THE BOLSHEVIK NEWS AGENCY
The most remarkable work which the Bolsheviks have done is their
organization of a news service which is certainly the most wonderful
institution of its kind in the world. I enjoyed peculiar advantages
for studying it, inasmuch as I made the acquaintance of its agents in
Siberia, got letters of introduction from them to the chiefs of the
service in Moscow, and was once able to penetrate into the Kremlin
and examine there at my leisure an exhibition devoted to the work of
this organization, which is known as the Rosta, a word formed out of
the initials of the phrase “Russian Socialist Telegraph Agency.” To
get into the Kremlin is very difficult, for as Lenin, Trotsky, and the
other National Commissars live there, the place is strongly guarded. I
noticed, however, that those who went in received a ticket in exchange
for a stamped permit of some kind from a girl in a little box-office
near the gate, and then presented it to one of the guards. By talking
German, saying I was a journalist, and suddenly remembering that I had an
appointment with “my friend Radek” (a Commissar whom I had never seen in
my life), I managed to bluff this girl into giving me a ticket, without
receiving any document in exchange. Her last suspicions were removed
when, knowing that she would not like to telephone and hoping fervently
that the telephone did not work, I professed great reluctance to accept
the ticket (“for fear of getting her into trouble”), until she had first
telephoned to “Comrade” Radek. She did not telephone, but told me to pass
on, and in a few moments I was inside the Kremlin. There I was fairly
safe, for the mere fact of being in the Holy of Holies presupposed that
I had got there by legitimate means. I met Trotsky crossing in his usual
impetuous style from Lenin’s department to the Cavalry Barracks, and
talked to him for a while, but without hearing anything of interest. Then
I examined the whole enclosure, which is not much changed from what it
was in 1914. The statues of the Emperors have, of course, been removed;
and the churches were all closed, and had been closed apparently for a
long time, as was shown by the great piles of soft, untrodden snow on
the steps. The ancient and much-venerated chapel of the Virgin inside
the quadrangle formed by the Imperial Palace is now a motor garage; the
Imperial apartments are unoccupied; and the other habitable buildings are
filled with (1) the Commissars, (2) their staffs and servants, and (3)
Red soldiers and their families. Not much damage was done to the Kremlin
during the fighting in October, 1917; one of the gateways was damaged by
a shell, but it is now hidden by scaffolding and being repaired. On all
the buildings and towers the Imperial double-headed eagle still remains,
and the only external sign of the Bolshevik occupation is the Red flag
flying over the dome-shaped Palace of Justice.
On entering one large building, which had been converted into Government
offices and was full of people hurrying to and fro, I discovered that
there was, in one of the halls, an exhibition of the Rosta intended
solely, however, for the deputies of the Ninth Communist Convention then
sitting. In order to obtain admission even these deputies had to exhibit
a pass, as well as their Convention credentials and their identity
papers; but luckily I met a prominent Red official who managed, by
breaking all the rules, to get me admitted.
The walls were covered with innumerable charts and diagrams prepared
with great skill and accuracy, and showing at a glance all the various
activities of the Rosta, the whole effect being that of a highly
technical and scientific exhibition by a well-equipped Government
department. It is the first time in history that the Press has been
treated by a Government as seriously as, say, Industry, Commerce,
Finance, or Public Health is treated.
The Rosta, which is the successor of the old Russian Telegraph Agency,
an organization resembling Reuter, has now become a great and most
ingeniously constructed machine for the Bolshevization of Russia, a
country which, it must be remembered, contains fewer Communists, in
proportion to its population, than England does. On the principle that
“charity begins at home,” the Reds are making Russia Communist before
turning the full force of their Propaganda on to the rest of the world,
though in the meantime they are not quite neglecting us. Their procedure
is simple. They have nationalized the whole Press, so that every
journalist in Russia is now a Government servant. All news, home and
foreign, goes first to the headquarters of the Rosta, a large building
on the Lubyanka, where it is cooked and peppered till it has the right
Communist flavour. Then it is sent by wireless to the correspondents of
the Rosta throughout Russia, and they give it to the local Press. Even
contents bills, headings of articles, and summaries of news are prepared
with great journalistic skill in Moscow by expert editors of the Rosta,
and sent by radio all over Russia. As far east as Ekaterinburg I had
been surprised at the uniform excellence of the newspaper placards.
