Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/6



This book is a result of a fourteen weeks' stay in Soviet Russia, as a correspondent for the Federated Press, during the Spring and Summer of 1921. It makes no pretensions to being a learned treatise on the Russian revolution: It is merely an effort to give the A. B. C.'s of the situation. What I have tried to do is to portray, simply and in workers' language, the broad outlines of the great upheaval: to answer the many mental queries of the toilers, who have little information on the subject, by describing in a general way the evolution, present status, achievements, and problems of the various important social institutions of the new society, such as the state, the political parties, the trade unions, the industries, the army, etc. It is a brief workers' history of the revolution.

Inasmuch as the social disorganization of Russia is very great and everything is changing with unbelievable rapidity, it is exceedingly difficult for even native investigators to get exact data on the situation. And naturally, for foreigners like myself who do not speak Russian, the difficulty is considerably increased, I was fortunate, however, in being able to talk French and German—after a fashion. This helped me greatly, because the Russians are wonderful linguists, and there are few of them of education who do not speak either or both of these languages in addition to their own. It was seldom that I ran across a leader, a man who was really doing something, with whom I was unable to converse. Many live rank and filers also speak English, French, or German. For contact with the masses and for my extensive reading of Russian revolutionary pamphlets, newspapers, etc., of course, I had to depend upon interpreters.

A favorite argument of counter-revolutionary writers against correspondents who come out of Russia in a friendly or even tolerant mood toward the Soviets is that these correspondents were taken under the wing