In striking contrast to the enthusiasm of the Soviet officials for this propaganda at the fighting front, and their reliance upon it to achieve important military results, was their seeming indifference to propaganda abroad. They were anxious enough that the case for the Russian revolution and the Soviet Government should be presented to the people of other countries, but they displayed none of that eager confidence in their ability to stir revolution abroad with which they are commonly credited. They believed that by means of propaganda they could break the morale of any army brought against them; but they did not pretend to be able to subvert remote governments. They were amused by the fear of Bolshevik propaganda displayed in the foreign press. They were not inclined to rate their powers so highly. “To be sure,” they told me, “we are internationalists and revolutionists, but if other countries are not ready for revolution how can we stimulate it? That is not our job. We have had our revolution in Russia and we must bend all our energies to preserve it. The workers in other countries must take care of their own affairs.” [Illustration: “RED TERROR” Execution of a Red Guard on an English gunboat in Lake Onega, Russia, in the presence of English and American Officers ] They were willing to give guarantees that the Soviet Government would not engage in revolutionary propaganda abroad. They told me that they had repeatedly assured foreign journalists and agents that their governments could take any measures they saw fit to protect themselves against Russian propaganda. Of propaganda in Russia itself there is plenty. I have already described the propaganda among prisoners of war, and of its effect upon the English prisoners in Moscow. I have no doubt the same “torture” was administered to Americans in Siberia. I saw, in an American magazine, a statement of a Canadian soldier that he and many of his comrades had been entirely converted to the doctrines of Bolshevism, but he attributed his conversion to actual experiences and to the things he saw rather than to anything he had read or been told. It occurs to an unprejudiced observer who has been in Soviet Russia that the nations that feared the contagion of Bolshevist propaganda took the worst possible way of avoiding it when they sent their young soldiers into a land full of propaganda explaining and upholding the new order established there. ------------------ CHAPTER XII COMING OUT OF SOVIET RUSSIA