Archangel fell when I was in the Urals, and the finished journalistic
phrases in which the smallest newspapers there spoke of the Red flag as
now waving from the White Sea to the Black, and prophesied that it would
yet wave over every capital in Europe, betrayed at once the practised
hand of the metropolitan journalists. Somewhat the same effect would be
produced in the British Isles, if all the best English journalists were
concentrated in, say, the Hotel Cecil, under the direction of some editor
gifted with unusual organizing ability. These experts would be divided
into different Committees, one consisting of experienced manufacturers
of headlines and contents bills, another consisting of leader writers,
another of news editors, and so on, with the result that the smallest
newspapers in the provinces, as well as the largest newspapers in
the great cities, would epitomize all the journalistic skill of the
country enthusiastically supported by the heads of the Government. In
each great city there would be, moreover, a local correspondent of the
British Rosta, who would always be a journalist of distinction, and
who would have a palatial house to reside in, and a network of local
correspondents under him. The agents of the Rosta in Perm, Ekaterinburg,
and other places are Bolsheviks, who all acquired a good knowledge of
journalistic work and of foreign languages while in exile under the Tsar.
I once heard one of them lecturing a number of his local correspondents
on their duties, and was surprised to hear him tell them that he did not
want murders and divorces, but only solid matter about the repair of
bridges, the agricultural, industrial, and educational situation, and,
above all, the progress of Communism. One of them, an unsophisticated
country schoolmaster, asked if poetry would be acceptable, but, curbing
by a violent effort a sudden tendency to laugh, the agent explained
politely and with patience that, though the republican Government would
always be glad to discover and foster any genuine poetic talent that was
brought to its notice, the news of the day had better _not_ be sent, as a
rule, in poetic form. “And if I send poetry,” continued the pertinacious
schoolmaster, whom I suspect of being himself a bard, “will Comrade Lenin
see it?” to which the agent replied that poems of special excellence
would certainly be shown to Comrade Lenin and also to Trotsky. This
assurance so satisfied the poetic schoolmaster that he subsided and did
not interrupt again.
The Rosta does not confine itself to telegraphic work. It sends out to
all the newspapers news articles, reviews of books, literary articles,
and even stories and poetry, all of which are produced in the great
journalistic factory on the Lubyanka; and I saw in the diagrams referred
to above a very accurate record of the reception which those articles
met with in the provincial Press. The name of the writers was given,
and also the exact number of times which each article was used. Thus,
one could trace the rise of a writer with scientific precision, and, by
looking at the chart of any journalist, the Director of the Rosta could
see at a glance whether he was progressing or not, the exact popularity
of each writer being stated in figures and even in decimal points. If
the development of Shakespeare’s genius had been recorded in this way,
it would have been shown in a series of charts similar to those used in
hospital to indicate the successive stages of an attack of typhus.
The publicity which attended various agitational cries was indicated
in the same way. Trotsky, for example, would say to Kerzhentsev, the
Director of the _Rosta_, “Start a cry of horror at the White Terror in
Ireland.” Kerzhentsev would pass on the order to his news editors and
poets, and forthwith the whole Russian Press would resound with roars of
indignation and with lurid descriptions of Governmental repression. A
similar cry was raised about India, Egypt, Finland, Poland, and Hungary.
More practical cries were raised in connection with cleanliness, typhus,
education, repair of transport, collection of arms for the Red Army, hair
cutting, and the support of Red Army hospitals. Minute cross references
from the articles to the “talent chart” of the journalist who had written
them gave the whole exhibition the air of a very up-to-date laboratory
for scientific experiments.
Even thus did Lord Northcliffe send forth a cry for “Standard Bread” or
for “More Shells,” a cry which was taken up by all his organs in the
Press. But this Bolshevik newspaper trust will be immensely bigger than
the Northcliffe combine, for it is an absolute monopoly of the Russian
Press, and seems to contain in it the principle of a rapid and monstrous
growth. If Bolshevism continues, there will be as much difference in
volume between the Red Press of 1930 and that of to-day as there is
between the British Press of to-day and that of 1820.
