“Perhaps. But they must not call it Communism, nor even Socialism. My quarrel with them is that they misname the thing. It is an autocracy, with a fresh group of autocrats. It is a bureaucracy very much like the old one for greed, incompetence and corruption. And if the personnel were reduced by fifty per cent, the work would be done just as well.”
I could see he was almost bitter in his disappointment.
“But education will remedy that in time,” I said hopefully.
“I doubt it. The nation is being rapidly militarised. The whole thing will harden into a system. The ground is being prepared for a new Czar or a Napoleon. I am full of grave fear for the future.” So the old man talked.
“Let us hope you are wrong,” I said, and left him to talk to a bright girl who had called for a good pair of boots I was able to spare.
But I must frankly say that this note was very frequently struck. By some it was regarded as the way of deliverance; by others, like my old friend, as the death-knell of all their hopes.
“They ought never to have attempted the experiment,” said another distinguished servant of the Republic, speaking of the Bolsheviki, “if they had no more promise of success than this. It was a crime against the nation, for the Allies would not have made war against a National Assembly chosen by the whole people, and the people of Russia would now have been a long way on the road to reconstruction and happiness.”
My girl friend was a Manchester lass who was working in a Soviet office. I asked her if she was happy, and she looked wistful and said she was hungry a good deal and that she could “do very well with some stockings and underclothes,” but that she liked her work, which was translating, and had no complaints on that score.
“But,” I said, “why don’t you go home? Are you being kept here against your will?”
“Oh no,” she replied very quickly, “I could go home if I wanted to, but—” and here a deep, red blush spread over her pretty face and told me her story without further words. She will not leave until her lover can come too. As a productive worker he cannot be spared at present. So the two stay and work and love and hope together.