ENGLAND POPULAR
There was, however, another political change still more significant. For some time after the Revolution, England was trumps. Wherever an Englishman went, he was treated with especial consideration. It seemed as if people felt that England guaranteed the Revolution, and that, with England behind them, their liberties were safe. It is difficult for people in England to realize how important an advantage this was. The educated Russian is drenched in German influence. He learns German at school, and at the technical institutes he is forced to take a course of it every year. German universities are flooded with Russian students. The engineering, electrical, and chemical experts all speak German fluently and read German technical journals. With a knowledge of German I would undertake to sell any goods in Russia, even if I did not know a word of Russian. The Russians have a ridiculous habit of attributing everything foreign that is good to Germany. I once had the greatest difficulty in convincing a Russian lady that “King Lear” was not by Schiller. She thought something so good must be German. German art, German music, the German theatres, German scholarship and science, German trade dominate in Russia, and to a large extent educated Russia looks at Europe through German spectacles. Now, all this strongly entrenched position of inveterate prejudice and age-old tradition seemed to have been won by us at a blow. England was the hero of the hour. German was banished from schools and universities and its place taken by English. If England had been able to make proper use of her opportunity, she might still hold in Russia the commanding position she has held for centuries in Portugal.
I should like to allow myself a brief digression on the commercial importance of Siberia. One can only speak of it in superlatives. In the Government of Irkutsk alone, besides the forests, fisheries, and agricultural produce, there are coal, iron, molybdenite, copper, lead, silver, gold, immense beds of salt, marble, naphtha. The Americans and Japanese know all about these things, but very few English do. Our most common English book of reference contains these sentences: “In Siberia, Tomsk, Irkutsk, and Ekaterinburg have each about 50,000 inhabitants. Nijni-Novgorod, though small, is a station on the trans-Siberian railway” (“Whitaker’s Almanack”). The fact is that Tomsk, Omsk, and Irkutsk have well over 100,000 inhabitants, Vladivostok over 90,000, Novonikolaievsk, Chita, Blagoviestchensk well over 50,000. Nijni-Novgorod is not on the trans-Siberian railway at all, but is the terminus of a short branch-line. Ekaterinburg is in European Russia. If our chief English book of reference is so hopelessly inaccurate and inadequate, no wonder that English merchants have failed to realize the importance of Siberia.
BOLSHEVIK AGITATION
For a brief space, then, England held a commanding position in the future granary, mine, and workshop of the world. She was ousted from it by the joint German and Bolshevik propaganda. Unscrupulous propaganda is the chief and practically the only weapon of Bolshevism, and through it they mean to conquer the whole civilized world. They do not rely so much on newspapers as on rumours. These are whispered from ear to ear, half in secret, their origin is not always apparent, and so they gain an authority which nothing in print could ever hope for. When Brusiloff made his effort in 1917, the Bolsheviks spread the report that he was a bad general, and that it was a great strategical error to advance as he did, he ought to have gone and retaken Warsaw. This criticism was heard all over the town, and when the news of his failure came through, everybody was ready with his “I told you so.”
I was able to watch the propaganda in the 12th Regiment from near at hand. After the abortive July rising in Petrograd, an emissary came to the regiment direct from Lenin. His antecedents were interesting. He said he had been a schoolmaster, a prisoner of war in Germany, and had been put to work on the land near the Dutch border. He had escaped over to Holland and got back to Russia just in time to take part in the rising at Petrograd. After its failure he was sent to Irkutsk to prepare the ground for a similar rising. How much of his story was true I do not know, but at any rate he came from Germany and spoke German. He never made any secret of the Bolshevik plans—they were to bring the Government to its knees by spreading ruin and devastation. If nothing else would do, they would cut the railway line between Russia and Siberia, and so starve Russia out. If one told him tales of Russia’s miserable condition, he used to snap his fingers for joy and say, “You wait. It is going to be worse yet.” He used to murmur terrible prophecies of the catastrophes to come—every time with a Satanic glee at the prospect he was unrolling before us. Don’t let any of my readers imagine that this is a bygone tale of some old unhappy far-off thing. The Bolsheviks are at this moment applying the same methods wherever they can get a chance to work. The organization of disaster—that is their aim. They want to stir up such a fury of discontent as shall make the masses rise and sweep the capitalists off the face of the earth. Why these fires in London, destroying so much food? These strikes in the great grain-ports—New York, Buenos Ayres, Monte Video? Just as they were prepared to starve Russia out, so also they want to bring the whole world to its knees by famine.
BOLSHEVIK METHODS
Our Bolshevik at Irkutsk was often in danger of arrest, but the soldiers plainly told their officers that they would be shot if anything happened to the agitator. To the rank and file he preached friendship with Germany and peace—a separate peace, of course. He used to magnify Germany’s power, and say the failures at the front arose, not from Bolshevik cowardice, but from Germany’s immense technical superiority. He used to frighten them with tales of German scientists and what they could invent. If the soldiers said a separate peace was dangerous because of Japan, he used to answer, “No, that didn’t matter, Germany would not let Japan take Siberia.” In time two parties in the regiment were clearly marked—the real soldiers and the Bolsheviks. The real soldiers remained very anti-German, and were unfriendly to the prisoners of war. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, used to creep up to the prisoners and say, “You are our friends, you won’t let anything happen to us, will you?” When the Battalions of Death were formed, they were laughed at as fools. And when the other soldiers were ordered to the front, they had their explanation ready. “You are going to die,” they said, “because Kerenski has been bought by the English. He has received millions of pounds to continue the war. You will shed your blood not for Russia but to fill his pockets.” And the soldiers used to march away, their hearts filled with anger and disgust against England and Kerenski. I have never seen a more miserable sight than the Russian troops marching off to the front in 1917. They dragged themselves along, sullen, gloomy, almost abject in their despair, obviously torn between craven fear of the battlefield and rage at the men who were sending them there.
At the same time other means were used to bring them definitely over to the Bolsheviks. Everything the Russian peasant held dear was represented as in danger from Kerenski. They were told that, once the Bolsheviks were in power, they could take whatever they had a fancy to. Only those who know the dense stupidity and ignorance of the Russian peasant can imagine how quickly this propaganda took effect. The soldiers had no idea of the issues involved in the war; they were fighting simply because they had to. When the news of Korniloff’s advance on Petrograd came, a soldier said to me, “Where is this Petrograd that everybody is talking about? Is it in England or in Germany?” He was from the Manchurian frontier, and the very vastness of his country prevented him from forming any idea of it.
AMERICA Y.M.C.A.