RUSSIA’S GREATEST NEEDS
It would be a very terrible thing for democracy and the world’s peace
if the Allies, observing the anarchy into which Russia has fallen,
should relax any of their efforts to help her back to a sound military,
economic and social foundation. The first impulse is to beseech the
United States government to refuse to loan money to such an unstable
government, and even to decline to send Red Cross relief to a people
who will not try to help themselves. But second thought reveals the
unwisdom of deserting Russia in her crisis, however wilfully the crisis
was brought on. We must loan money to Russia even though we lose the
money. We must send her food and supplies even though they be received
without much gratitude. For the sake of democracy, to which revivified
and regenerated Russia has a world to contribute, we must help her now.
The task will not be as difficult as the surface facts indicate. Russia
is rapidly approaching the climax of her woe.
Aside from her military situation, bankruptcy is coming if it is not
already there. Bankruptcy for the national treasury, for few taxes are
being paid. Bankruptcy for food, clothing, fuel for all the people
except a few on the farms, and even they will suffer for many things.
Hunger and cold are at the door. The Russian army may rally, may turn
on the Germans and magnificently retrieve its lost reputation as a
fighting force. But there is no way in which the army of producers, the
farmers and the working people, can rout the enemy they have admitted
within the lines.
The farmer class of Russia this year did not produce full crops, and
they refused to send to market a very large proportion of what they did
produce. They hoarded their grain for their own use and some of it at
least they have turned into vodka. In the towns and cities of Russia
prohibition almost prohibits, but the peasant very quickly learned the
art of illicit distilling, and I heard on authority I could scarcely
question that stills have been established in half the villages of
Russia. The statement is borne out to some extent by the fact that
drunkenness among soldiers is increasing, especially in places remote
from the larger cities. In Petrograd I saw little drunkenness, but the
farther I traveled southward into the farming area the more I saw and
heard of it. At the military position in Poland where the Botchkareva
Battalion of Death was stationed, I talked with a soldier who had lived
in America. In the course of our conversation he mentioned that a group
in his regiment had got drunk and were in trouble.
“Where could they get liquor?” I asked.
“Oh, they get it,” he replied. “It’s new and it’s quite horrible, but
they drink it.”
Serious as the grain shortage was, the transportation situation was
still more serious. Food for which Petrograd and Moscow would pay
almost any money, rotted on the ground, spoiled in the half-loaded
freight cars, and wasted in congested way stations for lack of
transportation facilities and for lack of labor. In the industrial
world things were as bad. The working people, blind to their own peril,
had shortened hours of work, had gone slack on their jobs, and had
voted themselves wages far in excess of their productive activities.
The consequences were rapidly accumulating. Factories were closing
down, partly because they could not get coal and partly because of the
extortions of labor. Soon there will be gaunt famine in the land. The
working people will know what it is to go hungry with their pockets
full of money.
When these troubles culminate--and in a few weeks at the most, the
world will stand aghast at Russia’s state--the orgy of the Bolsheviki,
the riot of the dreamers will end. Human nature is the same in Russia
as it is elsewhere, the same as it is in New York or in Emporia,
Kansas. We all know how, when hard times pinch the country, the
Republican party elects its candidates. The people follow their
theorizing and dreaming leaders in good times, but when the hard times
come they turn to the party of strong business men to set them on their
feet again. The full dinner pail argument is going to appeal strongly
to the Russian masses this coming winter, and if the constituent
assembly is postponed until the autumn of 1918, I am confident that the
people will vote in favor, not of a socialistic millennium that will
not work, but for a sane, practical democracy that will.
What Russia needs above all other things is leaders. What the people
of this country must do for Russia is to help her find and develop
those leaders. They are there somewhere. Russia has shown that she
can produce great men and great women, people whom any nation might
be proud to follow. But under czardom the only people permitted to
lead were so corrupt, so reactionary and tyrannical that the Russians
learned to fear and distrust all leadership. When they overthrew
czardom and banished the tyrants and the corruptionists they thought
they could get along without any leaders. The world knows now how fatal
was their mistake, and very soon the blindest of the blind in Russia
will know it.
Russia needs not only political leaders, she needs, even more urgently,
leaders in the economic field. She needs at the present time a business
man of the caliber of Mark Hanna, a man who, with a better ethical
standard, possesses Mark Hanna’s great genius for organization, his
marvelous executive ability. Such a man rarely dazzles the public with
oratorical powers. He wastes little energy in speech. But he knows
exactly what to do. He says to one man “come” and to another man “go,”
and you may depend on it they are precisely the right men at the right
jobs. He says to all about him, “Do this,” and they do it “to the
king’s taste.” Russia needs many such men.
Nobody need be a slave under leaders, responsible and removable, like
that. We were, in the United States, until we got our eyes a little
open. We sink back once in a while still. Witness some of our municipal
governments. But freedom under strong leadership is entirely possible.
In fact, it is the only real freedom there is in the world.
The Russians may have a difficult time achieving it, for they are not
quite the hard-fibered, ambitious, struggling race the English, French
and Americans are. They are fatalistic and dreamy. That is the reason
they endured their autocrats so long. But in the end they will achieve
it.
Russia needs education, and here again America must show her the way.
A public school system on the best lines we have been able to develop
will make over the Russian people in one generation. Ninety per cent.
of the present population is said to be illiterate. The old government
tried within the past ten years to extend the common schools, but with
little effect on illiteracy. The mass of the children were given two
years of schooling, with the object of teaching them at least to read
and write. Most of them barely learned and practically all forgot,
because they were not encouraged to use their tiny bit of knowledge.
