146 THE CLASS STRUGGLE TRUTH ABOUT INTERVENTION IN RUSSIA 147 for help. But let not the governments of England and France forget that foul deeds will rise, though all the world o erwhelm them to men eyes. Those who suppress the truth create forces that bring the truth into the light of day, but by methods which they least expect.
Knowing therefore the love of freedom and the sense of justice of the British working man, am in these few lines appealing to him to understand the facts that have here set before him facts which have obtained after four years residence in Russia. When he has read them he will be able to judge for himself whether the policy of the British government towards the Russian Revolution is a policy of which he approves. begin from the beginning. The Russian Revolution in March, 1917, was nothing less than the first practical step taken by the working classes of a European country to protest against the indefinite dragging on of the war for objects hidden in the Chancellories of secret European diplomacy.
There is no better proof of this than in the fact that the first act of the first all Russian Soviet conference in May, 1917, was an appeal to the workers of the world to lay down their arms and make peace with each other over the heads of their governments. The Russian workers and peasants were brought to this conviction by their intense sufferings during the previous two and a half years. The war in fact had brought their economically poorly developed country to ruin, the industries were at a standstill, famine was raging in the towns, and the villages were filled with maimed soldiers.
Long before the March revolution one could see that the Russian army was no longer capable of the offensive, even if it had the inspiration to effect one, and meanwhile all the towns in the interior of Russia were, even in 1916, filled with deserters, The next fact wish to set forth is that the Governments of the Allies, by refusing to allow the Stockholm Conference to take place in the autumn of 1917, destroyed the belief of the Russian peasants and workers in the sincerity of the Allied cause, weakened the hands of those in Germany who were working for peace, played into the hands of the Prussian war party and made the calamitous Brest Litovsk peace inevitable.
The Bolshevik revolution of October, 1917, was the second protest of the Russian workers and peasants against the continuation of a war which they had not the physical strength to carry on, nor the moral justification to support.
It seemed better for them to risk the dangers of making peace single handed with the Prussian warlords than be ruined by being dragged along in a war for the objects which were disclosed in the secret treaties between the Allies. The October Revolution differed from that of March. For the first time in the history of the world a people realized that only by radically altering the whole form of human government was it possible to put down war. Declining all ideas of a compromise peace between the rulers of the countries at war (a solution which would only have led to another war)
the workers and peasants of Russia dared to create a government, which, by putting an end to the political and economic power of landlords and financial syndicates, definitely rooted out that poison in human society which alone is the cause of war. For the Russian people under Czarism saw more clearly perhaps than the workers of England and Germany that the competition between the great banking and industrial trusts of London, Paris, Berlin and New York for spheres of influence, mining and railway concessions in undeveloped countries like their own, was the root cause of all modern wars and that, therefore, to put an end to war, the social and political system, which breeds, the exploiting trust, must be once and for all overthrown.
From this it follows that the workers and peasants of Russia after the October Revolution were forced to undertake a task, which the weak Kerensky government (controlled, as it was, mainly by landlords and bankers) could not even attempt to solve, namely to take directly under its authority the principal means of production, distribution and exchange.
For this reason the railways, waterways and mines were declared state property and the banks taken under government control. But Russia was bankrupt. Exhausted by the cruel war, through which Czarism had dragged her for three torturous years, her economic power was completely broken down. Food and the raw materials of industry in the country were reduced to a minimum and the land flooded with valueless paper money. To repay the bankers of London and Paris the war debts of Czarism, the Russian workers and peasants would have to export annually for many years to come in gold or raw materials a sum not less than one milliard roubles (30, 000, 000 pounds sterling) without obtaining any return.
To bear this burden in addition to others, brought about by the ruin of the industries, the collapse of the railways and the famine, was impossible without reducing the people to