Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

There is a significant angle to the smashing and burning that has gone on in Russia—an angle which the American working man should bear in mind when he is told that Russian Bolshevists are on the right track for turning a moujik into a magnate over night. Russia is a great producer of raw material. Smashed machinery there means that whatever raw material escapes destruction must seek a foreign market. Naturally, if such material cannot be sold to a Russian factory, the factory abroad buys it much cheaper than if there were a home demand for it. Also, smashed machinery in Russia means no production in Russia of manufactured goods; and no manufactured goods in Russia means that the very working men who smashed the machinery must buy goods manufactured abroad.

Further, if there are no goods manufactured in Russia, the foreign manufacturer makes his own prices, both for what he buys from Russia and what he sells to her. In other words, he gets raw materials from her at low prices, and sells manufactured goods to her at high prices. This forces all Russian labor, skilled as well as unskilled, into working at low wages on the production of raw materials, and the cost of the raw materials is constantly being pulled down because, with no Russian demand for factory-skilled labor, there is a surplus of labor. So the Russian manufacturing capitalist is wiped out, sure enough, along with all machinery. Also, in time, Russian skilled labor will be wiped out!

And for this condition of affairs, Russians can thank themselves!

Germany realized how crude were her methods when she sent to Belgium and France a force that, operating behind her fighting men, wrecked or burned factories, and seized raw material. That was a job she did herself, and she had to take the blame of the whole world for it. She had to devise a scheme by which she could get the same results elsewhere without having to bear any blame.

That scheme was Bolshevism. The craftiest criminals always use fools as their tools. And in Bolshevism Germany found the Ersatz, or substitute, for an army of thieving and destroying Germans. It has been estimated that more than a million Germans are prisoners of war in Russia. These men whispered anti-capitalistic propaganda into the ear of the poor moujik, who wants education so badly that he is willing to burn school books, and who thinks he can attain freedom by ripping off wall-paper. And the moujik, under skillful leadership, did Germany’s work, and did it for nothing. That same Ivan who had died by millions to beat the Germans ran home from the trenches and wrecked his own country to the Kaiser’s taste, at the Kaiser’s word—wrecked it more thoroughly than the German armies would have been able to wreck it. For he smashed everything but the ikons and the rubber-plants. Why he did not destroy the rubber-plants we cannot understand. Is it because Germany does not wish to sell rubber-plants to Russia?

So keen were the Germans to help the Russian Bolshevists to “overthrow the Russian capitalists,” that the German capitalists loaned the Bolshevists armored cars and cannon made in Germany by the Krupp works and in Austria by the Skoda works. Evidently the German capitalists had suddenly fallen in love with the Russian proletariat! (This is a nut for our own parlor Bolshevists to crack.)

I can guess how they will crack it. They will say, “Yes, the Russian Bolshevists took help from the German capitalists, but in time they will turn those guns upon the very capitalists who loaned them.” Yet what I ask to know, as Hashimura Togo would say, is, “Why did the German capitalists ever begin to help the Bolshevists?”

After all, Russian capitalists are the only people who can give Russian working men jobs. By the same token, German capitalists are the only people who can give German working men jobs. If the German capitalists do not want the Russian capitalists to be able to give jobs to Russians, are the German capitalists who loaned guns to Russian Bolshevists, friends of the Russian working men?

The first parlor Bolshevist who answers that question correctly will explain the joker in Bolshevism.

Germany mobilized the fools of Russia. Why not, she asked herself, extend a scheme that worked so successfully with the moujiks to the working populations of other countries? She began to have hopes (with the aid of Bolshevist propaganda) of mobilizing the malcontents everywhere. Capital, if not wiped out, could at least be frightened or forced into a period of non-production—or production at high prices. High prices, in turn, create demands for higher wages—demands that usually take the form of strikes. Labor troubles may lead to riots, or even revolution—with consequent destruction. And to judge by Belgium, northern France and Russia, destruction is what Germany wants.