2. Outlawing Bolshevism
Capitalist diplomats were wary of the Kerensky régime because they did not feel certain how far the Russian people intended to go. The triumph of the Bolsheviki made the issue unmistakably clear. There could be no peace between Bolshevism and capitalism. From that day forward it was a struggle to determine which of the two economic systems should survive.
During the years 1918 and 1919 the capitalist world organized one of the most effective advertising campaigns that has ever been staged. Every shred of evidence that, by any stretch of the imagination, could be distorted into an attack upon the Bolshevist régime, was scattered broadcast over the world. Where evidence was lacking, rumor and innuendo were employed. The leading newspapers and magazines, prominent statesmen, educators, clergymen, scientists and public men in every walk of life went out of their way to denounce the Russian experiment in very much the same manner that the propertied interests of Europe had denounced the French experiment during the years that followed 1789.
All of the great imperialist governments had at their disposal a vast machinery for the purveying of information—false or true as the case might demand. This public machinery like the machinery of private capitalism was turned against Bolshevism. The capitalist governments went farther by backing with money and supplies the counter revolutionary forces under Yudenich, Denekine, Seminoff, and Kolchak. Allied expeditions were landed on the soil of European and Asiatic Russia "to free the Russian people from the clutches of the Bolsheviki." A blockade was declared in which the Germans were invited to join (after the signing of the armistice), and the whole capitalist world united to starve into submission the men, women and children of revolutionary Russia.
No event of recent times, not even the holy war against the autocracy of militarist Germany, had created such a unanimity of action among the Western nations. Bolshevism threatened the very existence of capitalism and as such its destruction became the first task of the capitalist world.
The collapse of the capitalist efforts to destroy socialist Russia reflects the power of a new idea over the ancient form. The Allied expeditions into Russia met with hostility instead of welcome. The counter-revolutionary forces were overwhelmed by the red army. The buffer states made peace. The Allied soldiers mutinied when called upon to take part in a war against the forces of revolutionary Russia. "Holy Russia" became holy Russia indeed—recognized and respected by the proletarian forces throughout Europe.
3. The New Europe
Russia is the dramatic center of the European movement against capitalist imperialism, but the movement is not confined to Russia. Its activities are extended into every important country on the continent.
Since March, 1917, when the first revolution occurred in Russia, absolute monarchy and divine, kingly rights have practically disappeared from Europe. Before the Russian Revolution, four-fifths of the people of Europe were under the sway of monarchs who exercised dictatorial power over the domestic and foreign affairs of their respective nations. Within two years, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs were driven from the thrones of Germany, of Austria and of Russia. Other rulers of lesser importance followed in their wake, until to-day, the old feudal power that held the political control over most of Europe in 1914 has practically disappeared.