If Mr. Hard or any of the numerous journalistic apologists of the Bolsheviki in this country will look the matter up he or they will find that this decree copied the forms usually used by the Czar’s government. It is noteworthy that the restoration of freedom of the press was already made dependent upon that czaristic instrument, the ukase. On the 16th of November the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets adopted a resolution which read:
The closure of the bourgeois papers was caused not only by the purely fighting requirements in the period of the rising and the suppression of counter-revolutionary attempts, but likewise as a necessary temporary measure for the establishment of a new régime in the sphere of the press, under which the capital proprietors of printing-works and paper would not be able to become autocratic beguilers of public opinion.... The re-establishment of the so-called freedom of the press, viz., the simple return of printing-offices and paper to capitalists, poisoners of the people’s conscience, would be an unpermissible surrender to the will of capital—i.e., a counter-revolutionary measure.
At the meeting when this resolution was adopted, and speaking in its support, Trotsky made a speech remarkable for its cynical dishonesty and its sinister menace. He said, according to the report in Pravda two days later:
Those measures which are employed to frighten individuals must be applied to the press also.... All the resources of the press must be handed over to the Soviet Power. You say that formerly we demanded freedom of the press for the Pravda? But then we were in a position to demand a minimum program; now we insist on the maximum program. When the power was in the hands of the bourgeoisie we demanded juridical freedom of the press. When the power is held by the workmen and peasants—we must create conditions for the freedom of the press.
Quite obviously, as shown by their own official reports, Mr. Hard and gentlemen of the New Republic, Mr. Oswald Villard and gentlemen of The Nation, and you, too, Mr. Norman Thomas, who find Mr. Hard’s disingenuous pleading so convincing,[61] the hostility of the Bolsheviki to freedom of the press was manifest from the very beginning of their rule. On the night of November 30th ten important newspapers were suppressed and their offices closed, among them being six Socialist newspapers. Their offense lay in the fact that they urged their readers to stand by the Constituent Assembly. Not only were the papers suppressed and their offices closed, but the best equipped of them all was “requisitioned” for the use of a Bolshevist paper, the Soldatskaia Pravda. The names of the newspapers were: Nasha Rech, Sovremennoie Delo, Utro, Rabochaia Gazeta, Volia Naroda, Trudovoe Slovo, Edinstvo, and Rabotcheie Delo. The suppression of the Rabochaia Gazeta, official organ of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party, caused a vigorous protest and the Central Committee of the party decided “to bring to the knowledge of all the members of the party that the central organ of the party, the Rabochaia Gazeta, is closed by the Military Revolutionary Committee. While branding this as an arbitrary act in defiance of the Russian and international proletariat, committed by so-called Socialists on a Social-Democrat paper and the Labor Party, whose organ it is, the Central Committee has decided to call upon the party to organize a movement of protest against this act in order to open the eyes of the labor masses to the character of the régime which governs the country.”
[61] See The World Tomorrow, February, 1920, p. 61.
In consequence of the tremendous volume of protest and through the general adoption of the devices familiar to the revolutionaries under czarism—using new names, changing printing-offices, and the like—most of the papers reappeared for a brief while in one form or another. But in February, 1918, all the anti-Bolshevist papers were again suppressed, save one, the principal organ of the Cadets, formerly the Rech, but later appearing as the Nash Viek. This paper was suffered to appear for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained. Mr. Shub’s article contains a detailed, though by no means full, account of the further suppressions:
A few days after the Bolshevist coup, in November, 1917, the Bolsheviki closed down, among others, the organ of the Mensheviki-Internationalists, Rabochaya Gazeta; the central organ of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, Dyelo Naroda; the Volia Naroda, published by Catherine Breshkovsky; the Yedinstvo, published by George Plechanov; the Russkaya Volia, published by Leonid Andreiev; the Narodnoye Slovo, the organ of the People’s Socialists, and the Dien, published by the well-known Social-Democrat, Alexander Potresov.
The printing-presses which belonged to Andreiev were confiscated and his paper, Russkaya Volia, never again appeared under any other name. The editor-in-chief of the Volia Naroda—the newspaper published by Catherine Breshkovsky—A. Agunov, was incarcerated by the Bolsheviki in the Fortress of Saints Peter and Paul and this paper was never able to appear again, even under a changed name. The offices of the Dyelo Naroda were for a time guarded by groups of armed soldiers in sympathy with the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, and notwithstanding all orders by the Commissary of the Press to cease publication, the Socialists-Revolutionists managed from time to time to issue their newspapers, in irregular form, under one name or another. But the copies of the paper would be confiscated from the newsdealers immediately upon their appearance, and the newsboys who risked the selling of it were subjected to unbelievable persecutions. There were even cases when the sellers of these “seditious” Socialist papers were shot by the Bolsheviki. These facts were recorded by every newspaper which appeared from time to time in those days in Petrograd and Moscow.
