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The Old and the New
Arthur Ransome in his ''Open Letter to
America" is using as a motto the following
words of Emerson: "If there is any period one
would desire to be born in,—is it not the age
of Revolution; when the old and the new
stand side by side, and admit of being compared ; when the energies of all men are
searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by
the rich possibilities of the new era? This
time, like all times, is a very good one, if we
but know what to do with it."
The old and the new stand side by side in
Russia, and admit of being compared. The
new can well stand the comparison with the
old. But there is one condition—the new
must be freed from the calumnies and the
exaggerations indulged in by the supporters of
the old, and the old should be remembered
such as it actually was.
"The Soviet regime remains in power only
with the help of indiscriminate terror." "Lenine is executing his political opponents by
the thousands." "Peters, a tool of Lenine and
Trotzky, is signing death warrants without
looking at the names of those who are sent
to their death." Such is the daily food distributed by the press about Russia. When
Count von Mirbach, the German Ambassador,
was assassinated, the news agencies reported
that more than 500 members of the Social
Revolutionary Party, including the old revolutionary worker, Maria Spiridonova, were summarily shot by the Soviets. "The Grandmother
of the Russian Revolution," Catharine Bresh-
kovskaya, was reported thrown into prison by
the Bolsheviki, and that she died there of
privation and sorrow.
A few days ago I saw a man, not a Bolshevik,—not even a Socialist,—who recently returned from Russia, having left Moscow in
the latter part of August. He admitted that
during the period from April until he departed,
about twenty people had been actually executed by the Soviets,—for reasons which under
similar circumstances would lead to execution
in any other country in the world. No one
was executed indiscriminately. AIL had a fair
trial, and all were absolutely convicted of
ruthless plotting against the safety of the
country in times of stress. But Maria Spiridonova was not among those executed. She
is still alive, although she is kept detained,—
not in a vile prison—but surrounded with such
comforts as the Russian workers are able to
get for themselves.
Catherine Breshkovskaya has never been
imprisoned by the Soviets. When she died,—
not of privation, but of old age,—the Soviet
Government, although she was its opponent
on many questions of tactics and principles,
gave her a public funeral and hundreds of
thousands of Moscow workers, members of
the Soviet, turned out to pay their respects to
"The Grandmother of the Russian Revolution."
Peters, depicted by the capitalist press as a
brutal and murderous monster, is nothing of
the sort. Recently I met a man who had lived
for many years together with Peters. His
personal recollections of the many gentle and
humane acts done by that alleged monster impressed me much more than the wild, obviously
invented and impossible newspaper stories
about Peters' mass executions.
Let us admit, though, that even having
eliminated all the obvious lies and exaggerations there still remains on the debit side of
the Russian proletariat revolution many acts
of stern reprisals and punishment, which
bear out the well-known saying that a revolution never can be a pink tea-party attended
by people dressed in evening clothes. But let
us then compare the new with the old. Not
to speak of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Czarist regime who one by one were
killed or tortured in the prisons of Siberia, let
us remember a few of the instances of mass
terror during the old regime. The murder of
more than three thousand people at the
Chodynka festival, during the coronation of
Nicholas the Bloody, is not forgotten nor the
"punitive expeditions" of the revolutionary
period of 1906-1907, when thousands of peasants in Southern Russia, in the Baltic provinces, and in Siberia were massacred by the
agents of the armies of the Czar. The workers of the world also have not forgotten the
Lena massacres in 1913, when hundreds of
striking workingmen were shot to death. Nor
do the workers of the world forget that res-
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