XXV
FRENZIED FINANCE
Siberia is the land of Aladdins—Aladdins who can laugh at lamps so long as they possess money-printing machines. The German General Staff was the Magician who craftily suggested the use of the machines. And those first sponsors of Bolshevism, who were the creatures of the Magician, were the terrible jinns who gave their services to the financial wrecking of Great Russia, including Siberia. Said the Magician, “What you Russians want is land and money. There lies the land. Take it! As for money, print it!” So the Aladdins, instead of rubbing lamps, oiled up the printing-presses. And, presto—millions of rubles!
Such a suggestion would have passed as a species of light humor in any other country. Certainly it would not have been acted upon. But the Magician knew the child-like psychology of his Aladdins, for to their simple minds, a ruble is any piece of paper upon which the words “One Ruble” have been printed. And such paper is made more attractive than any genuine ruble if upon it is also engraved some crude picture, preferably that of a working man resting from his labors and surveying rich fields and bust factory chimneys.
First of all, the German Magician induced his jinns to steal from the Russian Treasury the gold which was behind the Imperial paper rubles—thus depreciating the value of those rubles (but only to those few who knew that the gold had gone to Germany). Next, and with characteristic inconsistency, the Bolshevists, while preaching a crusade against money,—in other words, capitalism—proceeded to print bales of money behind which they put no gold. Then they used money as their chief weapon to fight money!
From the standpoint of imagination, the whole scheme put to shame the wildest, most gigantic get-rich-quick dream ever born in the brain of a mortal. Those bales of stage money dramatized the cash wealth of the Bolshevists—actually visualized to every peasant and worker the tangible success of Bolshevism. Further, the Bolshevists, through their keen methods of distributing this wealth, were able to convince a poverty-stricken people that Bolshevism stood for everything that was generous and good. Already the Bolshevists had taken over the government. With pockets stuffed full of stage money, the people massed themselves in the defense of that new government.
If you have been desperately poor all your life, and a man thrusts hundreds of dollars into your hands to prove that he is your friend, you believe him. If he says he stands for the government which is behind those dollars, are you not likely to range yourself on the side of that government? And should a stranger from the other end of the world happen along and tell you that the fellow who had made you wealthy is a crazy man, will that stranger not need a pretty strong argument to win you away from him who made you rich without labor?
This is precisely how the scheme was worked in Siberia.
The Bolshevists carried out their program of winning over the people with great subtlety—a subtlety which suggests that the Magician was inspired of the Devil. The method of procedure was as follows: As the Bolshevist propagandists traveled by trains eastward from Vladivostok, and westward from Petrograd, they took with them chests and sacks of purposely rumpled, soiled and worn currency. Whenever they rolled into a station, they would call, say, upon a moujik for some trifling service—perhaps the filling of a tea-kettle with hot water; and when the moujik returned with the kettle, a Bolshevist would hand him five hundred one-ruble bills!
To a moujik, five hundred rubles represents years of hard work—it is a fortune. He stands and stares at his fistful of money. “This poor traveler is surely mad,” he concludes; “or he has made a terrible mistake.”
But neither of these is the truth. It is astounding enough—yet for the moujik not difficult to believe. For like all his fellows, this peasant has lived his whole life in the expectation that some such wonderful thing would happen when the Czar was pulled from his throne. And now the passenger tells the moujik that the money is all his. The miracle has come to pass!