The Dien (Day) did not appear at all for some time after its suppression. Later there appeared in its place the Polnotch (Midnight), which was immediately suppressed for publishing an exposé of the Bolshevist Commissary, Lieutenant Schneuer, an ex-provocateur of the Tzar’s government and a German spy, the same Schneuer who conducted negotiations with the German command for an armistice, and who later, together with Krylenko, led the orgy called “the capture of the General Headquarters,” in the course of which General Dukhonine, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, was brutally murdered and mutilated for his refusal to conclude an armistice with the Germans.
A few days after the Polnotch was closed another paper appeared in its place, called Notch (Night), but this one was just as rapidly suppressed. Again V Glookhooyou Notch (In the Thick of Night) appeared for a brief period, and still later V Temnooyou Notch (In the Dark of Night). The paper was thus appearing once a week, and sometimes once every other week, under different names. I have all these papers in my possession, and their contents and fate would readily convince the reader how “tolerantly” the Bolsheviki, in the early days of their “rule,” treated the adverse opinions of even such leading Socialists as Alexander Potresov, one of the founders of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, who, for decades, was one of the editors of the central organs of the party.
The publication of G. V. Plechanov’s—Russia’s greatest Socialist writer and leader—the Yedinstvo, after it was suppressed, appeared in the end of December, 1917, under the name Nashe Yedinstvo, but was closed down in January, 1918, and the Bolsheviki confiscated its funds kept in a bank and ordered the confiscation of all moneys coming in by mail to its office. This information was even cabled to New York by the Petrograd correspondent of the New York Jewish pro-Bolshevist newspaper, the Daily Forward. The Nashe Yedinstvo, at the head of which, besides George Plechanov, there were such widely known Russian revolutionists and Socialists as Leo Deutsch, Vera Zasulitch, Dr. N. Vassilyev, L. Axelrod-Orthodox, and Gregory Alexinsky, was thus permanently destroyed by the Bolsheviki in January, or early in February, 1918, and never appeared again under any other name.
The newspapers Dien, Dyelo Naroda, the Menshevist Novy Looch, and a few others did make an attempt to appear later, but on the eve of the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty all oppositional Socialist newspapers were again suppressed wholesale. In the underground Socialist bulletins, which were at that time being published by the Socialists-Revolutionists and Social Democrats, it was stated that this move was carried out by order of the German General Staff. The prominent Social Democrat and Internationalist, L. Martov, later, at an open meeting of the Soviet, flung this accusation in the face of Lenin, who never replied to it by either word or pen.
When the Germans, after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, still continued their offensive movement, occupying one Russian city after another, and the Bolsheviki had reasons to believe that they were nearing their end, they somewhat relaxed their régime and some newspapers obtained the possibility of appearing again, on condition that all such newspapers, under threat of fine and confiscation, were to print on their first pages all the Bolshevist decrees and all distorted information and explanations by the Bolshevist commissaries. Aside from that, the press was subject to huge fines for every bit of news that did not please the eye of the Bolshevist censor. Thus, for instance, Novaya Zhizn, Gorky’s organ, was fined 35,000 rubles for a certain piece of “unfavorable” news which it printed.
However, early in May, 1918—i.e., before the beginning of the so-called “intervention” by the Allies—even this measure of “freedom” of the press appeared too frivolous for the Bolshevist commissaries, and they permanently closed down Dyelo Naroda, Dien, and Novy Looch, and, somewhat later, all the remaining opposition papers, including Gorky’s Novaya Zhizn, and since that time none of them have reappeared. In spite of endless attempts, Maxim Gorky did not succeed in obtaining permission to establish his paper even six months afterward, when he had officially made peace with the Soviet régime. The Bolsheviki are afraid of the free speech of even their official “friends,” and that is the true reason why there is not in Soviet Russia to-day a single independent organ of the press.[62]
[62] April, 1919.
With one kick of the Red Army boot was thus destroyed Russia’s greatest treasure, her independent press. The oldest and greatest founts of Russian culture and social justice, such as the monthly magazine, Russkoye Bogatstvo, and the daily Russkya Viedomosti, which even the Czar’s government never dared to suppress permanently, were brutally strangled. These organs have raised entire generations of Russian radicals and Socialists and had among their contributors and editors the greatest savants, publicists, and journalists of Russia, such as Nicholas Chernishevsky, Glieb Uspensky, Nicholas Mikhailovsky, N. Zlatovratsky, Ilya Metchnikov, Professor N. Kareiev, Vladimir Korolenko, Peter Kropotkin, and numerous others.