PROSPEROUS IRKUTSK REDUCED BY RULE OF REDS

By Hector Boon.

At Irkutsk we found a small Japanese outpost under the command of a junior officer who, although we presented our papers signed by the Japanese Chief of Staff in Chita, declined to allow us to proceed until he had first communicated with the staff. Eventually we were permitted to go on, and reached the advanced Red position at 1 P. M. We called upon the military commandant, who was careful to impress upon us that we were not in Soviet territory but in that of the Far Eastern Republic, at that time called the Buffer State. We were quite willing to take his word for it, but we noticed with amusement that the entire population was sporting hastily improvised red stars and rosettes. In the course of the afternoon our wagons were attached to the post train which was already running daily between Hilok and Irkutsk.

We arrived at Verkni-Udinsk at 11 A. M. the next day and the Commissar Krassnochokoff’s aide-de-camp met me at the station with a motor car and conducted me to the Commissar’s house. I found Krassnochokoff, who had spent many years in America as the head of a Jewish orphanage in Chicago, living in a small room modestly furnished with a deal table, a few chairs and a truckle bed. He made a very pleasant impression upon me.

When, however, he asked questions concerning the conditions in Chita and the intentions of the Japanese, I had to decline to answer them. He was at some pains to impress upon me that the Bolsheviki I had known in 1917 and 1918 had changed decidedly for the better since that time. He went on to say that he realized, however, there was still a strong disinclination on the part of the Entente and America to have trade relations with the Far Eastern republic, and he therefore felt that the establishment of the Far Eastern Republic, extending from Verkni-Udinsk to Vladivostok, would provide a medium for trading with the Soviet. He assured me that there would be no confiscation or requisitioning of private property and that the communistic system would not be indulged in.

Buffer State Only a Fiction; Is Part of Soviet Russia

Krassnochokoff, who is certainly a man of some ability, spoke of his plans in a sincere and convincing manner, and I really think that at that time he believed the scheme would be carried through just as he outlined it to me. However, I must admit I was sceptical.

I had seen, drawn up in the station, the Bolshevik propaganda train, in charge of Dvornik, who had been employed as an interpreter by the American Railroad Corps until he was imprisoned by the Kolchak Government for propagating Bolshevism. It did not augur well for a truly democratic state. Subsequent events have shown that my estimate of the situation was correct. The buffer state exists only in name. It is part of Soviet Russia, administered by Moscow on the communist system. The population is embittered, being half starved. All industry has died and so have men and women at the hands of firing squads, because they unwisely expressed their disapproval of commissar rule.

Krassnochokoff was in Moscow this summer. His efforts to persuade Lenine and company to moderate their policy in the Far Eastern Republic met with fierce disapproval, and for some weeks he walked on thin ice. The butcher Dzherjinsky, of the extraordinary commission, was thirsting for his blood, but he weathered the storm and eventually returned to his job at Verkni-Udinsk.

We left that night for Irkutsk. I was most anxious to get there. I wanted to see our prisoners and get into touch with uncamouflaged Bolsheviks. I hoped to find the latter as Krassnochokoff had described them. The atrocities committed by the whites in Siberia had alienated all my sympathies for them. I was above all else anxious to see whether the wild beasts I had known in 1917 and 1918 had become tame.

I was at this time predisposed in favor of opening up trade relations with the Soviet power, feeling that this would do much toward solving the Russian problem. These were my feelings and my hopes on the eve of my entry into “Lenine’s Paradise” in April. I left that “Paradise” in October determined to do everything in my power to dissuade the outside world from having any dealings whatsoever with the Bolsheviki. They were scoundrels in 1917—they are even greater scoundrels to-day.

We received a great welcome from Major Vining and his six officers and seven men when we arrived in Irkutsk at 3 o’clock the following afternoon. We found that they had with them a party of British civilians who had been captured in Krasnoyarsk. These were evacuated by Carthew. We found that the whole party had been through trying times. Some of them had been dangerously ill with typhus, and all of them looked worn and undernourished. They told us that the sight of the Union Jack flying from our car as we rolled into the station was one which made them thrill with pride. Months later, when in Moscow, I was suffering severely from want of food and my position seemed desperate. I realized just what the sight of that flag must have meant to them.

