Siberia To-Day

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

And while Bolshevism was wrecking a vast nation, it seemed impossible to get any definite idea of what it was, and what it intended to do. Many of our people are still in that frame of mind, despite the fact that a nation has been wrecked. There are charges and counter-charges, accusations and denials, and all the while wholesale murder is going on. People at home, supposed to have brains, still argue that Bolshevism is a good thing, a just thing, and the only justice in government that there is. They have not seen the wreckage.

There are others who have seen the wreckage, but are so enamored of a theory which they have upheld, that they will not admit the terrible things they have seen because these things would prove them and their theory to be wrong. These people could look at a train wreck in which a hundred persons were killed, and say: “There is nothing to worry about. This all means that we will build better cars and use safety devices. And if we don’t like the color of the new cars, we will wreck the trains till we get equipment that suits us. It is necessary that people die in order to have cars which meet our tastes in colors. What happens to the passengers does not worry us—we have theories of railroading which must be carried out, even if in testing them everybody in the country is killed.”

The arguments of the Bolshevist leaders made headway with the peasants because the basis of Bolshevism is class-war. Bolshevism is founded on the fallacy that it is the ability of the lower class which is exploited, when it is the ignorance of the lower class which is exploited. And the Bolshevist leaders have exploited this ignorance in a more terrible way than ever the ruling class did under the old régime.

The ignorance, credulity, stupidity and cruelty of the Siberian peasant passes our understanding. And in passing judgment upon these forlorn people, who filled me with disgust by their willingness to be dirty when it would be as easy to be clean, and in stressing their revolting aspects, my purpose is to bring home to the reader a clearer appreciation of the problems which face us when we attempt to aid them. I believe that I am helping them in depicting them to the generous-minded people of the United States and other countries.

We cannot leave them alone, even if we would. The point I want to make is that all our agencies for welfare work, all our machinery of government which takes up the Siberian and Russian problem, must realize the difficulties ahead and understand that the problem differs from any other problem we have ever attacked. It is Asia, white man’s Asia. Despite white skin, we have on our hands a race not akin to white, yellow or black. We readjust our minds when we come to deal with the colored races. We must readjust our minds when we deal with the Siberian, and keep that readjustment steadily, for the Siberian does not constantly warn us by the color of his face that his mind presents to us a barrier against mutual understanding. We must learn about him, as he must learn about us. Centuries of serfdom, centuries of autocratic rule, centuries of cruelty, have left their imprint on his brain. “Half devil and half child” was written of the black races. It is also a good thing to keep in mind when we consider Siberia.

The more the peasant disgusted me, the more I pitied him. We may say that the drowning man who reaches up and catches the gunwale of a life-boat full of women and children and upsets it in his frantic efforts to save himself, is a fool. Yet we must realize that he is responding to the natural instinct of self-preservation. He knows decidedly that he is in danger of death, his brain is not working normally, and his greatest impulse is to save himself—all idea of sacrificing himself for the benefit of the majority or the helpless, have been swamped by unreasoning fear.

The Siberian peasant knew something was wrong when he was prevented from having the soil. He loves the soil, and he loves to make it produce. He and his forbears have been in the clutches of a governmental system so asinine as to thwart him in his desire to work the land. He endured this serfdom in fact, for ages, he endured serfdom under another guise since official serfdom has been abolished. Instigated and aided by the Bolshevists, who were in turn backed by Germany, he wrecked the government of his oppressors, and finds himself caught in the wreckage. If the thing works out in the way Germany hopes, the peasant stands simply to change masters.

The peasant has been glorified by the Russian novelists for his quality of endurance, rather than for his accomplishments. His submission was extolled, and we gave his submission a wrong valuation. We pitied him, and he became a martyr in our eyes, with all the virtues that go with martyrdom. Freed of his chains, he mistook license for liberty, and we were shocked to find that he whom we regarded as a kind man who had been wronged, could only emulate his late masters in cruelty, murder and injustice to his own kind.

It may be said that the people of Siberia, being the rudest of Russians, are not at all typical, and that as the Siberians are the descendants of exiles, or former exiles, they have experienced a degeneration which prevents them from being representative of the corresponding class in European Russia. There may be something in that idea.

And I grant that judging the people of Siberia during a revolution, may be like judging the people of San Francisco while they were camping among the ruins of their city after the earthquake—that conditions were abnormal, and reduced to a primitive state.