Vol. I

THE TRUTH ABOUT SOVIET RUSSIA,

By M. Philips Price
RUSSIAN RAW MATERIALS AND
AMERICAN BUSINESS
"NATIONALIZATION OF WOMEN"
THE FRENCH IN RUSSIA

SOVIET RADIOGRAMS

No. 9

PACE

PAGE

T the end of the eighteenth century the French

AT

people after two hundred years of embittered struggle threw off the tyranny of a feudal aristocracy. During this struggle they were surrounded by armed forces of a coalition of European kings, who had invaded France to subject her people to that slavery from which they had just freed themselves. Prussian peasants shed their blood in the Argonnes that Royalty might once more oppress the French people. British seamen died at Toulon that feudal seigneurs might rule again at Versailles. Looking back on these times today we recognize that the rôle of the English and German governments during the French Revolution was not a creditable one.

A little over a century has passed. Mediaevalism has given way to modern bourgeoisdom; the Divine Right of Kings to the Divine Right of Mammon. Russia, which has never been touched by the purging fire of the French Revolution, has groaned under a three-fold tyranny-a theocratic Tsarism, the relic of her proximity to Asia; an agrarian feudalism, which had escaped the European conflagration of last century; a middle class, grown up under the influence of Western industrialism, but demoralized and corrupted by its two companions. At the beginning of this century, the governing power in Russia rested on these three rotten pillars-two of them, decaying relics of a bygone age; the third an abortion of modern bourgeoisdom. It could not last long, but was bound to collapse from its own internal weakness. How did the governments of England, France and Germany treat the new Russia, which, phoenix-like, rose from the ruins of the old? History will prove that they treated the new Russia as shamefully as the governments of England and

Prussia treated the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century.

The Russian Revolution, like every great popular movement was set in motion by vast, elemental, anarchic forces, which had been pent up throughout the ages and like a lava-flow burst the overlying crust of convention, unreality and insincerity. Everyone was discontented with Tsarism. The war caused untold miseries. Famine, for which the Bolsheviks are accused of being the authors, was already raging in the autumn of 1916, and got steadily worse under Kerensky, as the war, like a great pump, sucked the life blood out of the country's industries. I know from my own observation as a war correspondent that after the summer of 1916, the Russian army was no longer fit for the offensive, owing to the impossibility in an economically undeveloped. country of feeding and supporting fifteen million soldiers. By the winters of 1915-16 and 1916-17, when no one in Russia but the intellectuals had heard of the Bolsheviks, the principal towns of central Russia were filled with deserters. One of the Tsars retired diplomats even admitted in the columns of the "Novaya Zhizn," in July, 1917, that the Russian Revolution was nothing more than a mass uprising against the war. But it was something besides.

The working classes of the Russian towns used to live in conditions of want and misery probably without parallel in Europe. They were forced to work such long hours that they often dropped of fatigue. They were systematically underfed. The factories where they worked were simply spy-dens. Nor was the peasant's lot any better. Half the land of Russia belonged to the landlords, the Church and the Imperial family, and that was the best half. On

it the peasants had to work like serfs. The rest of the land, much of it forest and swamp, was left to them to get what they could out if it. The corn produced on the good land (a large percentage of the cereal production of Russia) was systematically exported under the bounty system to pay for Tsarist warships and armaments, while the peasants in the villages nearby were often starving. Add to this the miseries of the three years of war and it is not difficult to see why, as soon as the rumor got about that over the length and breadth of the gigantic plain that "little father Tsar" was no more, that policemen had been locked up by the workmen in Petrograd, that Cossacks had gone over to the masses, that the spell-binding discipline, born of fear, vanished. Everywhere throughout the land in those days squads of soldiers got together to talk things over. Groups of workmen hung about the factory shops and peasants crowded round the village commune building. The same word was on everyone's lips. "What next?" These thousands of informal meetings that took place from the Baltic provinces to the Pacific coast, from the Arctic circle to the oases of Turkestan, were not summoned by anyone. They were the creation of the free spirit of man, which had just burst the bonds of an archaic, now useless form of society. They were the first rude instruments, now anarchic, soon to be organized, which were to build the new order of society. They were in fact the embryo Soviets.

