seek to counter
the condemnation which all the world must pronounce against Germany's
invasion of Russia, which she attempts to justify on the pretext
of restoring order; and it is the judgment of the United States
. . . that a hot resentment would be generated in Russia, and
particularly among the friends of the Russian revolution, for
which the Government of the United States entertains the greatest
sympathy in spite of the unhappiness and misery which has for
the time being sprung out of it.
This judgment was delivered in March of 1918, four months after
the Bolsheviks came into power. Mental italics should be placed
under the passage "could and would make it appear that Japan
was doing in the East precisely what Germany is doing in the West"
and under the passage "a hot resentment would be generated."
It has, indeed, been made to appear, and a hot resentment has,
indeed, been generated, and large numbers of Russians have refused
to accept our "pretext" that we are in Russia to restore
"order," and new Bolsheviks have risen out of every
village on every front to fight us, and American soldiers have
died, and they have died in vain, and Mr. Wilson foresaw it.
Why not foresee it some more, before some more Americans die
in vain? Why not foresee it some more, on behalf of Britons and
Frenchmen as well as on behalf of Americans? We have been comrades
to the British and the French. We are deeply in their debt, as
they in ours. We do not want, and we ought not to want, to act
without full previous consultation with them in Russia. But we
have followed their policy there for some time. Will they not
agree to join us in following an American policy there for a while?
At any rate, will they not agree to give us a free hand to follow
that policy ourselves in fall friendship for them and in full
participation by them in the benefits we hope it may yield? It
would be:
Lift the blockade on Russia. Refuse, that is, to support the
Allied blockade. Readmit the Russian population to the world.
Readmit them to it in so far as American ships and American supplies
are concerned. Equip the Russian population with the materials
necessary for the re-establishment among them of a going economic
life. They have always depended on imports for certain materials.
They have never themselves manufactured them in sufficient quantity.
Sell them such materials now. Sell them rails and locomotives
and other transportation materials in order that they may be able
to bring food from places of abundance in Russia to places of
hunger. Stop the hunger. If we are serious in wanting to convert
the Russians from Bolshevism and in wanting to make them see the
superiority of Western democracy, stop the hunger. Can anybody
really think that a Russian boy who has watched his mother pale
and sicken with the hunger put upon her by Mr. Clemenceau and
Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson will grow up full of a passion
of admiration for Western democracy? Do we, want to convert the
Russian people? Or do we want only to torture them? Lift the blockade.
Next, go back to Mr. Wilson's own project, put on the ways
by his administration last year and almost launched, for missions
to Russia charged with the truly missionary work of establishing
human helpful relations between the new order in Russia and the
American republic-relations in which Americanism, industrial Americanism,
personal Americanism, could genuinely and continuously spread
itself into the Russian mind and so come to some actual chance
of doing a little practical American propaganda on behalf of the
American system in Russia's stupendous future.
Is it possible that Bolsheviks are missionaries and we are
not? Is it possible that Bolshevism is a religion and Americanism
is not? Is it possible that agents from Moscow can dare to adventure
themselves in our cities and can convert our people, and that
we do not dare to adventure ourselves in their cities and cannot
convert their people? Is their cause so good and they so brave
and our cause so poor and we so weak? In the name of the country
which George Washington did not found on quicksand and in the
name of the institutions which Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson
did not organize and animate to be blown over by a wind from Moscow,
let us shake ourselves free from this nightmare of propagandized
cowardice. Argument for argument, and steel rail for steel rail,
in politics and in economics, let us hope that we talk and run
with Soviet Russians in an open race and still show them some
dust.
They are perfectly willing to let us come and talk and prove.
The unadventurous fact is that the life of a member of an American
or Allied mission in Russia is just as safe there---as it could
possibly anywhere be. Major Allen Wardwell could offer pertinent
testimony on that point.
