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“BARBAROUS SOVIET RUSSIA”
[Illustration:
MR. AVERAGE MAN’S IMPRESSION OF THE MEANING OF CERTAIN RUSSIAN WORDS
]
_Copr. Life Pub. Co._
------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Barbarous Soviet Russia”
BY
ISAAC McBRIDE
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THOMAS SELTZER
1920
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1920,
By Thomas Seltzer, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
All Rights Reserved
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
NINA LANE McBRIDE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Acknowledgment is hereby made to the “Christian
Science Monitor,” “Universal Service” (Hearst),
and “Asia Magazine” for courtesies extended, in
using some of the material that appeared in those
publications.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Preface 9
I. Entering Red Land 13
II. With the Red Soldiers 21
III. On to Moscow 41
IV. Moscow 51
V. Interview With Lenin 64
VI. Who Is Lenin? 72
VII. Petrograd 87
VIII. Bolshevik Leaders—Brief Sketches 102
IX. Women and Children 112
X. Government Industry and Agriculture 120
XI. Propaganda 138
XII. Coming Out of Soviet Russia 144
Appendix 157
I. Code of Labor Laws 159
II. Resolutions Adopted at the Conference of the
Second All-Russian Congress of Trades Unions 191
III. Financial Policy and Results of the
Activities of the People’s Commissariat of
Finance 241
IV. REPORTS: (_a_) Metal Industry; (_b_)
Development of Rural Industries; (_c_)
Nationalization of Agriculture 255
ILLUSTRATIONS
Mr. Average Man’s Impression of the Meaning of _Frontispiece_
Certain Russian Words
FACING
PAGE
Red Army’s Infantry Division 22
Trotzky, Commissar of War and Marine 30
Lenin and Mrs. Lenin, Moscow, 1919 38
Lenin in the courtyard of the Kremlin, Moscow, 46
Summer of 1919
Lenin at his desk in the Kremlin, 1919 50
Lenin in Switzerland, March, 1919 62
Exterior and Interior of Lenin’s Home in Zurich 70
Gorky and Zinovieff 78
Zinovieff, President of the Petrograd Soviet 86
Chicherin, Commissar of Foreign Affairs 94
Litvinoff, Assistant Commissar of Foreign Affairs 102
Children of the Soviet School at Dietskoe Selo 110
Mrs. Lenin visiting a Soviet School 118
Soviet Propaganda Train 126
“Red Terror” 142
PREFACE
Of the five weeks I spent in Soviet Russia ten days were spent in Moscow
and eight in Petrograd. The remainder of the time I traveled along the
Western Front, from the Esthonian border to Moghilev, with leisurely
stops at Pskov, Vitebsk, Polotzk, Smolensk, and numerous small towns. I
tried to see as much as possible of this vast and unknown land in the
short time at my disposal, and I tried especially to check up from
first-hand observation some of the many things I had heard on the
outside. I also tried to test the truth of what was told me in Russia
itself,—to find visible evidence of the fairness of the claims made.
Some popular fancies were quickly dispelled. Disproof of others came
sometimes in vividly concrete fashion.
Soviet Russia is not unanimously Bolshevist, any more than the United
States has ever been unanimously Democratic or Republican, or
Prohibitionist. The speculators are not Bolshevist, nor are the
irreconcilable bourgeoisie, nor the Monarchists, nor the Cadets nor the
Menshevists, nor the Social Revolutionists and Anarchists. Nevertheless
Russia stands overwhelmingly in support of the Soviet Government, just
as the United States stands overwhelmingly in support of Congress and
the Constitution. There are many who are opposed to Soviet rule in its
present form, and this opposition is not confined to the old bourgeoisie
and the anarchists. It prevails to a certain extent—variously
estimated—among the peasants. But it is an opposition which ceases at
the military frontier of the nation. I found many critics of Soviet rule
within Soviet Russia, but they insisted that whatever changes are to be
made in the government must be made without foreign interference. At
present their first interest is the defence of Russian soil and the
Russian state against foreign assault and foreign interference.
The peasant opposition is mainly due to the deficiencies in
transportation and the shortage of manufactured articles. They blame
this on the government, much as other peoples lay their troubles to “the
government.” The peasants are reluctant to give up their grain for paper
money which is of no value to them unless it will buy shoes and cloth
and salt and tools,—and of these necessities there are not enough to go
round. While the blockade continued the government was striving
vigorously to overcome the shortage of manufactured articles brought
about by the blockade, knowing that this alone would satisfy the
peasants. They claimed to have made encouraging progress, especially in
the production of agricultural machinery, of which they were trying to
have the largest possible supply ready by spring.