For the new social order the first necessity was to create a new discipline. The informal gatherings of workmen, soldiers and peasants which were called Soviets (the Russian name for a Council) had now this task before them. In Petrograd on the second day of the March revolution the garrison soldiers issued an order that there was to be no more saluting officers, that no order was to be obeyed unless it was countersigned by the Soldiers' Soviet. Inasmuch as the bulk of the officers and all the generals were known to be Monarchists or at the best only supporters of a bourgeois republic the necessary measures had to be taken to protect the Workers' Revolution. "What is the meaning of this war with Germany?" began to come from a thousand throats. "Is there no means of stopping it by appealing to the German soldiers directly," they argued. Surely a natural and obvious, if somewhat unconventional thing for war weary soldiers to do. Soldiers using Soviets to fraternize with people whom they no longer wished to fight, became now a common phenomenon. No one had heard of Bolshevism in these days.

In the factories, meetings were held and committees elected. The latter were to see to it that wages kept pace with the cost of living. They were to look into the proprietors' books and see how much war profit was being made and lop off enough to fill up that ever narrowing margin between weekly wages and weekly expenses. And was the peasant with his dessyatine of land, on which he had to starve, going to allow the rich black earth near by

to fill the barns of the "baryn"? Here too the spell was broken, the "Zemsky Nachalnik" (chief of the county administration) was sitting in the local jail, whither he was used to send others. The fruits of that seigneur land were to go to the peasants' barns that year. And they went-somewhat anarchically it is true, and not without heartburnings as to how much should go to each peasant.

By the summer of 1917, the class which considered itself the rightful successors to the Tsarist heritage-the bourgeoisie, manufacturers, and warprofit parvenus-began to recover from the shock of this revolution, which had gone so far past what they considered respectable. Girondin-like, they began to organize resistance to "anarchy," to insist on discipline in the army, to demand that every citizen of the republic should carry out his patriotic duty. Alas! what duty? To shoot at and be shot at by German workmen in order that Russian warprofit parvenus should dominate at Constantinople and French bankers exploit the Alsace-Lorraine iron mines! No, the time for this had gone by. The spell had been broken. The people now must know the reason why they were to die. But the Russian bourgeoisie could not read the signs of the times. The Mene-Tekel hand was writing on the wall, but they could not see it. Desperate, they organized the Korniloff rebellion, which only aggravated the strife. This rebellion first showed the real power of the Soviets. The soldiers' committees put their men into the field telegraphs, they had their comrades on the railways. No message of the counter-revolution passed. Their messages for help and instructions flew all over Russia. The counter-revolution vanished, but the war did not. Winter was coming down. The soldiers came to the Soviet offices and said: "start negotiations with the Germans for a general peace; we shall stay in the trenches till the first snows and after that we go home with our rifles and divide up the landlords' land." No, it was not Bolsheviks who said this; Lenin at the time was in hiding and accused by the very soldiers who were saying this of being a German spy. Lenin's friends, who had control of most of the soldiers' Soviets, by September, 1917, were trying to calm these warweary soldiers and indeed, when they came into power in October, they exhorted them to remain in the trenches and not anarchically to demobilize and turn Russia into a chaos. A mighty power-the will to international solidarity, had laid hold of the psychology of the Russian masses. That power was manifesting itself in disorderly, anarchic ways, because it was crude, elemental, and sprung from the masses themselves. If the Bolsheviks had not put themselves at the head of that movement, some other unknown group would have done so and have become world famous. The Bolsheviks, finding the movement there, led and directed it into orderly channels, and seeing the Soldiers' Soviets, those informal bodies, which had sprung up spontaneously in the first days of the Revolution, used them as the channels through which their will could be expressed to the outer world.

