1. There is a frankly avowed atheism, materialism and anti-religious policy of the individual members of the Communist Party, despite the measure of liberty of conscience and religious toleration which the government officially has allowed to the Church. We appreciate the deep, mystical religious consciousness of the Russian people, their unique capacity for suffering and sacrifice, and the sublime elements of worth in the Orthodox Church once it is reformed. But when it is remembered how some of Russia's present leaders suffered at the hands of the Church as well as of the State, and what a caricature of religion was presented to them in the superstition, hypocrisy and corruption typified by such men as Rasputin, their rejection of the religion which they knew is not so much to be wondered at as their measure of toleration. They have, however, been merciless to those whom they believed were guilty of counter-revolutionary plotting and meddling in politics. 2. There is the Orthodox Marxian policy of the class war and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They believe that other countries have a veiled dictatorship of the privileged one-tenth, while they claim a frank dictatorship on behalf of the hitherto unprivileged nine-tenths who constitute the working masses. They claim that this dictatorship is temporary, and that once it has been fully established by a minority on behalf of the majority, it will automatically terminate all class distinctions, abolish itself and take in the whole united communal society. But the love of power may prove an evil and a tyranny as great as the love of money which they decry. There is, however, some evidence and promise of a lessening of this dictatorship. 3. There is a fundamental denial of liberty to all who oppose the government, similar to that of the old régime. Russia has always had a strong, stern, centralized, auto cratic government. As we compare Russia under the Bolsheviks and under the Czar as we saw it a decade ago, the present government appears to be far better than that of the old system. But there is little room for the expression of public opinion, no freedom of the press, and no liberty for voting or acting on economic, social or religious issues in opposition to the policy of the present government. For the present at least they frankly profess dictatorship rather than democracy. The priceless possession of the human spirit of liberty, after a thousand years of struggle, has been abandoned, at least for the time being. 4. There is a continued bureaucracy, compulsion and state control of life, often similar to that of the old régime, that does not allow the same free play for independence and individual initiative found in other countries. 5. There is an evident lowering of standards in higher education, especially in the universities. Russia has a remarkable plan for primary, practical and technical education, though they lack means as yet adequately to carry it out. But there has been a frank suppression of idealistic teaching in philosophy, theology and cultural studies; a suppression of academic freedom, and a dilution of the universities in the interest of practical, utilitarian education for the working classes, at the expense of the former cultural education for the few. There is a whole Russian university in Berlin composed largely of professors and students who were banished for their idealism or who fled from the Terror. 6. There is a lowering of moral and spiritual standards in some areas of life, chiefly as the result of the inherited corruption of the Czarist régime, the pressure of poverty, and a materialistic and atheistic interpretation of life. As a result of this situation, liberty, religion and idealism will have to fight for their very life in Russia during this generation as in no other country in the world. There is a remarkable discipline in the Communist Party which is today guiding the destinies of the 132,000,000 people of Russia. Of the body politic, the directing brain and nervous system may be compared to the Communist Party of 450,000; the body and hands are the workers in organized trade unions which they claim number nearly 5,000,000; the ponderous limbs are the more than 110,000,000 peasants who constitute 85 per cent of the population. The rest are considered vestigial survivals like the appendix which once had a functional use. The government is making a tremendous fight against graft and bribery, under the inherited traditions of the old régime of abysmal corruption. Conditions are, however, still very bad. Nevertheless, despite these failings Russia constitutes an economic and industrial challenge, wherever ruthless capitalism exists in the world. In referring to "ruthless capitalism" we fully recognize the legitimate and necessary accumulation of capital without which modern industry cannot be conducted. Throughout this book what we mean by ruthless capitalism is the excessive concentration of power and privilege as a result of vast wealth in the hands of a few; monopoly of natural resources for private gain at the expense of public welfare; autocratic control of industry; production for individual profit and power rather than for social use and service, with consequent extravagant luxury for some while many live in poverty and want. We do not believe that State Capitalism, State Socialism or Military Communism furnish any panacea for the evils of our present system. While we wish to be fair and to do justice to any elements of truth in this and every other system, we do not believe in the Bolshevik theory of life for the reasons already stated-its anti-religious policy, its class war and dictatorship, its fundamental denial of liberty, the state control of life, the lowering of standards in higher education and the lowering of moral and spiritual ideals. The fundamental instincts of human nature, hunger and love, both in the material and spiritual realm, cannot be crushed and conquered either by capitalism or Communism. Both systems in their worst applications have outraged the free spirit of man. But man survived the enthroning of a painted Goddess of Reason in the enduring cathedral of Notre Dame, the red terror of the Guillotine, and the militarism and sordid vanity of the coarse Corsican butcher who made a caricature of the French Revolution. France still bears the scars of the evils of that period. Yet the great ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity lived on in a freer Europe despite the wild license and debasing mixture of good and evil in the movement. We do not condone the evils of either the French or Russian revolutions, but we should appreciate the full significance of each. We shall reserve final criticism of the Bolshevik régime until the closing chapter, endeavoring in this only to state the facts in the case impartially and to describe industrial conditions as we found them. The significance of Russia is enhanced by its very mass and magnitude. Midway between East and West, the Russian Empire at the opening of the war contained more than one-seventh of the land surface of the globe and about oneninth of its population.1 Stretching for over six thousand miles across Asia and Europe, it was approximately twice the size of all the rest of Europe. Siberia alone with its 1915 8,417,118 1923 8,166,130 Area in Square Miles. Population (estimated).. 182,182,600 131,546,045 Statesman's Year Book, 1923, p. 1278. Losses were in Poland, Esthonia, vast resources has an area one and a half times that of the United States, and if peopled with the same density of population as Belgium, would hold almost twice the present population of the world. When a state with such resources and with the largest white population in the world tries the boldest social experiment in all history, it must be reckoned with. At least we shall not solve the problem by telling lies about the present government such as the ridiculous statement that all women had been nationalized, or other baseless propaganda, furnished by members of the old order dispossessed of their privileges under the Czar, or other interested parties, determined that a workingman's government should not succeed. Further, the significance of the present movement in Russia can only be adequately understood in the light of its past history. Russia has been marked for suffering for a thousand years. It has been the land of autocracy and revolution. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries the land was laid waste by eighty-three civil wars. For the next two centuries (1238-1467 A. D.) it was swept by invasion under the galling Tartar or Mongol domination; it was rent by ninety internal conflicts and more than a hundred and fifty foreign wars. Then for five centuries Russia suffered under the autocracy of the Czars. Ivan the Terrible began a reign of terror which lasted for twenty-five years. Before the last feeble Czar, Nicholas II, came to the throne in 1894, for two decades an average of some twenty thousand victims a year had been sent to Siberia. The government of the last Czar had banished 180,000 political exiles. We stood in Petrograd in the dark fortress of Peter and Paul between the tombs of the dead Czars on the one hand, and the cells of their former political prisoners on the other. For centuries the finest spirits in Russia had |