On the Eastern side of Europe Russia was cut off from the family of
nations and lay prostrate. Civilisation itself had gone down there in
anarchy and misery, and its new government of Bolsheviks were ruling
over a hundred million people, hungry, diseased, stricken, crushed
in spirit, weak in body, overcome by melancholy and inertia. They
had broken first under the strain of war. Four million of their men
had died in the fields of slaughter and their labour had been taken
from the fields. Corruption beyond words, treachery in high places,
inefficiency amounting to murder, had aroused a spirit of revolt
amongst soldiers sent forward without arms to fight against men with
whom, individually, they had no lasting cause of quarrel; peasants
like themselves, gun-fodder like themselves, for ambitions and hatreds
which they did not share. They turned to rend their own leaders and
made a pact at any price with the enemy outside. All the explosive
forces of passion which had been stored up in centuries of tyranny
by a brutal Tsardom and its Governors burst out against its present
representatives, although the last Tsar was a gentle man who loved his
people. Old dreams of liberty, new philosophies of democracy, united
for a time to overthrow the Government and all its powers. Revolution,
bloody and cruel, raged in Russia, and the beast leapt up in peasant
minds. Kerensky tried to control this anarchy but was swept on one side
like a straw by stronger forces. Lenin and his crowd took command,
and their new philosophy of Communism, fair-sounding, theoretically
righteous, based upon the principles of equality and brotherhood and
peace, put a spell upon the simple minds of the Russian folk. All
opponents, critics, doubters, were destroyed relentlessly. Lenin and
his friends, having taken command of the new machinery of Government
by Soviet committees, were in supreme power over a people unarmed,
half-starving, and submissive to those who had broken their old chains.
It was some time before the Russian folk were aware of the fetters
which enslaved them, and of a tyranny over their minds and bodies more
ruthless than that of Tsardom. They were denied freedom of speech,
freedom of knowledge, freedom of movement. The newspapers published
the news of the world according to Lenin. The schools taught economic
history according to Karl Marx and world history according to Soviet
philosophy. Trotsky fashioned a Red Army in which discipline was more
severe than under the Grand Duke Nicholas. The prisons were filled with
people of all classes who came under the notice of the secret police.
Execution became a habit. There was a Reign of Terror undoubtedly as
bad as that of the French Revolution of 1793.
For a time the people as a whole were keyed up to a new enthusiasm
for what they believed to be a democratic system of Government by
attacks from the “White Armies” of the old Royalists, financed, armed
and organised by foreign powers, and especially by France and Great
Britain. As Republican France had risen against the armies of the
_emigrés_, so Soviet Russia rallied against the armies of Koltchak,
Denikin, Wrangel and others, and defeated them overwhelmingly. After
that the Reign of Terror abated somewhat, internal revolt died down,
and the gospel of Communism was seen at work in conditions of peace.
It failed to work. It was all very well for the Communists to hand out
tickets for bread, clothes, boots, education and operas to all those
who were registered for service to the State, but those who presented
the tickets found that there was not enough bread to go round, that no
clothes or boots were forthcoming, that education is a poor thing on
empty stomachs in schools where the teachers died of starvation, and
that the opera, beautiful as it continued to be, was not nourishing
after a day of hunger. The workers fled from the factories because they
could get no food. In the fields the peasants resisted the soldiers who
tried to requisition their grain for the cities. Transport broke down.
Grass grew on the railways. Horses and cattle died for lack of fodder.
Typhus was rampant for lack of soap, medicines, decent conditions of
life. Then famine struck the Volga region after two summers of drought.
Twenty-five million people were threatened with death by actual
starvation, and all over Russia there was hunger, fear, and despair.
From the famine districts the roads were black with fugitives moving
to districts where they hoped to find food, while, from those very
districts, people were trekking away from barren fields. Parents
abandoned their children. When I went down the Volga the people were
eating dried leaves, chopped straw and clay. The children were dying.
The old people awaited death. And far away in Petrograd and in Moscow
the factories were deserted, the hospitals were stone cold for lack of
fuel, and there was not a single man or woman who had any comfort of
body or soul.
Communism had failed. Its failure was proclaimed by Lenin himself.
Russia was _in extremis_ after a war which had broken the machinery
of its life and a revolution which had failed to fulfil any of its
promises, except equality—in misery.
That downfall of Russia was the worst thing in Europe, and was the
cause of some of its general poverty. Trade was cut off from a hundred
million people. Their purchasing power had been extinguished, so that
neighbouring countries could not sell to them. Their own sources of
wealth had perished, so that neither wheat nor oil nor flax could be
exchanged for manufactured goods. The wealth of the world was so much
less.
At that time the new Baltic States were unable to support themselves
on any decent standard of life. Their children also were underfed. No
trade came into the port of Riga, which once had been busy with the
world’s merchandise.
In Poland there was the spiritual warmth of national independence, but
not much else. Misery was widespread. Food for the army was taken from
the people. Commerce was stagnant, industry at a standstill. Germany
was not buying from Poland. Poland could not buy from Germany or
Russia. Underneath its new military ardour there was desperate need in
the homes of the workers.