Major Wardwell was a member of the American Red Cross Mission
in Russia. Like Major Thacher, he is in private life a New York
lawyer. In the American Red Cross Mission in Russia he was Chief
of Transportation. He became head of the mission, by Robins' selection,
when Robins returned to America. Major Wardwell stayed in Russia
all through the summer of 1918 and on into the fall. He saw the
first great outburst of the Mass Terror. He lived in Russia in
its days of greatest personal peril. But he differed from certain
other representatives of foreign governments in Russia. He took
no part in plots for the blowing up of railway bridges to interrupt
the supplies of the Soviet government. He took no part in plots
for the bribing of Soviet army officers to upset the military
organization of the Soviet government. He remained neutral in
the Russian civil war. Remaining neutral, he remained in perfect
security. He stayed till October, seeing Russia at its reddest,
attending to his own American Mission business, in full protection
by the Soviet government; and then he came out in full liberty,
unmolested and unhindered.
The Soviet Russians are altogether willing to listen to Americans
(or to Englishmen or Frenchmen or Italians) who can keep their
fingers out of Russian fights. From such Americans our American
missions to Russia should be recruited.
These missions should be, above all, commercial and industrial
and financial. Naturally, they should be also educational. There
would seem to be little doubt that the Soviet government would
be glad to receive lecturers from our universities, just as it
is glad to receive journalists from our newspapers. Soviet Russia
is wide open to inquiry. It welcomes, it requests, inquiry. It
does not want inquirers who plot, but it offers a free field to
inquirers who will inquire and come to conclusions, friendly or
hostile, and go to the lecture platform and the printing-press
with them.
Soviet Russia is not afraid of an interchange of views
with us. If we have confidence in our ideas-and only a renegade
American can fail to have confidence in them---let us export a
few of them to the place where they are most needed and where
they will do us the most good. Our intellectual Benedict Arnolds,
who despair of the intellectual validity of the American cause
and who yell for a policeman every time they see a Bolshevik argument
headed for them, can be profitably left at home. Genuine Americans,
with confidence in Americanism, could profitably be sent to Russia,
carrying with them the appealing treasures---are they appealing
or are they not?---of American history, American thought, American
purpose. They will experience no difficulty at all in presenting
their ideas to Russian circles.
But, since Bolshevism is essentially an economic system, our
missions to Russia should be primarily economic. They should devote
themselves especially to the establishment of methods of trade
with the new Russian order. A year of trade will do more to harmonize
Bolshevism with the rest of the world, and with the safety of
the rest of the world, than a generation of invective and invasion.
This trade is eminently possible, besides promising to be eminently,
profitable. The Bolsheviks, instead of wishing to shoot every
foreign trader at the frontier, have over and over again requested
us to enter into economic relations with them, provided only that
those relations are not used as a cover for political intrigue.
Russia, wide open to the influence of intellectual inquiry by
us, is also wide open to the influence of our trading system.
Could any intellectual and economic enemy offer us a fairer field
of competition and combat?
In this matter of trade the Bolsheviks begin by offering to
pay the Czar's public foreign debt. Their declaration regarding
the payment of the debt was suppressed widely in the Allied and
Associated press. But it was perfectly explicit. It offered peace
and payment.
Next, the Bolsheviks offer "concessions" ---regular
"concessions"---"concessions" to private capital
for the development of Russia's enormous undeveloped natural resources
on terms of profit to private capital. Already the arrangements
are proceeding to completion for the "concession" through
which the new great railway in Northern Russia will be built.
The capital there interested seems to be---in part, at least---Scandinavian.
Scandinavian capital, Dutch capital, German capital cannot possibly
be prevented by any thickness of blockade or by any heaviness
of peace terms from transferring itself into Russian development---which
means into the development of the world's most extensive untouched
wealth of forest and mine.
The Bolshevik policy of granting "concessions " is
thoroughly known, and has long been known, to the Allied and Associated
governments.
