I find that like most radical papers, you assume that your reader knows a great many things that may be trite in the discussion of parlor Socialists, but with which the average citizen is not in the least familiar. For example, in your May issue, page 141, I find the assertion that the reports purporting to show how family life had been officially demoralized in Russia are “now happily proved false.” If this is the fact, no such proof has leaked into the newspapers or other periodicals to which I subscribe, and in view of the fact that we have what purport to be authentic copies of the official edicts and decrees, I cannot believe that these reports have been proved false.
And here is a letter from Alice Stone Blackwell, which, needless to say, could only be published in some radical paper. It appeared in the “Public,” New York:
Catherine Breshkovsky “the Grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” is getting badly misquoted. She is astonished to see how different some of the press reports are from what she really said. She tells me she declared the other day that she would work twenty years longer to keep Russia from having another Tsar, and she was reported as saying that she would work twenty years longer to get the Tsar back.
She also denied that women have been “nationalized,” or “made common property,” or that the Government puts any compulsion upon them in matters of sex. She said to me: “Women have more freedom in Russia now than they ever had before.” As Madame Breshkovsky is strongly opposed to the Bolshevist régime, her denial of this particular accusation may be accepted as conclusive.
I have at several places in this book portrayed the degeneracy of “McClure’s Magazine,” since it has become an organ of privilege; also I have mentioned Newell Dwight Hillis, agent of the Clerical Camouflage, and his knavish pamphlet against the Colorado strikers. Now we see “McClure’s” hiring Hillis to vilify the Russian Soviets. After all these denials have been published, and are available to all honest men, this agent of the Clerical Camouflage contributes to “McClure’s” (June, 1919) a long article calling for the blood of the Russian people. “McClure’s” puts over the article a picture representing a hideous fiend with a torch and bomb; also this editorial statement:
Dr. Hillis’s articles have brought in a flood of letters of commendation. He writes as he preaches, fearlessly, truthfully.
I ask: Could the re-crucifixion of Christ go farther than the application of the words “fearlessly, truthfully,” to the following dastardly lie:
It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities of Russia have gone over to this nationalization of women.
This agent of the Clerical Camouflage of course portrays Russia as a chaos of murder and bloodshed; in which our whole capitalist press agrees. We now know that most of the time Petrograd and Moscow were the most orderly capitals in Europe; but our newspaper correspondents in Stockholm and Copenhagen and Odessa and Omsk, meeting in the cafés with exiled Russian noblemen, thought nothing of standing a few thousand Russians against the wall of the Kremlin and shooting them in a news despatch. For weeks they harrowed us with a projected “St. Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre,” in which all the bourgeoisie in Russia were to be destroyed. Bartholomew’s Eve came, and next morning I looked in the papers, and saw that there had been a general amnesty for political prisoners in Russia—something for which I am still petitioning the President of my own country! I saw no mention of the massacre; but this did not surprise me. I, too, have been lied about by Capitalist Journalism on the front page, and have seen the retraction buried in small print among the advertisements.
That there was much killing in Russia, I do not doubt; but whether there was more killing than under the government of the Tsar—that is the real question. Frazier Hunt tells us that in the first fourteen months of their rule, the Bolsheviki executed four thousand, five hundred persons, mostly for stealing and speculation; whereas, in twelve months after the 1905 revolution, Stolypin, minister of the Tsar, caused the execution of thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three persons. That is about the usual proportion of the White Terror to the Red, and the proportion that would have prevailed had the Allies succeeded in their plan of getting Kolchak to Moscow.