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If the Bolsheviks remain in power, it is much to be feared that their Communism will fade, and that they will increasingly resemble any other Asiatic Government for example, our own Government in India. Soon after my arrival in Moscow I had an hour's conversation with Lenin in English, which he speaks fairly well. An interpreter was present, but his services were scarcely required.
The need of self-defence compelled the Bolsheviks to send their best workmen to the front, because they were the most reliable Communists, and the loss of them rendered their factories even more inefficient than they were under Kerensky.
My hospital orderly rendered what aid was possible to the girl, who was carried by Madame Frank to my carriage for conveyance to the hospital at Manchuli. A civilian doctor declared both cases hopeless, and the depositions of the man were taken. Briefly thus: When the Bolsheviks first occupied Manchuli a railway workman of anarchist tendencies was appointed Soviet Commissar of the district.
At the same time the internal and external peril has necessitated the creation of a vast army recruited by conscription, except as regards a Communist nucleus, from among a population utterly weary of war, who put the Bolsheviks in power because they alone promised peace.
As for the hostility of the Entente, it is of course true that Bolshevism might have developed very differently if it had been treated in a friendly spirit. But in view of its desire to promote world-revolution, no one could expect and the Bolsheviks certainly did not expect that capitalist Governments would be friendly.
It was small concern to Ivan whether the Allies or the Bolsheviks won this strange war. He did not know what it was all about, and in that he was like the rest of us.
But Petrograd in the hands of the Bolsheviks was worth more to the Germans than in their own; for a German occupation of the capital would have sterilized its miasmic influence over the rest of Russia, and the Germans had only advanced so far in order to get into touch with Finland and establish pro-German governments among the little nationalities of the Baltic littoral.
In the spring of 1918, the Bolsheviks, anticipating the Allies landing, moved out to Vologda and Kotlas as much as they could rush out by the railway and river, and on the arrival of the first troops here not more than five per cent of the military material still remained. The materials of most use to the engineers, which still remained, were forty thousand reels of barb wire and cable.
The Bolsheviks now arrested prominent members of the Moscow branch of the Czecho-Slovak National Council on the ground that they were "anti-revolutionaries." They alleged also that they had no guarantee that ships would be provided for the Czechs to be transported to France, and that the Czechs were holding up food supplies from Siberia.
But when all this is admitted to the full, it remains true that the state of industry under the Bolsheviks is much worse than even under Kerensky. The first and most obvious reason for this is that Russia was quite unusually dependent upon foreign assistance.
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