“AN AMERICAN BUSINESS MAN ON THE SITUATION IN RUSSIA”
To The New York World justly belongs the credit for giving the American people the best description of the present situation in Russia that has ever appeared in the American press. Beginning with Sunday, Jan. 9th, and ending on Friday, Jan. 14th, The New York World has published daily articles by Hector Boon, who has just returned from Soviet Russia, which he entered on April 6th and left on Oct. 12th, 1920, after spending more than half a year in Lenin’s kingdom.
Altogether, Mr. Boon spent ten months in Russia, of which four months were spent in the so-called “buffer state,” the Far Eastern Republic, which extends from Verkni-Udinsk to Vladivostok, and more than six months in Soviet Russia proper, mostly in Moscow. * * * To this is added that Mr. Boon was in Russia in 1917, before the Bolsheviki came into power, and thus he was able during his last visit to compare the conditions in Bolshevist Russia with the situation in Russia during the first months after the March Revolution.
From an article by A. J. Sack, Director of the Russian Information Bureau in the United States.
INSIDE FACTS OF RUSSIA TOLD BY NEW YORK BUSINESS MAN
Hector Boon, Trading Expert, Describes in Series of Articles Prepared for The World Conditions Under Regime of Soviet Which He Believes Will Not Last More Than Two Years Longer—First Instalment Relates Experiences in Eastern Siberia After Defeat of Kolchak—He Sought to Recover 5,000 Furs Stolen by Bandit Chief Semionov.
Here is Russia from the inside as seen at close hand for ten months by an unusual observer—not an author, not an artist, not a propagandist, not a sympathizer, not an enemy, not a Socialist, not a reformer, not a reactionary, but a hard-headed, clear-seeing, unimaginative, fair-minded, give-the-other-fellow-a-chance kind of American business man.
Hector Boon saw things as they are—not as some one else says they are—not what Russia promises but what Russia is performing. And in a series of articles which he prepared exclusively for The World he tells plainly and with exactness what he has observed, what he has heard, what he has thought.
Mr. Boon, although of English nativity, is a thorough New Yorker—a keen, wideawake, practical man of affairs, whose business as a financial expert and trading expert, particularly for fur importers, has taken him to many parts of the world. He has just returned from Russia, into whose condition he had opportunities for thorough insight. It was not new territory to him; he knew the country before the Red regime and is able to draw contrasts between that period and the present. He believes the Soviet rule will not last more than two years longer.