Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/189

 Rh centralized control. They are equally agreed that Soviet Russia is the only "proletarian" country to-day, that it has led the world in revolutionary tactics, that it has started the world revolution and organized the only genuinely proletarian internationale. They are agreed, too, that the iron dictatorship established in Soviet Russia and within the Russian Communist Party furnishes a model for the international organization.

This is the feeling of the extreme revolutionists and communists of all countries. But Moscow goes much farther. It feels that the fate of Soviet Russia carries with it the fate of the world revolution and that therefore all that pertains to its safety and welfare must be given first consideration. It feels that as the light has come from Soviet Russia the light must continue to come from Soviet Russia. It feels that Russia has already experienced what other countries must experience. Russia is the older sister, the others must follow in her foot-steps. None of these ideas are shared even by the extremists of other countries. Lenin sometimes says, and possibly believes, he is allowing for the divergencies of other countries and treating them as equals. But this is scarcely consonant with his astounding twenty-one points, by which he drove away even such ardent and docile supporters as the leaders of the Italian Socialists. His real state of mind is portrayed in his speech before the All-Russian Political Education Conference (November 5th, 1920), in which he said:

The union of all great capitalist countries of the world against Russia, against Soviet Russia—this is the whole business of the present international political situation, and we must be entirely clear as to the fact that the