Chapter XV: of this book, as the reader doubtless remembers, and we

merely recall the facts here to put them in line with the other features of Bolshevist labor oppression which we have just been considering. Who could have imagined that within a little more than two years after beginning their barbarous Socialist experiment with Russian industries the brazen dictatorship would be urging "foreign capital" to join in a scheme to squeeze both a domestic and a foreign profit out of the toil of Russian workingmen conscripted by Socialist task-masters and held in wage-slavery under fear of death by court martial?

In the fifteenth place, we have the dreadful fact that Russian labor is enslaved by a Socialist autocracy not for the sake of promoting peace but for the sake of promoting war. In our last chapter we quoted the statements of Zinovieff to Lincoln Eyre that the Third Internationale would never give up its purpose to make the whole world Bolshevist. Eyre also found the belief general in Russia that so long as the Socialists retain power, any peace made by them with the outside world will only be a short truce in which to prepare for another war. He says, in his cable printed in the "New York World" of February 27, 1920:

"All, Bolsheviki included, feel that as long as the Soviets remain
in power in Russia and Bolshevism does not spread to other lands,
peace cannot be more than a truce in the international class
warfare."

Again, in his cable printed in the "New York World" of March 4, 1920, Lincoln Eyre says:

"The Red Army's victories against Kolchak, Yudenitch and Denikine
are in themselves paradoxical, in that they serve to increase the
Russian need for peace.... Every advance recorded in Siberia or the
Crimea brings the front line further from the base and complicates
the task of supplying munitions, food and equipment. Thus it
becomes increasingly evident to all Russians, whatever their
political leanings may be, that Russia must have peace in order to
survive economically. And yet--another paradox--all feel that any
peace established now between Soviet authority and Governments of
the bourgeois and democratics cannot be more than a brief truce
because Socialism and capitalism cannot abide side by side, and
because neither can be suppressed without warfare. The Bolshevik
faith in the ultimate appearance of a world revolution has not
waned, but their hope of its speedy coming has lessened
considerably."

Who but the long-suffering Russians would endure the hopeless fate imposed by Socialism on Russian labor? The workingmen were conscripted by Trotzky's armies. They won victories, but these have not freed them. Returning from the front they are conscripted for labor armies, to work as they fought, under military discipline, subject to court martial and death if they rebel. Yet this military toil will not free them. They slave under the pistols of the commissaries only to get themselves economically equipped for a new war against their "capitalistic" neighbors, and in this war the workingman, if he can still walk, will be conscripted to go to the front again. Should he survive this, must he begin the same round over again?

But why not strike against this slavery? Russian labor does not dare to strike. Tender-hearted Socialism has made the labor strike a crime in Russia. Says Lincoln Eyre, in a cable dated March 11, 1920, and printed in the "New York World" of March 13, 1920:

"The unions, of course, lost their former principal weapon--the
strike. Today any body of workers that would venture out on strike
would be considered, to quote President Melnitchansky of the Moscow
unions, as traitors to their Socialist fatherland and as such would
doubtless be shot."

With this utter collapse of Socialist theories and professions in Bolshevikiland, we need not wonder that, according to a cable in the "New York Times" of March 2, 1920, the French National Socialist Congress adjourned at Strasbourg, March 1, 1920, "after voting down by more than 2 to 1 a motion to ally the Socialists of France with Lenine and Trotzky." According to the same cable, "The pleaders for the Third Internationale, formed at Moscow, were answered by the reply that the beautiful doctrines enunciated there had been thrown aside by Lenine and Trotzky and that any one who believed in real Socialism would be a fool to get behind the leaders of Soviet Russia."

Is it now in order for our American Bolshevists, Gene Debs, Morris Hillquit (_alias_ Hilkovitz) and Vic Berger, solemnly to inform us that Russian Bolshevism never was Socialism, nor anything like it, but only a base counterfeit? And will they also inform us that Lenine and Trotzky are unprincipled adventurers and cold-blooded blackguards who have hidden behind the mask of Socialism to blackjack a great people and filch a wealth they never did a day's work to accumulate?

When our American wavers of the Red Flag try to hide their shipwrecked theories behind a repudiation of Bolshevikiland, we shall have to remind them of their many, many utterances jubilantly assuring us that "Bolshevism is Socialism in practice." A specimen will do, taken from one of the books published by the Jewish Socialist Federation of America, a "part of the Socialist Party" of the United States piloted by Debs, Hilkovitz and Berger, which we quote as cited on page 34 of the "Outline of the Evidence Taken Before the Judiciary Committee" of the New York Assembly:

"Bolshevism is not a new Socialist theory, but the practical
carrying out in life of the old Socialist theory.

"Bolshevism especially is not a theory. Bolshevism is a method of
how to establish Socialism in life.

"Bolshevism is practical Socialism, the Socialism of today, and not
of the remote future day."