distorted by our own censors and headline writers until it was assured that not one golden grain of favorable truth about the Soviet Republic ever fell under the eyes of the American public.
Of course, in Russia it is especially easy to find the bad things to tell—the things that will convey an impression of complete barbarity and misery and the-dissolution of civilization. Russia was a relatively illiterate country in the first place; it was stripped bare by the war, and bereaved of millions of its strongest young men; it has just passed through the most profound revolution in history, and the revolution has been complicated by the chaotic self-demobilization of an army of ten or twelve million men, and by the necessity of withstanding a counter-revolutionary foreign invasion. Obviously under such circumstances all those gruesome statistics of our human existence that we usually ignore, would show a morbid increase in Russia. There is nothing, however, in any press dispatch having a reasonable degree of credibility, to make a person who is familiar with such statistics feel unduly excited, or in the least degree inclined to despair of the success of the great social experiment that is being conducted by the Soviet government. It is only necessary that some avenues of publicity shall be established, which are not in the control of the counter-revolutionary interests, and which will, therefore, let us read the good things, as well as the bad, which can be said about conditions under that government.
In this little book are contained, I think, the most important of all the good things. And I write this foreword in order to urge every American who cares about truth and even-handed justice to assist in giving it a share of publicity equal to that which has been given to the so-called “crimes of the Soviet Government.” We learn in this book that after all the futile yearnings of the idealists through the ages, a powerful government has at last set out with resolute purpose, unclouded with any contrary economic motive, to make a complete and high education accessible to all of its one hundred and fifty millions of people without bias or exception. To those who know anything about the world, and the sad history of the great hopes of the world, that is almost the most important fact in the record of these times. No political or military event could possibly be more important than that. And yet that fact has never received the space of a single paragraph in the news columns of any of
4