If they choose now to block their own capitalists from Russia
and choose to surrender the rapidly passing Russian opportunity
to neutral and German capitalists, the responsibility is with
them and not with the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have offered
to the Allied and Associated governments everything that they
are now offering to others. They have offered it by messenger
and they have offered it by wireless. To call them pro-German
now for giving to Berlin the Russian economic leadership which
they have already personally and publicly offered to Paris will
be, of course, only one more logical step in the diplomacy which
refused the Bolshevik offer of the Black Sea Fleet and then had
the triumphant verbal satisfaction of calling the Bolsheviks pro-German
because the Germans got it. It will be only one more logical step;
but it will be the step which loses the strategic economic battle
of the war---the battle for the economic development of eastern
Europe.
Our American missions to Russia should be the symbols of a
total abandonment of that kind of diplomacy, and they should be
the agents of the preparation of the channels by which not only
American products, but American investments, can flow into Russia.
If anything is more influential than trading, it is investing.
The Bolsheviks ask us to invest. We invest in Mexico, where some
of us get murdered. None of us get murdered in Russia unless we
go there in arms. A Soviet Russia, able and willing to give us
physical safety, offers to give us a welcome for our agents of
knowledge, for our agents of commerce, for our agents of invested
capital, carrying American ways of thinking and ways of doing
into immediate contact with Russian life.
Robins simply says:
Accept that offer. Lift the blockade and send American influence
by every possible channel into every possible part of Russian
life, central and local. Reciprocally admit to this country, and
protect while here, the agents of Soviet buying-and-selling organizations.
If any American representative in Russia mixes himself into Russian
internal politics let him be deported, after proper punishment
in Russia. If any Russian representative in America mixes himself
into American internal politics let him be deported, after proper
punishment in America. Let us put a firm stop to intrigues on
both sides, and let us get down to the open human manly competition
by which alone the quarrel between our two systems can ever be
conclusively decided.
Can the Soviet Producers' Republic produce cattle and produce
hides and produce locomotives and produce ships and carry the
hides to market better than we can? Can it produce shoes and carry
them to market better than we can? Can it, as it goes on, show
a Russia more serviceable to human happiness and to human dignity
in work and play than America? At the present time the Bolsheviks
can say that they are not being allowed to show what their system
can do. It has been compelled by us to spend its time resisting
invasion rather than organizing production. If now we extinguish
it in blood, its adherents in Russia and its sympathizers in all
countries outside Russia will be able to say, and will emphatically
and continuously say:
"If Lenin had only been allowed to work his idea out into
practice there would now be no poverty in the world and no misery.
Look at the poverty we have now! Look at the misery! Down with
it! And out of Lenin's grave, up with Lenin's idea again!"
This bomb cannot really be extinguished in blood, either now
or at any other time. It can be extinguished only in the free
air of fair controversy and of fair, practical proof. If the Soviet
Producers' Republic can outcompete the American system in the
economic world, it deserves to win. If it gets outcompeted by
us, it will be inexorably obliged to modify itself and remake
itself on our model. In the competition of intercourse the American
Republic, the American system, has the field in which by merit
it can demonstrably and conclusively win and make the Soviet system
demonstrably and conclusively lose.
The choice is between intervention and intercourse. To anybody
who believes that capital has a function in the world as well
as labor; to anybody who believes that a free capitalistic order
is possible and that it is better for human beings than a proletarian
dictatorship; to anybody who does not want to see the whole world
slide down the slope of an accelerating class war into an inevitable
universal proletarian dictatorship---Robins would say:
"The Russian choice is the choice. As you choose in Russia,
so goes the world. You have seen intervention. Climb back up the
slope. Climb with your finger-nails. Climb with your teeth. But
get back to the air. Fight Bolshevism where you can fight it.
Fight it where humanity and Christianity can be with you. Fight
it to a finish where the finish can leave you standing, standing
in honor and standing in success. Choose the policy in which a
free economic system can prove itself free and keep the world
free. Choose intercourse with Russia."
THE END