ABSTRACT
Before going further, I would like, therefore, to discuss whether it is not a mistake that the really great interest and importance of the objective which the Russian Communists have in view should be overlooked, while attention is focused on the defects of the means? The errors and crimes which occupy the attention of the public are in any case exaggerated, 10but granted there are many of them, why do we never stop to consider how far they are incidental to any minority rule based on force, wherever it occurs? Russia is not the only country in Europe where many of the methods we denounce when used by Bolsheviks are in full swing. There is no general outcry when acts of political tyranny or terrorism occur under Mussolini, nor under the Fascist Governments of Hungary or Roumania. Most of these pass unnoticed, while every possible story in the count against the Bolsheviks is featured throughout the Press. Moreover, have we forgotten that in Russia itself the horrors of arrest on suspicion, of indefinite imprisonment without adequate trial, of political executions, persecutions, the absence of free speech, etc., are no new thing? It seems almost insulting to public intelligence to remind readers of the terrorism employed under the despotism of the Tsars, for it is such an ABC fact of European history. A vast population of peasants and workers for generations suffered indescribably under the oppression of a bureaucracy and the landlord class. When a portion of the intelligentsia at the end of last century took up the people’s cause, they, too, were subjected to a terrorism which no extreme of Bolshevik methods could ever surpass. One reads of whole families decimated—some members executed, some in Siberia, some gone mad from their sufferings, and all as a consequence of what 11might be described as a mild Liberalism in their opinions. 1