All through the summer of 1917, Petrograd and Moscow workmen tried to better their conditions through their own elected factory or shop stewards' committees. But every step they took to control the actions of the employers was met by countermeasures of sabotage and often of open resistance by "white guards," hired by the employers to defend the "sacred rights of property." Heads of the shop stewards' committees were arrested and sent off to the army, raw materials hidden and the men locked out on the plea of no work to be done. The workers replied by organizing Red Guards, seizing the factories and trying to run themselves without a staff and without technical knowledge. Chaos increased. One group of workmen often struggled with another group in the attempt to get hold of the much needed raw materials. Meanwhile, famine became worse and worse and the Workers' Soviets were in danger of turning into committees for grabbing whatever they could get for their own members. Then the Bolsheviks came along, and in October, when they came into power to control the Soviets, gave the latter political as well as economic power, as an organized proletarian mass.

And so with the peasants. During the summer of 1917, the landlords and their agents among the war-profiteer parvenus organized a resistance to the peasant land committees. Peasant elders were arrested and thrown into prison, some were even shot. The peasants replied by sacking the landlords' mansions. Anarchy was raging in the provinces long before the Bolsheviks came into power in October. The latter, restraining the righteous indignation of the peasants, declared their informal committees, the first fruits in the villages of the March Revolution, to be the legal authority, possessing the right to take the landlords land and work it in the interests of the whole community. Long and difficult has been the struggle of the Bolsheviks with the disorderly forces among the Russian peasantry. The latter, divided into rich and poor, struggled among themselves for the landlords' land, split up into two contending factions-one, of small proprietors and rich speculators, the other of laborers or those peasants who hire no labor. The latter group became the "committees of the poorer peasantry," or the reconstituted rural Soviets, whose duty it became to stop the disorderly scramble for land and to create the new communal system of land tenure. Thus the seed sown in the soil of anarchic revolt germinated into the young shoot, which fed in the atmosphere of order and discipline.

The Struggle With Foreign Imperialism

The regeneration of Russia could only begin when once the Soviets had completed their development and come to the zenith of their political power. After October, 1917, it seemed that order, through the Soviets would prevail over the chaos bred in the first days of the March Revolution. For the working classes, schooling themselves in their factory and village committees, were fighting famine and

struggling to raise production. But the war was still nominally going on with the Prussian war lords. The country was open to any tyrant that chose to walk in. The soldiers had nearly all gone from the front by Christmas, 1917. The Bolshevik leaders of the Soviets had now the most terrific task before them. They had to secure some sort of peace in order to give the ruined and exhausted land a breathing space and the workers a chance to repair the damage of the war.

There will probably be nothing more tragic in history than the picture of Russia struggling with the German war-lords and deserted by the Allies. Not possessing any material resources to enforce the justice of his cause, Trotsky relied upon the conscience and sense of justice of the Western world. This was the time when the Allies, if they had known the day of their visitation, if they had understood what was the driving force of the true Russia, would have declared their peace program and, sustaining Trotsky, would have exposed to the world the cynical intrigues of the Prussian militarists. The Allied governments did not do this because they could not. They did not dare face their people and tell them that they had plans of conquest. The moment for uniting the moral front of the Allies with that of revolutionary Russia passed. It never came again.

Revolutionary Russia was thus left alone in the world to face the German war-lords. Two courses were open to it. It could either play the idealist and decline to accept any peace which did not embody its principles in toto; or it could pursue RealPolitik and, estimating all the forces which were making for the internal breakup of their enemies, could make an agreement with them as a temporary expedient. In the days preceeding the signing of the Brest-Litovsk peace, two very fundamental human impulses were struggling together inside the Russian Revolution. The one was altruistic, ready for self-sacrifice, Brunnhilda-like, upon the flaming pyre of an idea. The other was wise and calculating, prepared to save what could be saved now in order to gain the surer in the end. The struggle between these two impulses, old as the human race itself, was reflected in the controversy between those among the Russian revolutionaries, who would sign the Brest-Litovsk peace and those who would not. The left socialist-revolutionaries and the anarchists in Russia, like artists, lived only for their ideals, which they would have realized at once or else would perish. The greater part of the Bolsheviks, and the hungry masses following Lenin, lived not only for their ideals but for the means to realize them. The former, rather than sign the Brest-Litovsk peace, renounced all claim to participation in the government and resorted to acts of individual terror in the hopes of striking fear into the breasts of the tyrants. The latter recoiled, pour mieux sauter, fostered their forces till the day came when they knew they could strike.

