The fairness of the new system, as it works so far, has won over to it the working class and the poorer peasants. The well-to-do still complain, and very bitterly sometimes. Their hoardings are broken into by the government and by the poverty committees, and they are severely punished for speculative trading. But even these classes are moved somewhat by the treatment of children. They are in a class by themselves: class A,—I. They get all the few delicacies—milk, eggs, fruit, game, that come to the government monopoly—at school, where they all are fed, regardless of class. "Even the rich children," they told us, "they have as much as the poor children." And the children, like the workers, now see the operas, too, the plays, the ballets, the art galleries—all with instructors.
The Bolsheviks—all the Russian parties—regard the communists' attitude toward children as the symbol of their new civilization.
"It is to be for the good of humanity, not business," one of them, an American, said, "and the kids represent the future. Our generation is to have only the labor, the joy, and the misery of the struggle. We will get none of the material benefits of the new system, and we will probably never all understand and like it. But the children—it is for them and their children that we are fighting, so we are giving them the best of it from the start, and teaching them to take it all naturally. They are getting the idea. They are to be our new propagandists."
The idea is that everybody is to work for the common good, and so, as the children and the American prisoners note, when they all produce more, they all get more. They are starving now, but they are sharing their poverty. And they really are sharing it. Lenin eats, like everybody else—only one meal a day—soup, fish, bread, and tea. He has to save out of that a bit for breakfast and another bit for supper. The people, the peasants, send him more, but he puts it in the common mess. So the heads of this government do not have to imagine the privations of the people; they feel them. And so the people and the government realize that, if ever Russia becomes prosperous, all will share in the wealth, exactly as they share in the poverty now. In a word, rich Russia expects to become a rich Russian people.
This, then, is the idea which has begun to catch the imagination of the Russian people. This it is that is making men and women work with a new interest, and a new incentive, not to earn high wages and short hours, but to produce an abundance for all. This is what is making a people, sick of war, send their ablest and strongest men into the new, high-spirited, hard-drilled army to defend, not their borders, but their new working system of common living.
And this is what is making Lenin and his sobered communist government ask for peace. They think they have carried a revolution through for once to the logical conclusion. All other revolutions have stopped when they had revolved through the political phase to political democracy. This one has turned once more clear through the economic phase to economic democracy, to self-government in the factory, shop, and on the land, and has laid a foundation for universal profit sharing, for the universal division of food, clothes, and all goods, equally among all. And they think their civilization is working on this foundation. They want time to go on and build it higher and better. They want to spread it all over the world, but only as it works, As they told us when we reminded them that the world dreaded their propaganda:
"We are through with the old propaganda of argument. All we ask now is to be allowed to prove by the examples of things well done here in Russia, that the new system is good. We are so sure we shall make good, that we are willing to stop saying so, to stop reasoning, stop the haranguing, and all that old stuff. And especially are we sick of the propaganda by the sword. We want to stop fighting. We know that each country must evolve its own revolution out of its own conditions and in its own imagination. To force it by war is not scientific, not democratic, not socialistic. And we are fighting now only in self-defense. We will stop fighting, if you will let us stop. We will call back our troops, if you will withdraw yours. We will demobilize. We need the picked organizers and the skilled workers now in the army for our shops, factories, and farms. We would love to recall them to all this needed work, and use their troop trains to distribute our goods and our harvests, if only you will call off your soldiers and your moral, financial, and material support from our enemies, and the enemies of our ideals. Let every country in dispute on our borders self-determine its own form of government and its own allegiance.
"But you must not treat us as a conquered nation. We are not conquered. We are prepared to join in a revolutionary, civil war all over all of Europe and the world, if this good thing has to be done in this bad way of force. But we would prefer to have our time and our energy to work to make sure that our young, good thing is good. We have proved that we can share misery, and sickness, and poverty; it has helped us to have these things to share, and we think we shall be able to share the wealth of Russia as we gradually develop it. But we are not sure of that; the world is not sure. Let us Russians pay the price of the experiment; do the hard, hard work of it; make the sacrifice—then your people can follow us, slowly, as they decide for themselves that what we have is worth having."
That is the message you bring back, Mr. Bullitt. It is your duty to deliver it. It is mine to enforce it by my conception of the situation as it stands in Russia and Europe to-day.
It seems to me that we are on the verge of war, a new war, a terrible war—the long-predicted class war—all over Europe.