Moscow Soviet decision.—The Moscow newspaper, the "Evening Life," for printing an invented decree regarding the socialization of women, in the issue of the 3rd of May, No. 36, shall be closed for ever and fined 25,000 roubles.
And then again, in the city of Saratov, in central Russia,
the Anarchists were making trouble, and some wag, to discredit
the Anarchists, invented an elaborate decree, signed,
"The Free Association of Anarchists of Saratov." This
decree was discovered one morning, posted in several parts of
the city. An American official, Oliver M. Sayler, who was in
Saratov, wrote the story in the "New Republic," March 15,
1919. He visited the Anarchist clubs, and found them boiling
with indignation—calling it a "Bolshevist plot"! Needless to
say, of course, the decree had no relation to reality; the
Anarchists never had any power to enforce any decree,
whether in Saratov or anywhere else in Russia; several hundred
Anarchists had been jailed by the Bolsheviki. But that,
of course, made no difference to the editors of capitalist newspapers
in America, to whom Anarchists, Bolsheviki, and Socialists
were all the same; from one end of the country to the
other this decree took the front page. The "Los Angeles
Times" published it with a solemn assurance to its readers
that the authenticity of the decree might be accepted without
question. And forthwith all our capitalist clergymen rose up
in their pulpits to denounce the Bolsheviki as monsters and
moral perverts, and a good part of the moving picture
machinery of Southern California has been set to work constructing
romances around this obscene theme.
The "New Europe," which had first published the story, made a full retraction and apology. Harold Williams, who had sent the story to England, also apologized. The American State Department denied the story officially, February 28, 1919. Jerome Davis, of the American Red Cross, denied it from first-hand knowledge in the "Independent," March 15, 1919. But did you read these apologies and denials in American capitalist newspapers? You did not! It would not be too much to say that nine people out of ten in America today firmly believe that women have been "nationalized" in Russia, or at any rate that the Bolsheviki attempted it. In the "World Tomorrow," for July, 1919, I come upon a letter signed Remington Rogers, Tulsa, Oklahoma. I find something very quaint and pathetic about this letter. How does it strike you?
