"The Red Army's victories against Kolchak, Yudenitch and Denikine are in themselves paradoxical, in that they serve to increase the Russian need for peace.... Every advance recorded in Siberia or the Crimea brings the front line further from the base and complicates the task of supplying munitions, food and equipment. Thus it becomes increasingly evident to all Russians, whatever their political leanings may be, that Russia must have peace in order to survive economically. And yet--another paradox--all feel that any peace established now between Soviet authority and Governments of the bourgeois and democratics cannot be more than a brief truce because Socialism and capitalism cannot abide side by side, and because neither can be suppressed without warfare. The Bolshevik faith in the ultimate appearance of a world revolution has not waned, but their hope of its speedy coming has lessened considerably."
Who but the long-suffering Russians would endure the hopeless fate imposed by Socialism on Russian labor? The workingmen were conscripted by Trotzky's armies. They won victories, but these have not freed them. Returning from the front they are conscripted for labor armies, to work as they fought, under military discipline, subject to court martial and death if they rebel. Yet this military toil will not free them. They slave under the pistols of the commissaries only to get themselves economically equipped for a new war against their "capitalistic" neighbors, and in this war the workingman, if he can still walk, will be conscripted to go to the front again. Should he survive this, must he begin the same round over again?
But why not strike against this slavery? Russian labor does not dare to strike. Tender-hearted Socialism has made the labor strike a crime in