Russia has no conception of the public library as we have developed
it. There are libraries, magnificent ones, in the cities. But they are
reference libraries for the learned, not reading and lending libraries
for the masses. I am sure there is not such a thing in Russia as a
children’s library, much less a librarian especially trained and paid
to teach children how to use and to love books. Russia needs schools
to teach children knowledge and she needs libraries very near, if not
directly attached, to the schools. I talked to many people in Russia
about the wonderful Gary schools, in which children work, study and
play their way to fine, strong, thinking manhood and womanhood, and in
every case the response was the same. “We must have schools like that
all over Russia. Will you help us, when the time comes, to organize
them?”
They cannot hope, of course, to go at once into all the intensive
work of the Gary public school system, but they can adopt its general
principles and its duplicate use of the school plant. In this way they
will be able to educate more children in each school house and thus
hasten the day when all the children will be in school. William Wirt’s
next great work may be organizing school systems in new Russia. Having
no old system to replace, he will not meet with the stupid and criminal
obstruction and opposition with which his labors in New York were met.
Russia needs wholesome popular amusements to entertain and instruct her
adult population. If I were to write a detailed list of Russia’s most
pressing needs I should place near the head of the list plumbers and
moving pictures. The empire is back in the dark ages as far as building
sanitation is concerned. That is no small thing, because it affects
both the health and the morals of a people. It affects their manners
also, as any one who ever had to enter the lavatory of a Russian
railroad carriage or station can testify.
They have some moving picture theaters in Russia, but they are poor in
performance and frightfully high-priced. You pay as much to go to the
movies in Russia as you pay to hear a high class symphony concert. I
never saw a 10 and 15 cent motion picture house, nor could I learn that
they existed anywhere in the empire. Mrs. Pankhurst and I went to the
movies one night, paying something like a dollar and a half for our
seats. The play was a long, dreary drama, ending in suicide and general
misery. The acting was poor and the actors fat and elderly. For current
events pictures they presented the Cossack funeral, reeled off at such
a dizzy pace that it looked less like a funeral than an automobile race.
Moving pictures, carefully selected, offered for a small admission
fee, would be a boon to Russia. They would teach the grown people a
thousand and one things they have never had a chance to learn, and
they would perhaps get the Russian mind out of its habit of ingrowing,
self-torturing analysis that leads to nowhere. They would also give
the Tavarishi something to do besides soap box spouting, and their
listeners something more to think about than half-baked social
theories. Because of the great illiteracy of the masses, Russia would
have to introduce into her picture theaters an institution which Spain
has already established. In Spain few people can read the titles and
captions that run through the picture dramas, so each theater has a
public reader, a man with a strong voice and clear enunciation, who
reads aloud to the audience, and also makes any explanations that are
necessary.
I know exactly where moving pictures for the masses could be shown in
Petrograd without waiting for private enterprise to open theaters.
On the west bank of the Neva, not far from the sinister fortress
of Peter and Paul, stands the best and most democratic monument to
Russian enterprise in the capital. This is known as the Narodny Dom,
or People’s House, a combination club house, restaurant, theater
and general meeting place of the working classes, founded by Prince
Alexander of Oldenburg and liberally supported by the late Czar.
They have some fine concerts there, in times of peace, and an excellent
drama for the more intelligent of the workers. Admission prices are
fairly low and the performances good. For the less intellectual there
are certain Coney Island features, and these are so well patronized
that the concessionaries were well on the road to vast wealth. Long
lines of people waited every evening for a turn on the chutes or the
roller coaster. Their absolute hunger for a little amusement, a chance
to laugh and be gay is pathetic to witness.
Another thing Russia needs is the soda fountain. A cold soft drink in
summer and a hot chocolate in winter, easily accessible and cheap,
would do more to take Ivan’s mind off moonshining vodka than all the
laws in the world. Last summer there were times when I would cheerfully
have given a dollar for a frosty glass of soda, any kind, any flavor.
And there were plenty of others in Petrograd of my mind.
The best place to have luncheon in Petrograd is at the officers’
stores in the street which bears the appalling name of Bolshaia
Konnyushennyaia. Here the food, government supplied, is good and it
is sold for something approaching reasonable prices. The best meal
I had every day was luncheon at the officers’ stores. The place is
crowded from 11 to 4 every week-day, military men and their families
predominating. Once, on a hot July day, there appeared on the counter
where hors d’oeuvres were sold a cold delicious drink. It was a sort
of cherry phosphate, and there were glass pitchers and pitchers of it,
literally gallons. It sold for about twenty cents a small glass, and
within half an hour it was gone, every drop. The crowd swarmed to that
counter waving its money in the air, swallowed the cherry phosphate in
one gulp, so to speak, and clamored loudly for more. I remember that
I pleaded almost with tears for a second glass and could not get it.
There is a fortune waiting for the capitalist who will take cold, soft
drinks to Russia, and he will have besides the fortune the additional
satisfaction of bringing hope to the sodden victims of vodka.
An army that will obey orders; a government that will govern; leaders
in business, in transportation, in agriculture and a people willing to
obey those leaders; education, wholesome life. Russia needs all these,
and in her coming mighty struggle to achieve them the whole world of
democracy, and especially our United States, must lend willing and
sympathetic help and guidance.