THE EVIL RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT

[The author of this article has lately returned from Russia. He is well acquainted with the conditions there and the Bolshevik Government's plots and propaganda directed especially against the British Empire. It has been repeatedly laid down by The Nineteenth Century and After that for the sake of our national honour, as well as our security, we ought to have no relations whatever with Lenin and Trotsky and their evil agents. As far back as July 1919 this was clearly stated in the opening article of The Nineteenth Century and After, entitled Peace or Truce': As to the Lenin and Trotsky group, we ought in any case to have no dealings with them. Their record is smeared by monstrous crimes. . . . To represent the Bolsheviks and their leaders as idealists, to dwell on their refinements and visions, is to poison the wells of language. It is to make noble words immoral. They have no ideals, no refinements. If we cannot carry fire and sword into the camp of those ogres, at least let us carry nothing else to them.' Every article on Russia which has appeared since in The Nineteenth Century and After and the course of events during the last four years-including the Genoa Conference, which

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The Times so fearlessly exposed and condemned—have borne out and emphasised the soundness of this policy, namely, to have no dealings whatever, for commercial or other ends, with the Bolsheviks. -EDITOR, Nineteenth Century and After.]

NONE of the symptoms of the after-war illness from which Europe is still suffering was so ominous and so alarming as the apathy which, almost from the day that the Armistice was signed, seemed to paralyse the spiritual life and all the generous instincts of the European nations. Those nations had seen so much violence, injustice and bloodshed from 1914 to 1918 that no further violence, injustice and bloodshed had any effect on them. There had, during the Great War, been so many appeals to their patriotism, their pride, their pity, their sense of national honour, that all further appeals of the same kind seemed to fall on deaf ears. Atrocities, which would have stirred them profoundly in 1913, went unnoticed in 1918. Humiliations inflicted on their national pride, insults to their religious feelings, left them absolutely cold. They seemed to think only in terms of barter, huxter, raw material, new markets; and the darkest corner of the whole sombre picture was Red Russia. There materialism was enthroned and worshipped to an extent that was in some ways appalling, in other ways ludicrous. At a time when the production of the Russian factories had fallen in some cases to 4 per cent. of what it had been before the war the Bolshevik newspapers were filled, day after day, with long, heavy, extremely dull articles on economics and industry; and the more those subjects were written about, the worse the economic and industrial situation became. Russia is a rich country, with marvellous powers of recuperation, and if the Bolsheviks had let it alone, it would have rapidly recovered of itself; but, unfortunately, the first principle of Bolshevism is interference. Lenin reminded me sometimes of a crazy gardener who is so anxious about the growth of his plants that he pulls them up every morning to look at the roots, sometimes of a crazy surgeon performing innumerable operations on a patient who does not require any operation at all.

In this respect the position is tragic. In some other respects it is almost comic. At the Genoa Conference, which I attended as a newspaper reporter, the Bolshevik envoys were verbose, interminable, authoritative, and all wrong on the question of currency, and this at a time when their own currency was the laughing-stock of the world. In March last, for example, I got for 1l. 230 million roubles, formerly equal to twenty-three million pounds sterling; and a month later I got 420 million roubles for Il. And yet hardly a day passed without the Izvestia and the Pravda publishing very technical and dogmatic articles from

the pen of Comrade Preobrazhensky and other Bolshevik financiers showing that the rouble was all right.

The same newspapers were filled almost daily with the grossest attacks on every form of religion, on everything spiritual, even on Freemasonry, which Trotsky regarded as too 'mystical,' on England, which, alone among the Great Powers, had sent a delegation to Moscow; but these attacks made little impression outside, first because the world was utterly weary, secondly because this torrent of abuse was so constant, so voluminous, so violent, that it stunned and deafened people. I have heard Trotsky attack England in language which, if used by a Minister of the Tsar, would have excited a very serious diplomatic incident; but nobody in England paid any attention. I have read onslaughts on England in the Bolshevik official Press which would, under the old régime, have caused grave complications with this country, but no newspaper here even went to the trouble of translating them.

Russia, as I have just pointed out, seemed the darkest corner of the whole sombre picture, and the city of Petrograd seemed the darkest corner of Russia, yet it was from Russia and from Petrograd that the first glimmer of light came. It came when the Bolsheviks were mad enough to attack the Orthodox Church. On the day that Bishop Benjamin, of Petrograd, refused to obey the insolent demands of the Petrograd Soviet, and told it that there was a higher authority than itself, I saw the first gleam of dawn.

Sufficient praise has not been given, I think, in this country to this brave and pious prelate of the Orthodox Church for the noble stand he took on this occasion. Perhaps it was because the outside world failed to understand that it was a genuine persecution of the old Nero or Diocletian type that had been begun in Russia. Some English politicians seem to imagine that the Bolsheviks are like themselves, that they talk occasionally to the gallery, make election pledges that they do not intend to keep, threaten when they do not mean to do any more, keep their ear to the ground, put out feelers, fly trial balloons, and go through all the other performances. Such politicians have probably judged all Bolsheviks by Mr. Krassin, who is certainly not a typical Moscow Red. The real Bolshevik leader has no more need to make election pledges than Nero had, and he does not threaten at all; he strikes. Even Englishmen who call themselves Bolsheviks do not realise this. Mr. Newbolt, for example, expressed in the House some two months ago his complete and utter disbelief in the statement that Mgr. Butkievich would be put to death. Mr. Newbolt has been in Russia, but he does not know the Bolsheviks.