The Prussian warlords, not because they wanted to, but because they had to, gave a breathing space

to the Russian Revolution. For they were engaged in playing their last card in a terrific onslaught on France. Revolutionary Russia is accused of being responsible for this onslaught, but I submit that its tactics did more than anything else to break the power of Prussian militarism. The very fact that the politically non-conscious elements of the German people got a taste of peace on the East front, broke their will to war. "If we can have peace with Russia," their minds instinctively argued, "why can we not have it also with the Allies." But month after month went by and they began to see that the German army must either conquer the world or else make a compromise peace. They knew they could not do the former, because of America; their own warloards would not let them do the latter. But the example of the peace with Russia was before them, and seeing it, their spirit of rebellion against the war rose ever stronger. The German towns began to fill with deserters, workers struck, discipline collapsed, and with it the army. And the

Russian revolutionaries knew how to make use of this new psychology in the German people's mind. The peace on the East front was made use of to flood the Ukraine with Bolshevik agents, who spread revolutionary literature broadcast and who, within a few months, had turned the Kaiser's glorious "Heer im Osten" into a little better than a hybrid between a rabble and a revolutionary committee. M. Joffe, while playing at diplomacy with the Kaiser's Ministers, was distributing pamphlets right and left, calling upon the German proletariat to overthrow their tyrants. The fear and hatred in which the propertied classes of Germany hold Bolshevik Russia can be seen by the fact that at the moment of writing, Russian Bolsheviks are now pining in German prisons, are hunted like hares, and murdered by the armed hooligans of the Ebert-Scheidemann-Noske government of "socialist" Germany. I ask an unprejudiced obserber: Does this look as if the Bolsheviks are the agents of German Imperialism? (To be Continued)

PROOF

ROOF that the leading American firms desire to sell their wares to Soviet Russia was given in a previous issue of this magazine. Extracts from typical letters from the largest concerns in the country showed that American business men are ready and willing to meet to the limit of their capacity the urgent need in Russia for goods of foreign manufacture. Only the refusal of the United States Government to allow exports to Russia holds back the meeting of these powerful human and economic forces-Russia's need and America's desire.

But these are not the only forces that beat upon the walls of the Russian blockade.

Just as there is a banked-up reservoir of American manufactured goods ready to find its level in Russia's shortage, so there is a reservoir of surplus raw materials in Russia straining to find its level in the demands of the United States. Just as the files of the Commercial Department reflect this situation in the desire of American business men to send their goods to Russia, so also do they show that American firms are eager to secure the vast supplies of raw materials which the Soviet Government as sole exporter for the Russian people has now on hand for distribution in foreign parts.

Russia has always had a trade balance in her favor. That is to say, she has exported to other countries more than she has imported from them. Russian trade has been an exchange of raw materials for manufactured products with the balance distinctly in her favor. Russia exceeds any other country in the world in the production of flax, rye, oats, hemp, barley, platinum, and timber. She has exported vast quantities of these commodities as well as other materials produced in Russia on a large scale, such as hides, dairy products, bristles, licorice, sugar, wheat and other goods.

Previous to the war Germany controlled 33 per cent of all exports from Russia. A large proportion of these exports were re-exported from Germany to other countries, Germany acting as broker or middleman. German brokers with the aid of the Imperial Bank were, before the war, in a strategic position to finance Russian trade transactions. Now that the war is over, German interests are making strenuous efforts to resume their control of Russian trade.

The nationalization of foreign trade by the Soviet Government has, however, enabled Russia to finance her trade in direct negotiations with buyers and sellers in other countries. German competition and the increased facilities for direct relations with Russia are an added stimulus to American trade at the present time.

In spite of the exhaustion due to the world war and to the utter disorganization of economic life, which the Soviet régime inherited from the Czar and Kerensky, and from the vast dislocation of revolutionary change, the Soviet government in behalf of the Russian masses has accumulated large stores of these raw materials. They are piling up in Russian ports in increasing rates as the reconstruction of the country's economic machines proceeds and the Allied blockade keeps back their normal flow in export trade.