The day of our arrival in Irkutsk was a “prasnik” or church holiday, and it was therefore impossible to call on the President of the Revolutionary Committee until the morrow.

The town, even making allowance for the fact that it was a holiday, looked dead. All the shops had been closed and their contents removed. Many of the windows on the main street had been perforated by bullets, and over everything there hung that air of gloom so indissolubly associated in my mind with Bolshevism.

I had visited Irkutsk, several times during the Kolchak regime, when it was a thriving trading centre, and now I found it hard to realize that this red-beflagged, poster-besmirched conglomeration of buildings could constitute the same town. The prosperous, well dressed, happy looking townspeople of the past had been replaced by drab and dirty workpeople, peasants and soldiers, all liberally bedecked with red stars. I discovered later that all those who wore red stars were by no means Bolsheviks; in fact, the great majority of them were “radishes,” or red outside and white within, as the Russian phrase goes. With the Reds in power it is advisable to present at least a red exterior.

Wherever one went on the main or side streets, one met lavish displays of gaudy posters; some of an educational character, others blatantly lewd. The majority had for their object the stirring up of class hatred.

Hotels Taken by Bolsheviki.

We found that all the hotels had been taken over by the Bolsheviki for the housing of Soviet officials and their families. The restaurants had either been closed or converted into Soviet dining rooms for Soviet employees, where meals of exceedingly poor quality and consisting mainly of cabbage soup, without meat, and “kasha” (millet). These meals were served at nominal prices on production of the inevitable card.

On the following day I called on Jansen, the President of the Revolutionary Committee. He gave me a very cordial welcome and expressed himself as most anxious to enter into trading relations with American firms. He arranged a meeting with the heads of the various Government departments. This meeting, which took place on the following day, was the forerunner of a great many conferences which extended over a period of nearly two months, and which brought me into close touch with the leaders of the Soviet Government in the town, and afforded me an excellent opportunity of studying their characters and their methods.

I found Jansen, at all times a reasonable, moderate and above all humane man. He had a pretty good grasp of his duties and executed them with efficiency and despatch. He was always ready to render me assistance, and in all my personal relations with him I found him straightforward and reliable.

Of the other leaders, Saxs, a nervous, highly strung little Jew, who had spent many years in prison during the Czar’s regime for political offenses, I found to be a very decent fellow. Despite the fact that his mind has become politically unbalanced, he had remained human and there is more than a little of the milk of human kindness in his make-up.

Waxhoff, who, despite his youth (he was about twenty-three), occupied a position of importance as the head of a Government department, was the source of unfailing interest to me. He was the son of a rich manufacturer in South Russia and had commenced his career by organizing strikes in his father’s factories. He was a youngster of natural ability, but his head unfortunately was crammed full of half-digested revolutionary theories. I found him even a lovable companion, warm-hearted, honest to a degree and incapable of harming a fly. He travelled to Moscow with me.

Reduces the Town to Penury.

Taking then all in all, the men who held the reins in Irkutsk were moderate men, but none the less in carrying out the orders of Moscow they reduced that once prosperous and well-fed town to penury and semistarvation within a few months.

The market was officially decreed closed, but the peasants still continued to bring in foodstuffs until the “Chika” (the Extraordinary Commission) commenced raiding it and arresting sellers and buyers, confiscating their goods and imprisoning them. When I left Irkutsk only a small number of peasants were bringing food into the town.

Siberia, even allowing for the land which has been allowed to go out of cultivation in recent years, still produces, or did during the Kolchak regime, enough to feed the whole of its population and still permit her to export a considerable surplus to European Russia. Notwithstanding this fact, which is incontrovertible, there is not a town of any size in Soviet Siberia which is not suffering from a shortage of food. The Entente blockade is certainly not responsible for this state of affairs: it is the Communist system which is at fault.

I found in those Government departments which I visited a superabundance of staff, occupied mostly in doing nothing. The people in these departments had been forced to work for the Soviet, but they took good care to do as little work as possible and that as badly as they dared. Outside the spy service there is little or no real organization in Bolshevik institutions.