While in some respects, such as this terrible savagery, Bolshevism has out-Heroded Herod and surpassed the régime of the Romanovs in cruel oppression, upon the whole its methods have been very like that of the latter. There is really not much to choose between the ways of Stolypin and Von Plehve and those of the Lenine-Trotzky rule. The methods employed have been very similar and in not a few instances the same men who acted as the agents of espionage and tyranny for the Czar have served the Bolsheviki in the same capacity. Just as under Czarism there was alliance with the Black Hundreds and with all sorts of corrupt and vicious criminal agents, so we find the same phenomenon recurring under the Bolsheviki. The time has not yet arrived for the compilation of the full record of Bolshevism in this particular, but enough is known to justify the charge here made. That agents-provocateurs, spies, informers, police agents, and pogrom-makers formerly in the service of the Czar have been given positions of trust and honor by Lenine and Trotzky unfortunately admits of no doubt whatever.
It was stated at a meeting of Russians held in Paris in the summer of 1917 that one of the first Russian regiments which refused to obey orders to advance "contained 120 former political or civil police agents out of 181 refractory soldiers." During the Kerensky régime, at the time when Lenine was carrying on his propaganda through Pravda,[45] Vladimir Bourtzev exposed three notorious agents of the old police terror, provocateurs, who were working on the paper. In August, 1917, the Jewish Conjoint Committee in London published a long telegram from the representative of the Jewish Committee in Petrograd, calling attention to the fact that Lenine's party was working in tacit agreement with the Black Hundreds. The telegram is here given in full:
Extreme Russian reactionaries have allied themselves closely with extreme revolutionaries, and Black Hundreds have entered into tacit coalition with the Lenine party. In the army the former agents and detectives of the political police carry on ardent campaign for defeat, and in the rear the former agents-provocateurs prepare and direct endless troubles.
The motives of this policy on the part of the reactionaries are clear. It is the direct road to a counter-revolution. The troubles, the insurrections, and shocking disorders which follow provoke disgust at the Revolution, while the military defeats prepare the ground for an intervention of the old friend of the Russian Black Hundreds, William II, the counter-revolutionaries work systematically for the defeat of the Russian armies, sometimes openly, cynically.
Thus in their press and proclamations they go so far as to throw the whole responsibility for the war and for the obstacles placed in the way of a peace with Germany on the Jews. It is these "diabolical Jews," they say, who prevent the conclusion of peace and insist on the continuation of the war, because they desire to ruin Russia. Proclamations in this sense have been found, together with a voluminous anti-Semitic literature, in the offices of the party of Lenine Bolsheviki (Maximalists), and particularly at the headquarters of the extreme revolutionaries, Château Knheshinskaja. Salutations. Blank.
That the leaders of the Bolsheviki, particularly Lenine and Trotzky, ever entered into any "agreement" with the Black Hundreds, or took any part in the anti-Semitic campaign referred to, is highly improbable. Unless and until it is supported by ample evidence of a competent nature, we shall be justified in refusing to believe anything of the sort. It is, however, quite probable that provocateurs worming their way into Lenine's and Trotzky's good graces tried to use the Bolshevik agitation as a cover for their own nefarious work. As we have seen already, Lenine had previously been imposed upon by a notorious secret police agent, Malinovsky. But the open association of the Bolsheviki with men who played a despicable rôle under the old régime is not to be denied. The simple-minded reader of Bolshevist literature who believes that the Bolshevik government, whatever its failings, has the merit of being a government by real working-men and working-women, needs to be enlightened. Not only are Lenine and Trotzky not of the proletariat themselves, but they have associated with themselves men whose lives have been spent, not as workers, not even as simple bourgeoisie, but as servants of the terror-system of the Czar. They have associated with themselves, too, some of the most corrupt criminals in Russia. Here are a few of them:
Professor Kobozev, of Riga, joined the Bolsheviki and was active as a delegate to the Municipal Council of Petrograd. According to the information possessed by the Russian revolutionary leaders, this Professor Kobozev used to be a police spy, his special job being to make reports to the police concerning the political opinions and actions of students and faculty members. One of the very first men released from prison by the Bolsheviki was one Doctor Doubrovine, who had been a leader of the Black Hundreds, an organizer of many pogroms. He became an active Bolshevik. Kamenev, the Bolshevik leader, friend of Lenine, is a journalist. He was formerly a member of the old Social Democratic party. Soon after the war broke out he was arrested and behaved so badly that he was censured by his party. Early in the Revolution of 1917 he was accused of serving the secret police at Kiev. Bonno Brouevitch, Military Councilor to the Bolshevik government, was a well-known anti-Semite who had been dismissed from his military office on two occasions, once by the Czar's government and once by the Provisional Government. General Komisarov, another of Lenine's trusted military officials and advisers, was formerly a chief official of the Czar's secret police, known for his terrible persecution of the revolutionists. Accused of high treason by the Provisional Government, he fled, but returned and joined the Lenine-Trotzky forces. Prince Andronikov, associate of Rasputin; (Lenine's "My friend, the Prince"); Orlov, police agent and "denouncer" and secretary of the infamous Protopopov; Postnikov, convicted and imprisoned as a German spy in 1910; Lepinsky, formerly in the Czar's secret police; and Gualkine, friend of the unspeakable Rasputin, are some of the other men who have been closely identified with the "proletarian régime" of the Bolsheviki.[46] The man they released from prison and placed in the important position of Military Commander of Petrograd was Muraviev, who had been chief of the Czar's police and was regarded by even the moderate members of the Provisional Government, both under Lvov and Kerensky, as a dangerous reactionary.[47] Karl Radek, the Bohemian, a notorious leader of the Russian Bolsheviki, who undertook to stir up the German workers and direct the Spartacide revolt, was, according to Justice, expelled from the German Social Democratic party before the war as a thief and a police spy.[48] How shall we justify men calling themselves Socialists and proletarian revolutionists, who ally themselves with such men as these, but imprison, harry, and abuse such men and women as Bourtzev, Kropotkin, Plechanov, Breshkovskaya, Tchaykovsky, Spiridonova, Agounov, Larokine, Avksentiev, and many other Socialists like them?
In surveying the fight of the Bolsheviki to establish their rule it is impossible to fail to observe that their chief animus has been directed against other Socialists, rather than against members of the reactionary parties. That this has been the fact they do not themselves deny. For example, the "People's Commissary of Justice," G.I. Oppokov, better known as "Lomov," declared in an interview in January, 1918: "Our chief enemies are not the Cadets. Our most irreconcilable opponents are the Moderate Socialists. This explains the arrests of Socialists and the closing down of Socialist newspapers. Such measures of repression are, however, only temporary."[49] And in the Soviet at Petrograd, July 30, 1918, according to Pravda, Lachevitch, one of the delegates, said: "The Socialist-Revolutionists of the Right and the Mensheviki are more dangerous for the government of the Soviets than the bourgeoisie. But these enemies are not yet exterminated and can move about freely. The proletariat must act. We ought, once for all, to rid ourselves of the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Right and of the Mensheviki."
In this summary of the Bolsheviki war against democracy, it will be observed, no attempt has been made to gather all the lurid and fantastic stories which have been published by sensational journalists. The testimony comes from Socialist sources of the utmost reliability, much of it from official Bolshevist sources. The system of oppression it describes is twin brother to that which existed under the Romanovs, to end which hundreds of thousands of the noblest and best of our humankind gave up their lives. Under the banner of Social Democracy a tyranny has been established as infamous as anything in the annals of autocracy.
"O Liberty, what monstrous crimes are committed in thy great name!"