Unchained Russia

UNCHAINED RUSSIA BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL MEMBER OF THE AMERICAN SPECIAL DIPLOMATIC MISSION TO RUSSIA IN 1917 AUTHOR OF BUSINESS THE HEART OP THE NATION. THOMAS CHATTEETON THE MARVELOUS BOY OTESE SHIFTING SCENES, THE STORY OF WENDELL PHILLIPS, ETC. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON 1918 CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. NEW KUSSIA AND THE CZARS WAR, . 1 II. THE REAL PROPULSION AND THE REAL HOPE 41 III. Two ASPECTS OF THE NEW FAITH ... 94 IV. THE OLD REGIME AND ITS FETJITAGE . . 122 V., A BROKEN DOWN RAILROAD AND WHAT CAME OF IT 155 VL THE PART PLAYED BY RUSSIAN WOMEN . 193 VII. THE PEASANT 218 VIII. THE BOLSHEVIC 252 IX. THE INFLUENCE OF MANNERS AND MORALS 290 CHAPTBE I NEW RUSSIA AND THE CMBS WAR To the last syllable of recorded time, mainland is likely to have cause to lament that in the years 1917 and 1918 the people of the United States did not understand the people of Russia and the peo ple of Eussia did not understand the people of the United States. As to the people of the United States, our share of the understanding was partly natural and partly manufactured partly sheer distance from the stage and partly inattention and mental lazi ness. The great Russian Revolution of March, 1917, was economic and political. We persisted in ac cepting it as only political To get rid of the Czar and political absolutism, to have done with the absurd medieval trappings of monarchy, to set up a representative republic like our own these were objects we could well understand and sym 1 UNCHAINED RUSSIA, pathize with. To reform, in the interest of all mankind, the existing social system to abolish poverty to secure for the masses every possible chance for culture and comfort to end the modern worldssottish conditions of too much and too little these were objects that seemed to us dreamy, anarchistic or insane. With the startling news of the Revolution we grasped rejoicingly the first series of objects the Czar was gone the old hateful tyranny was no more, blessed be the day 1 But when word came of the second series of objects we chilled rapidly, then looked askance, then began to turn upon the whole manifestation a face of frowning reproof. This was nothing to be wondered at. The United States had, for the time being, stopped on a dead center in its democratic evolution. It had ceased, or apparently ceased, to go ahead demo cratically, and some persons of limited vision even thought it was floating backward. A lapse of this kind takes place in the story of every republic Having won political freedom we were for the time content to think there was nothing more to be done and to roll about where we were, inert socially and threatened with fatty degeneration morally. But the Russian Revolutionists had 2 NEW RUSSIA AND THE CZARS WAR shot far beyond political democracy they aimed at industrial democracy no less. All the years when they were so bravely in the darkness strug gling for freedom and light, carrying on their secret propaganda, making infinite sacrifices for the sake of an ideal, walking always under the shadow of a horrible fat 3, those unsung heroes of Russia that have gone by the thousands to graves, were working toward this two-fold aim. Political freedom was well, it was very well but it was well chiefly because it offered a means by which the masses of men that toil could secure a larger share of the wealth their toil created. Freedom meant a world freed from the blightof kings and freed no less from the blight of an industrial sys tem that condemned nine men in every ten to pov erty a world with no more despots and no more slums. To oust the old Russian political system, blood dripping and odious, was the necessary beginning. We, still shackled more or less to another century and to the petrifactions of a philosophy good in its day but now grown rusty as a stage coach, thought it was an end, and when we began to see there was another program instinctively we sMed away...