Few Englishmen knew them, indeed, at the time Bishop Benjamin was sentenced. Most people in this country probably thought that the trial was a geste, such a geste as Mr. Lloyd George might have made two years ago in the direction of Mr. de Valera. And it must be admitted that, though the Soviet Government is brutally frank and direct in Russia, it is not so willing to let Western Europe see it as it is. Hence the presence of Mr. Krassin here. Hence the fact that when Bishop Benjamin was executed secretly in Petrograd the Bolsheviks prevented the news being sent abroad, and still prevent foreign journalists from sending it. In reply to a cablegram from New York, I wired from Moscow in February last that Bishop Benjamin had certainly been executed; but my wire was suppressed by the censor. These doubts about the deadly seriousness of the Bolsheviks and about Bishop Benjamin's death probably accounted for the comparative indifference with which that onslaught on religion was received here. But Bishop Benjamin was a martyr quite as much as Mgr. Butkievich was. And he was not the only martyr of the Orthodox Church who suffered on this occasion. Eight priests and three lay-people were condemned to death at the same time, and amongst the laity was Madame Brusilova, wife of General Brusilov's son. That brave woman was the ringleader in a crowd which resisted the attempts of the Reds to despoil the Kazan Cathedral; and she had been heard to cry out: 'The Jews have come to despoil the body of Christ.' She did not deny having used those words; on the contrary, she gloried in them; and when sentence was passed on her, she said: 'You can take away my life, but you cannot take away the peace that is in my heart, for I received the Sacrament this morning.'

When this Red villainy has passed away Petrograd should raise a great monument to the women of Russia, for they have been splendid. During the anti-Christian processions that were held in the streets of Moscow last Christmas, the only people who publicly protested were poor Russian women.

The next gleam of light that came out of the Muscovite darkness was blindingly bright; and it also came from Petrograd. The Roman Catholic Archbishop and sixteen of his clergy were arrested on a variety of charges. I have the Act of Accusation before me as I write, and it is certainly one of the most curious legal documents ever written. The principal charge is that the accused held illegal, counter-revolutionary meetings four years ago; but those assemblies were ordinary meetings of the clergy to consider purely ecclesiastical business, and when this charge was first made, immediately after the offence was alleged to have been committed, the Public Prosecutor finally dropped it on the ground that it was untenable. But two months ago it was taken

up again for purposes of persecution. The Reds of Petrograd wanted blood, and their leaders had to give it to them.

I have already indicated that there are two tendencies in Russian Communism: the moderate tendency, represented by Messrs. Krassin, Chicherin, and Litvinov, and the extremists, represented by practically all the other Red leaders. The moderates are very feeble, very cowardly, wholly contemptible. The extremists are the sole force which upholds Bolshevism, and when they ask for a thing they must be given it. Some day they may ask for the heads of the foreign merchants and concessionaires in Russia, and some of those heads will have to be thrown to them. As a matter of fact, a stronger case could be made out under Bolshevik'law' for the infliction of the death penalty on the British and American merchants now in Russia than was made out two months ago for the infliction of the death penalty on the Petrograd clergymen. British merchants are tolerated now in Russia, just as the Catholic clergy were tolerated for a time; and if any merchant among my readers contemplates a trip to Russia, I would advise him to get a copy of the Bolshevik Criminal Code before he starts on his travels.

The quarrel between the Petrograd Soviet and the Roman Catholic community of Petrograd goes back to the beginning of 1918, when the Council of People's Commissars passed a decree, supplemented by a regulation of the Commissariat of Justice on August 24, which required that agreements should be concluded for the lease and use of Church property. A draft agreement was then drawn up by the Petrograd Soviet and presented to the Catholic clergy for signature, but the clergy rejected it on the ground that it implied the ownership by the State of Church property. Suddenly, on December 2 of last year, the Soviet authorities closed the Catholic church at Gatchina, and on December 5 they closed all the Catholic churches in Petrograd (ten in number) after Red soldiers had driven out the congregations with great brutality. Immediately afterwards a deputation of sixteen workmen visited the Bolshevik headquarters at Smolny in order to protest against the closing of the churches, but they were roughly handled and threatened with severe punishment. When workmen ask the Bolsheviks to murder somebody, the Bolsheviks find the request perfectly reasonable, but when they ask for the most elementary religious liberty, they are lucky if they escape with their lives.

Many people will think that in refusing to sign the agreement the clergy were foolish, since similar agreements have been signed by the clergy in France; but the Archbishop only wanted to refer first to the head of his Church, and, as a matter of fact, the Vatican, which had been negotiating directly with Krassikov, the Com