Whatever the state of mind of the peasants, they are certainly better
off materially than the city workers. In all the villages I visited I
found the peasants faring much better than were the Commissars in
Moscow. They had plentiful supplies of good rye bread on their tables,
with butter and eggs and milk,—almost unknown luxuries in the cities.
Their cattle looked well fed and well cared for. It was harvest time and
the farmers were gathering in their crops. They told me that the season
had been exceptionally bountiful.
I learned after my return to America that there had been a great deal of
agitation among the upholders of the old Russian order in this country
last summer and early fall over the pogroms which were said to have been
carried on by the Bolsheviki. I found nothing but cooperation and
sympathy and understanding between the Russians and the Jews. There was
no discrimination whatsoever, as far as I could see. Jews and Russians
share alike in the councils of the Soviet Government and in the
factories and workshops.
In fact I found nothing but the utmost kindness and good will towards
the whole world, all through Russia. "If they will only let us alone
they have nothing to fear from us,—not even propaganda,"—was said to me
over and over again. There were no threats made against the
interventionists. The Soviet forces merely went ahead and demonstrated
their strength and ability to defend themselves, and left the record of
their achievements to speak for itself.
ISAAC MCBRIDE.
“Kloshe Illahe,”
Bethel, Connecticut,
March, 1920.
“Barbarous Soviet Russia”
CHAPTER I
ENTERING RED LAND
“You will never return alive. They will slaughter you. They will rob you
of everything. They will take your clothes from your very back.”
With stubborn conviction the dapper young Lettish gentleman spoke to me
as he attempted to change my mind about going into Soviet Russia. He was
attached to the Foreign Information Bureau of Latvia. He had been in
Riga all through the Bolshevist régime, from November, 1918, to May,
1919, when the German army of occupation in the Baltic provinces drove
them out. There was nothing he could not tell me about that régime. He
was especially eager to impart his experiences to foreign journalists.
“Was it really so terrible, then?” I asked him.
“Nothing could have been worse,” he repeated. "Many persons were killed
by the Bolshevists—I saw them myself—but not so many as when the Germans
began their slaughter. There was the Bolshevist program of
nationalization. They nationalized the land. They nationalized the
factories. They nationalized the banks and the large office buildings,
and even the residences.
“Aristocratic women were taken from their comfortable homes and forced
to wait on Bolshevist Commissars in the Soviet dining-rooms. One of our
leading citizens, a man who through hard work had accumulated a great
fortune, was put to work cleaning streets. His fine house with thirty or
forty beautiful rooms, where he lived quite alone with his wife and
servants, was taken away from him, and he was moved into a house in
another part of the city on a mean street where he had never been
before. His home was taken over by the ‘state’ and seven families of the
so-called proletariat were lodged in it. One of our generals was
compelled to sell newspapers on the streets. Our leading artists were
forced to paint lamp posts—and the color was red. They made the
university students cut ice.”
“And the women—did they nationalize them?” I interrupted.
“Well, no, they didn’t do that here in Riga,” he said, “but that was
because they were not here long enough to put it into effect. They were
so busy confiscating property in the six months they held sway that they
had little time for anything else. No, they didn’t nationalize the women
in Riga, but you will find they have done so in Moscow.
“But you must not go to Moscow,” he added. “You will surely never return
alive—but if you do, please come and tell me what you have seen.” And
mournfully he wished me a safe journey.
I returned to the Foreign Office the next day determined to get
permission at once to pass through the Lettish front into Soviet Russia.
It was a hot August day. Officers and attachés sat around panting,
obviously bored that any one should come at this time to annoy them. Yet
despite the heat, they were willing enough to argue with me when they
learned that I wished to go into Soviet Russia. Like the young man I
talked to before, they tried hard to dissuade me. They were full of
forebodings.
“You will be robbed of the clothes on your back the minute you fall into
the hands of the Bolshevists,” they insisted.
“You must be crazy,” said one particularly friendly officer, whose
blonde hair stood straight up from his head so that he looked
perpetually frightened.
“But I am an American correspondent,” I repeated over and over again,
not knowing what else to say.
“So that is it,” said the officer, seeming to understand all at once.
And shortly after that the Foreign Office at Riga decided to recommend
the General Staff that I be permitted to pass the lines. But still they
urged me not to go.
“You will come back naked if you come back alive,” they shouted to me in
parting.
I left Riga on a troop train at six o’clock in the evening of September
1, 1919, bound for Red Russia. By noon the following day we had reached
a small town, where I disembarked with the soldiers. The front was
fifteen versts away. There the Reds had established themselves, I was
told, in old German trenches near the town of Levenhoff, 107 versts from
Riga.
I carried a heavy suitcase, an overcoat and an umbrella, and the thought
of trudging in the wake of the less heavily caparisoned soldiers was
discouraging. I accosted a smart young officer with blonde mustaches. He
listened to me with interest.