An official wireless dispatch in the latter part of May from the Soviet Government stated that large stocks of merchandise were then ready for exportation. Included amongst these, the dispatch stated, were over 31⁄2 million poods (approximately 56,250 tons) of flax, hemp and other merchandise.

The following excerpts from the Soviet Bureau's files show the kind of demand among American business men for Russian raw materials.

As 97% of the world's output of platinum is produced in Russia, American firms are especially anxious to buy this commodity from the Soviet Government, the sole Russian exporter. A leading manufacturing and importing chemical concern with headquarters in New York and branches in all the largest cities, writes as follows:

"...... We are purchasers at all times of platinum and its allied metals.....

"If you have anything to offer in the line of platinum or iridium, we should be pleased to know what quantities you have and what prices. could be made on arrival in New York.....

"If we can give you any further information regarding this matter, we will be only too pleased to reply to any communication you may address to us."

Another firm interested in platinum writes:

"...... As one of the two or three largest purchasers of platinum in this country, we are interested in buying Russian platinum......

"We purchase many thousands of ounces of platinum. The quantity we would be interested in importing at present depends upon the rate of delivery, price and other conditions.

"We are very much interested in this matter and await your reply to this letter with much interest."

There are few articles in general use in the United States, which have risen so enormously in price during the past few years as all kinds of brushes: toilet, painters' and artists' particularly. The reason we pay 60 cents now for a tooth brush we paid 25 cents for a few years ago is, in part, the Allied blockade of Soviet Russia. Russia has been the chief source of supply for American brush manufacturers. The closing of trade has been one cause for these irritating price increases. The manufacturer, on the other hand, finds his business curtailed by the shortage. He is, therefore, anxious to trade with Soviet Russia. Witness the following from a large trading corporation in New York City:

“......As we are importers of Russian and Chinese products, we would be pleased to hear from you in regard to bristles.

"If you have samples of same please send them to us, together with quotations, terms, and quantities."

Another firm dealing in badger hair, used in soft brushes of all kinds, writes:

"I use about 50,000 Russian Badger Skins annually. I believe that the way to get them now is to buy them directly from the present Russian Government. Will you kindly advise me as to what you can do for me?"

A side light on the possibility of eliminating Germany from her middleman's control of Russian trade is given in the following excerpt. It is taken from a letter to the Bureau from a leading Philadelphia dealer in hair and wool for American manufacturers:

"We bought Russian products very extensively before the war through German houses and we will no doubt be able to handle these commodities again providing they are properly

stock used to be very poorly packed, in loose bags of various sizes, but it would be much more advantageous both to the shipper and to ourselves if they could be packed in compressed bales weighing possibly 500 lbs. We could handle these stocks in large quantities if the qualities and prices are right."

High prices for shoes and leather goods have been the bane of every American these past years. Shortage of hides and skins has contributed to this result. The influx of raw material from Russia, would have a relieving effect upon practically everyone in the country if sufficient quantities were shipped. Dealers in hides and skins, as well as leather manufacturers, are eager to increase their business by taking advantage of this trade with Soviet Russia.

The following is an excerpt from a typical letter received only a few days ago by the Commercial Department of the Soviet Bureau, from a prominent New York firm:

..... We are interested in hides and skins of all description in any quantity offered. . . . .

"We have handled very large quantities of this merchandise before. We had before the war our own house in Riga, and were represented in a great many places in Russia. We were considered one of the largest purchasers of Russian raw hides and skins.

"We shall be very glad to confer with you personally if anything further could be done in the matter."

An Indiana concern writes:

"We are in the market for the goods that you offer, for any quantity of hides that you can send us. We can buy any quantity that can be delivered to us, also goatskins, or any quantity of wool."

A large Boston firm says:

"..... We would be interested in hemp, flax, hides, skins, bristles and wool.

"We would be prepared to handle these materials in as large quantities as they could be secured......

"We would want to take acceptance of delivery in this country.

"We would require samples with full details as to quantities, deliveries, and lowest prices. Samples must be thoroughly representative." A San Francisco concern of international traders with world-wide connections writes: