PREFACE

In the following pages I have tried to make a plain and easily understandable outline of the origin, history, and meaning of Bolshevism.  I have attempted to provide the average American reader with a fair and reliable statement of the philosophy, program, and policies of the Russian Bolsheviki.  In order to avoid confusion, and to keep the matter as simple and clear as possible, I have not tried to deal with the numerous manifestations of Bolshevism in other lands, but have confined myself strictly to the Russian example.  With some detail—­too much, some of my readers may think!—­I have sketched the historical background in order that the Bolsheviki may be seen in proper perspective and fairly judged in connection with the whole revolutionary movement in Russia.

Whoever turns to these pages in the expectation of finding a sensational “exposure” of Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki will be disappointed.  It has been my aim to make a deliberate and scientific study, not an ex-parte indictment.  A great many lurid and sensational stories about the Bolsheviki have been published, the net result of which is to make the leaders of this phase of the great universal war of the classes appear as brutal and depraved monsters of iniquity.  There is not a crime known to mankind, apparently, of which they have not been loudly declared to be guilty.  My long experience in the Socialist movement has furnished me with too much understanding of the manner and extent to which working-class movements are abused and slandered to permit me to accept these stories as gospel truth.  That experience has forced me to assume that most of the terrible stories told about the Bolsheviki are either untrue and without any foundation in fact or greatly exaggerated.  The “rumor factories” in Geneva, Stockholm, Copenhagen, The Hague, and other European capitals, which were so busy during the war fabricating and exploiting for profit stories of massacres, victories, assassinations, revolutions, peace treaties, and other momentous events, which subsequent information proved never to have happened at all, seem now to have turned their attention to the Bolsheviki.

However little of a cynic one may be, it is almost impossible to refrain from wondering at the fact that so many writers and journals that in the quite recent past maintained absolute silence when the czar and his minions were committing their infamous outrages against the working-people and their leaders, and that were never known to protest against the many crimes committed by our own industrial czars against our working-people and their leaders—­that these writers and journals are now so violently denouncing the Bolsheviki for alleged inhumanities.  When the same journals that defended or apologized for the brutal lynchings of I.W.W. agitators and the savage assaults committed upon other peaceful citizens whose only crime was exercising their lawful and moral right to organize and strike for better wages, denounce the Bolsheviki for their “brutality” and their “lawlessness” and cry for vengeance upon them, honest and sincere men become bitter and scornful.