It is to be hoped, too, that the leaders of the Illinois Labor Party who secured the adoption in their platform of a pro-Soviet plank in the spring of 1919 will take a few hours off and learn something about the Russian system before trying to "work it off" on our country.
There has been a great deal of "pussy-footing" talk in the American press about Bolshevism and Socialism, implying that there is no connection between the two. Yet Bolshevism is nothing but a form of Socialism. It is Socialism applied, though not yet as completely applied as the teachings of Karl Marx require. If an incomplete application of the principles of Socialism reduces a country to such an awful condition as Russia reveals, what may be expected from the full dose of Socialism?
At the last moment, with this book in type, a cry from the Bolshevik dictatorship comes out of Russia through interviews given by Lenine and Trotzky to the "New York World's" European correspondent, Lincoln Eyre. "I had an hour's talk with Lenine in the Kremlin at Moscow," Eyre writes in a dispatch headed, "Riga (by courier to Berlin), Feb. 20, 1920," and printed in the "World" of February 21, 1920. Lenine turned the interview into an argument for the lifting of the Allied blockade of Russia, and gave more than a hint that Russia's economic condition is desperate. According to Mr. Eyre's cable to the "New York World" of February 21, 1920, Lenine said, speaking in English:
"Russia's present economic distress is simply a part of the world's economic distress. Until the economic problem is faced from a world standpoint and not merely from the standpoint of certain nations or groups of nations, a solution is impossible.... Not only Russia but all Europe is going to pieces, and the [Allied] Supreme Council still indulges in tergiversation. Russia can be saved from utter ruin and Europe, too, but it must be done soon and quickly."