Curiously enough, however, the Bolshevik papers generally are not yet
so subject to Kerzhentsev as the Northcliffe papers are to Northcliffe,
many of the provincial journals in Russia being published by local
Soviets and local Labour organizations which print a good many original
articles; but, of course, the complete control of the foreign and
of practically all the Russian news, as well as the possession of a
merciless censorship, enables the central Soviet Government to exercise
a tremendous and irresistible influence on the entire Russian Press,
an influence even greater than that exercised by the German Government
on the German newspapers during the war. Moreover, the Rosta not only
supplies telegrams and articles to the Press throughout Russia: it
also publishes over four hundred newspapers of its own, not to speak
of a still greater number of small sheets called “wall papers,” which
are posted up on hoardings and at railway stations, and from which the
Russian man-in-the-street derives most of his information about the
general progress of the world, even as the British man-in-the-street
derives most of his information about current events from newspaper
contents bills. The extent to which the Press has expanded may be judged
from the fact that, while formerly there were only two newspapers in
Ekaterinburg Government, there are now twelve, eight of which get most of
their news by radio from the town of Ekaterinburg.
In Perm and Ekaterinburg provinces, where there were formerly only four
newspapers in all, no “wall papers,” and no resident correspondent of
the Russian Telegraph Agency, there are now twenty-two “wall papers” and
two resident correspondents whose position in the Bolshevik hierarchy is
second or third, who live in houses as large as those occupied by the
local Bishops, and who hold in the Bolshevik Community the same position
as the Bishops held in the Pravoslavny Community. This is not a fanciful
comparison. Lenin has decided, with the same cold, matter-of-fact, but
inflexible determination which he has shown in all the other tremendous
changes that he has decreed, that his newspaper correspondents shall
exercise all that influence over public opinion which has hitherto
been the monopoly of the Church; and Trotsky speaks calmly of having
replaced the Army Chaplains by political Commissars, who will appeal to
the emotions of the soldiers exactly as the Chaplains used to do. At
the Red Front in Siberia I attended military revival meetings presided
over by military Commissars, who employed all the arts of the Methodist
preacher in order to arouse the fanaticism of the soldiery. By wild
harangues and by making the “congregation” join in the singing of fierce
revolutionary songs, those Commissars worked the troops up to a state of
excitement such as I have only seen paralleled in Stamboul and Belfast.
The old _régime_ used to do the same by means of vodka and religion; and
I remember that, during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian War Office
distributed among the soldiers thousands of pictures representing a
priest who, with his crucifix held aloft, was alleged to have headed a
charge against the heathen Japanese.
Owing to its flatness, Russia is an ideal place for the use of wireless,
which is being very extensively used even now for journalistic purposes,
much more extensively than it is used in England; and the Bolsheviks look
forward to a time when its use for such purposes will be a million times
greater than it is at present, and when the great establishment in the
Lubyanka will be like a vast megaphone dictating policies and opinions,
and then hearing the innumerable echoes of its own voice come back to it
from the remotest confines of Russia. It is difficult to exaggerate the
power which the Soviet Government will thus acquire for the manufacture
of public opinion, and for the education, on utterly wrong lines, of
a plastic people still in its infancy. The central laboratory wherein
all domestic and foreign news is manipulated with the one main object
of helping Bolshevism, is under the direct control of the Communist
Executive Committee at the Hôtel Métropole, and, in fact, the more
important news, foreign and domestic, goes to the Hôtel Métropole first,
and is sometimes manipulated there before being sent to the offices of
the Rosta. The position is much the same as if all the more important
news reaching England or coming from various parts of the British
Isles went first to Downing Street, and was “touched up” by a board of
Ministerial Secretaries under the direct supervision of the Cabinet
before being sent to a college of tame editors housed in the Hotel Cecil.
If Mr. Lloyd George dropped in occasionally to add a flashing phrase
or a striking metaphor to the concoction before it was served out, the
parallel would be complete, for that is what Trotsky does.
For a large area round Moscow the telephone is used, and wireless
telephony will be employed as soon as possible. The great map in the
Kremlin exhibition indicated where the ordinary telegraph lines and even
mounted messengers are employed to carry the news to remote villages and
factories. Kerzhentsev is a convinced Communist and an indefatigable
editor; his guide-book to Communist literature and his organization
of the Rosta display all the minute scientific care of a Darwin or
a Mechnikov. Some of his assistants are not so satisfied with their
servitude, and, in fact, they would like to get into a freer atmosphere;
but, under present conditions, they have as little chance of getting away
as a cog-wheel in a Pittsburg factory has of walking down the street.
