INTRODUCTION
I am well aware that there is material in this book which will be
misused by fools both white and red. That is not my fault. My object
has been narrowly limited. I have tried by means of a bald record of
conversations and things seen, to provide material for those who wish to
know what is being done and thought in Moscow at the present time, and
demand something more to go upon than secondhand reports of wholly
irrelevant atrocities committed by either one side or the other, and often by
neither one side nor the other, but by irresponsible scoundrels who, in the
natural turmoil of the greatest convulsion in the history of our civilization,
escape temporarily here and there from any kind of control.
The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For propaganda,
for the defence or attack of the Communist position, is needed a
knowledge of economics, both from the capitalist and socialist standpoints,
to which I cannot pretend. Very many times during the revolution it has
seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properly equipped in this way
was in Russia studying the gigantic experiment which, as a country, we are
allowing to pass abused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think
I may say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist could get to
what was going on. But I never lost the bitter feeling that the
opportunities of study which I made for myself were wasted, because I
could not hand them on to some other Englishman, whose education and
training would have enabled him to make a better, a fuller use of them.
Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get the opportunities
which were given to me when, by sheer persistence in enquiry, I had
overcome the hostility which I at first encountered as the correspondent of
a "bourgeois" newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the
Communists do not regard war as we regard it.