“I am an American correspondent,” I said, “accredited to your
headquarters.”
He glanced at my papers and shrugged his shoulders with such an air of
indifference that I thought he was not going to help me at all. But he
told me to follow him, and a short distance up the road we came upon a
peasant driving a crude hay-rick drawn by a single gaunt horse.
After a brief parley, none of which I understood, the peasant got down
from his high seat, hoisted my suitcase into the vehicle, and I followed
it. I sat flat on the floor with my feet braced against the sides of the
springless cart, and we started jolting and bumping down the rough road
which ran parallel with the tracks. The peasant sat on a board laid
across the front of the rick.
We had gone only a short way when the booming of guns came from both
sides of us. My driver, however, seemed unconscious of it. We went on
for another five versts. The guns grew louder and I saw shrapnel shells
burst uncomfortably near. They came thicker and faster.
I remembered the peace of Riga some twenty-four hours before this. I
wanted to tell the driver to turn around and go back, and then I
remembered that we did not speak the same language, and certainly,
judging from his impassive back, we were not thinking the same thoughts.
There was an instant when I stopped thinking altogether, and when I knew
that I could not have opened my mouth had I tried to speak. A shell
burst some forty feet away and a piece of shrapnel about the size of a
grape-fruit landed on the floor of the hay-rick between my outspread
legs, broke two slats on the floor of the wagon and dropped harmlessly
to the ground. Then at last the driver turned around, his face white as
chalk. His panic, instead of communicating itself to me, had the very
opposite effect and I suddenly lost all sense of danger. With a
boldness, which surprises me whenever I think of it, I shouted to him:
“For Christ’s sake, go on!”
The driver obeyed reluctantly but soon turned around again.
“Go on!” I cried.
A few minutes later we approached a clump of trees under which stood a
Lettish gun, surrounded by four or five officers. My driver stopped to
talk to them, evidently inquiring whether it was safe to go on. One of
the officers nodded, the others laughed, and one said in good English,
“Everything is all right.”
At four o’clock we reached the headquarters at the front. I presented my
pass to the commanding officer, a stocky young fellow with humorous
wrinkles around his eyes.
“You are an American,” he said, observing me keenly.
“From New York,” I said. “I am going to Moscow on important business for
my paper.” I told him more, giving most impressive details. I convinced
him.
“Well,” he said finally, “you will have to wait until morning. Both of
us are using heavy artillery now.”
I insisted. I wanted to go at once.
“Well, go then,” he said with his first show of impatience. He called a
lieutenant, gave him brief instructions and washed his hands of me.
Right across the neutral zone you could see the Bolshevist trenches,
running at right angles to the railroad with barbed wire on each side so
that a motor train couldn’t rush through. “You can’t go into the front
line trenches,” the commanding officer told me. “Nobody is allowed in
there except military men, but you can go through the opening in the
barbed wire and start across.” That was the best I could do, so the
lieutenant took me around those barbed wires and down into a ditch at
the edge of the railroad and pointed to me to climb the bank. Well, I
climbed up somehow, it was about twenty-five feet; and started down that
track with my big suitcase and a heavy overcoat on, holding up my
umbrella with a white handkerchief tied to it.
It was a very hot day and I had to walk two miles across the neutral
zone—two miles right straight down the tracks. You could see the
Bolshevist trenches in the distance. Pretty soon the firing started. I
couldn’t feel anything dropping near me, so I decided those Lettish
soldiers were popping their heads out of the trenches to see this fool
go across and the Bolshevists were taking pot shots at them.
The Lettish officer had told me: “If they start to fire on you, roll off
down the bank and crawl back to our positions.” But I would have had to
roll twenty-five feet and probably crawl a mile. So I kept on. A
scattering rifle fire spat out from the Red trenches and the shells
screamed steadily overhead. My suitcase dragged heavily and I was
uncomfortably warm, but I made good progress. I had covered about half
the distance when a rifle bullet whipped by my ear. I plunged along the
track with redoubled speed.
As I came within fifty yards of the barbed wire which the Russians had
strung across the tracks, Red soldiers shouted up at me from their
trenches and motioned for me to come down into the adjoining field where
there was a gap in the wire. A few moments later I was in the first-line
trench of the Red army.
I was hot and exhausted and still resentful of that shot. I spoke first:
“Why did you shoot at me?” They did not understand, but one of them
evidently knew I was speaking English. He called down the trench to
another soldier who ran up. He was a tall young Slav, and showed white
teeth in a broad smile as he greeted me in good English.
“Hello, America,” he said.
“Why did you shoot at me?” I repeated indignantly.
“Oh,” he made a deprecatory gesture.
“One of the comrades made a mistake,” he said. “He shot at you without
orders. But you also made a mistake.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“You carried a white flag,” he said, grinning. “It should have been
red.”
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