I once spoke to an intelligent Commissar of this pitiless repression
of human individuality, but he retorted that the same thing went on in
Western Europe. “Have you not in England,” he asked, “able journalists
of Radical views who are compelled by the pressure of hard facts to
work for Conservative newspapers?” This Commissar had spent most of his
life abroad, and knew the French Press from the inside. What he told me
of the corruption in the French Press was astonishing and not untrue;
Trotsky has a similar tale to tell of the American Press. Both of them
are convinced that, outside Russia, Capitalism exercises indirectly as
tremendous a power over the Press as Socialism exercises in Moscow.
“This is no time for sloppy sentimentality,” they said. “We had better
face facts and take our measures accordingly.” On this point Trotsky
spoke, I must admit, with a certain amount of authority, for he, with
his great organizing and journalistic ability, might easily have joined
the Associated Press or some of the great New York papers, if only he
had consented to moderate his Socialist enthusiasms. Instead of that, he
worked for obscure revolutionary organs which paid him little or nothing,
and he always had the police on his track, moving him on from one country
to another.
Most of the best Russian journalists are still abroad, but lack of money
will probably induce them to return, as the diplomatists and the officers
are returning; and when they do come back, they will be fitted into the
great Press Machine of the Reds. That Machine is supplemented by theatres
and concerts, and works in harmony with the Commissariat of Education
and with the Propaganda department. It even caters for the illiterate
by means of cinemas and posters; and its agents are expected to furnish
periodically most careful, statistical reports of their activities. The
specimens of these reports exhibited in the Kremlin Exhibition could not
be surpassed in accuracy and painstakingness by agents of the great Steel
Trust of America. They were all facts and figures; no rhetoric whatever.
Those facts and figures were controlled from other sources, and there was
short shrift for a correspondent who did not “deliver the goods.” The
chiefs of the Rosta weighed the idealism and energy of their subordinates
with a detachment which could not be excelled by the President of a
Chicago Meat-Packing Company.
The conception, organization, and management of the Rosta is very
good—from a technical point of view. The pooling of all journalistic
talent under Government supervision enables the smallest papers in remote
parts of Russia to publish excellent articles and reviews, to use catchy
headings, and to issue striking posters. Trotsky, himself a journalist,
is so enamoured of this scheme that he is going to make all Russian
journalists wear a special uniform, probably with a pair of crossed pens
as the badge, so as to emphasize the fact that they are as much agents
of the Soviet Government as the Grenadier Guards are of the British
Government.
The technical experts at the head of the wireless service are extremely
able men. They claim to have invented a new receiver, in advance of
anything used elsewhere in the world, and they say that they can alter
the pitch (or whatever the technical expression is) to take any kind of
message. They receive messages at Tver and send messages from Moscow, and
are now installing in Moscow a transmitter much more powerful than the
one at present in use.
In some respects the Rosta overdoes its propaganda. It so frequently
reports revolutions abroad, that people have come to disbelieve it, even
when it tells the truth. A prominent Bolshevik once asked me if there
was any truth in the reports of demonstrations outside the War Office in
Whitehall by soldiers wanting to be demobilized. He had been doubtful
of it owing to the false reports of the same kind, which had appeared
so often in the Communist Press that there is a common humorous saying
in Moscow to the effect that “We must have a revolution reported from
abroad at least once a day.”
But though the Commissars do not always believe their own Propaganda,
they nevertheless continue it at the same high pitch for the sake of less
enlightened “comrades”; and their policy is justified, for the rank and
file swallow it all. On my once telling an educated Bolshevik workman
that Krassin was going to England, he said: “Then England has gone Red.”
To him our loss of India, Egypt, and Ireland were accomplished facts.
He believed that a Soviet was sitting at No. 10 Downing Street, that
an English Lenin had replaced Mr. Lloyd George and an English Trotsky
had replaced Mr. Churchill. The tremendous events of the last three
years in Russia, the constant reiterations of the Bolshevik Propaganda,
had rendered these events not only credible, but even trifling and
commonplace.