Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

We have people at home, who have lived for years under our form of government, who do not yet grasp our meaning of liberty and freedom. We cannot expect the Siberians to grasp the principles of republican government over night. They have had no demonstration of our system of government, and they find some of their own people who have experienced our system of government, going back to Siberia to slander us. They go back with the cry that they were exploited here, in our mills and packing-houses. Their ignorance was exploited, and our government is blamed. They assert that their ability was exploited. They do not realize that in confessing that they were exploited, they are admitting ignorance. That may not excuse their exploitation, but it accounts for it.

One of my Russian orderlies, who had been in this country some ten years, first as a steel worker in Pittsburgh, and then as a barber, told me how he had finally induced his brother to come to America and work. So he sent his brother passage-money. The brother got aboard a ship for America—and found himself practically sold into slavery in the Argentine, where he worked more than a year for miserable food and quarters. By that time he had been located by his brother of Pittsburgh, who sent passage-money to come to New York and fare to Pittsburgh. But he got aboard a ship for Russia, having had enough of “America.” He was killed as a Russian soldier in the war against Germany. He told everybody in his home town what a terrible place America was. The United States was blamed because he could not get here when his ticket was purchased for him—so far as he was concerned, life as a peon in a turpentine camp in the Argentine represented labor conditions in the United States. He never could be made to understand that Argentina was not the United States. It was all “America.”

In the same way, immigrants from Russia have been lured to Russian boarding houses in this country, stripped of their little cash and few belongings, and turned adrift. They blame the United States, when it was their own countrymen who robbed them. Their ignorance was being exploited.

We at home hear that the Trans-Siberian Railroad is running. So are our transcontinental lines. A railroad is a railroad, to us. In Siberia, however, it took me ten days to go by rail a distance that would take ten hours at home. There I traveled in what we would consider a fairly good cattle-car; here I moved in a palace on wheels. There, I was glad to pay a dollar for a bowl of greasy cabbage soup; here, I got a complete meal served in luxurious surroundings, for a dollar.

These are some of the reasons why we require a mental readjustment when we think of Siberia. It is impossible to use the same terms and convey the same idea. And these differences in usual things and usual terms, explain the difficulty we have had in visualizing and understanding Bolshevism. We think of a theory at home; in Siberia we see the result of the theory.

Returning home I heard a man in the Twentieth Century Limited explaining some of the virtues of Bolshevism. He had never been in Siberia. Our train was moving nearly sixty miles an hour, and we were clean and comfortable, plenty of food at hand. As this man talked, I smiled in remembrance of an engineer in Siberia who had demanded a bottle of vodka before he would haul our train any farther—and when he got it, proceeded to get drunk and let his train almost run away during the night as it descended a steep grade in the Khingan Mountain range.

I wondered if the passenger in the Twentieth Century, who extolled the virtues of Bolshevism, would have been willing to ride in the Twentieth Century any longer if our engineer had suddenly stopped and demanded a bottle of whiskey before he proceeded. That would have been Bolshevism in fact. It was easy to theorize in safety with a sober engineer at the throttle. A Bolshevist at the throttle of government may make a good engineer, to hear our boudoir Bolshevists talk. I observe a strange reluctance on their part to go to Russia where Bolshevism is running things.

To me, the horror of the peasant in Siberia, was the realization that his children and grandchildren had little hope to be better off. I do not mean that the old régime will come back with all its terrors; but no matter what form of government may flourish in Petrograd, it will be many years before the leaven of the most enlightened rule can penetrate the minds of these people and bring to the surface such good qualities as are deeply imbedded in their brains, sealed up under layers of ignorance, superstition, and submission.

They believe we are not there to help them, but to protect our own investments. We are losing their confidence every day that we remain in Siberia without doing something constructive, in which they have understanding. If we want to do welfare work, do it, but without an expedition on the ground; if we want to use our troops in cleaning up the Bolshevists, get into action. They will understand either activity by itself but they cannot understand military occupation without action, and they cannot understand relief work carried on under inactive bayonets. We have talked too much about our friendship for Russia, and done little or nothing to aid the country in reëstablishing itself with a government.

Whatever assurance we may give Kolchak, or other leaders, that we will back them up, we will gain little unless our actions win the confidence of the peasant masses, and the so-called “workers.” I group them together.