Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/394



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.

Our papers were giving us lurid accounts of the Bolsheviki advancing in the Baltic provinces, burning and slaying as they went; but the conspiracy slipped a cog, and there crept into an Associated Press dispatch a little paragraph which gave the game away. In reading it, understand that these provinces are a part of Russia, which the Russians were taking back from the Germans:

Warsaw, Dec. 29.—The Bolsheviki are advancing rapidly toward