“Barbarous Soviet Russia”
CHAPTER I
ENTERING RED LAND
“You will never return alive. They will slaughter you. They will rob you of everything. They will take your clothes from your very back.”
With stubborn conviction the dapper young Lettish gentleman spoke to me as he attempted to change my mind about going into Soviet Russia. He was attached to the Foreign Information Bureau of Latvia. He had been in Riga all through the Bolshevist régime, from November, 1918, to May, 1919, when the German army of occupation in the Baltic provinces drove them out. There was nothing he could not tell me about that régime. He was especially eager to impart his experiences to foreign journalists.
“Was it really so terrible, then?” I asked him.
“Nothing could have been worse,” he repeated. "Many persons were killed by the Bolshevists—I saw them myself—but not so many as when the Germans began their slaughter. There was the Bolshevist program of nationalization. They nationalized the land. They nationalized the factories. They nationalized the banks and the large office buildings, and even the residences.
“Aristocratic women were taken from their comfortable homes and forced to wait on Bolshevist Commissars in the Soviet dining-rooms. One of our leading citizens, a man who through hard work had accumulated a great fortune, was put to work cleaning streets. His fine house with thirty or forty beautiful rooms, where he lived quite alone with his wife and servants, was taken away from him, and he was moved into a house in another part of the city on a mean street where he had never been before. His home was taken over by the ‘state’ and seven families of the so-called proletariat were lodged in it. One of our generals was compelled to sell newspapers on the streets. Our leading artists were forced to paint lamp posts—and the color was red. They made the university students cut ice.”
“And the women—did they nationalize them?” I interrupted.
“Well, no, they didn’t do that here in Riga,” he said, “but that was because they were not here long enough to put it into effect. They were so busy confiscating property in the six months they held sway that they had little time for anything else. No, they didn’t nationalize the women in Riga, but you will find they have done so in Moscow.
“But you must not go to Moscow,” he added. “You will surely never return alive—but if you do, please come and tell me what you have seen.” And mournfully he wished me a safe journey.