It is now conceded that the interior towns and cities of Russia have gone over to this nationalization of women.
This agent of the Clerical Camouflage of course portrays
Russia as a chaos of murder and bloodshed; in which our
whole capitalist press agrees. We now know that most of the
time Petrograd and Moscow were the most orderly capitals in
Europe; but our newspaper correspondents in Stockholm and
Copenhagen and Odessa and Omsk, meeting in the cafés with
exiled Russian noblemen, thought nothing of standing a few
thousand Russians against the wall of the Kremlin and shooting
them in a news despatch. For weeks they harrowed us
with a projected "St. Bartholomew's Eve Massacre," in which
all the bourgeoisie in Russia were to be destroyed. Bartholomew's
Eve came, and next morning I looked in the papers, and
saw that there had been a general amnesty for political
prisoners in Russia—something for which I am still petitioning
the President of my own country! I saw no mention of the
massacre; but this did not surprise me. I, too, have been lied
about by Capitalist Journalism on the front page, and have
seen the retraction buried in small print among the advertisements.
That there was much killing in Russia, I do not doubt; but whether there was more killing than under the government of the Tsar—that is the real question. Frazier Hunt tells us that in the first fourteen months of their rule, the Bolsheviki executed four thousand, five hundred persons, mostly for stealing and speculation; whereas, in twelve months after the 1905 revolution, Stolypin, minister of the Tsar, caused the execution of thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and seventy-three persons. That is about the usual proportion of the White Terror to the Red, and the proportion that would have prevailed had the Allies succeeded in their plan of getting Kolchak to Moscow.
Our papers were giving us lurid accounts of the Bolsheviki advancing in the Baltic provinces, burning and slaying as they went; but the conspiracy slipped a cog, and there crept into an Associated Press dispatch a little paragraph which gave the game away. In reading it, understand that these provinces are a part of Russia, which the Russians were taking back from the Germans:
Warsaw, Dec. 29.—The Bolsheviki are advancing rapidly toward
