Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- Soviet Union
Everything I saw in Russia, in the cities and near the front, convinced
me that what is going on there vitally concerns us. Every man,
woman and child in the United States must get to work to give the
help so sorely needed by the allies. Whatever has failed in Russia,
whatever has broken down must never be missed. We must supply these
deficiencies. Our business now is to understand, and to hurry, hurry,
hurry with our task of getting trained and seasoned men into France.
After what I saw in the neighborhood of Vilna, Dvinsk and Jacobstadt,
I know what haste on this side means to the world. There are several
reasons why the whole truth has not before been written about the
Russian revolution. It could not be written or cabled from Russia.
It could not be carried out in the form of notes or photographs. It
could not even be discovered by the average person who goes to Russia,
because the average visitor lives at the expensive Hotel d’Europe,
never goes out except in a droshky, and meets only Russians of social
position to whom he has letters of introduction, and who naturally
try to give him the impression that the troubled state of affairs is
merely temporary. The visitor usually knows no Russian and cannot read
the newspapers. There are two good French newspapers published in
Petrograd, but the average American traveler is as ignorant of French
as of Russian. Even if he could read all the daily papers, however, he
would not get very much information. The press censorship is as rigid
and as tyrannical to-day as in the heyday of the autocracy, only a
different kind of news is suppressed. One of the modest demands put
forth by the Tavarishi (comrades) when I was in Petrograd was for a
requisition of all the white print paper in the market, the paper to be
distributed equally among all newspapers, large and small. The object,
candidly stated, was to diminish the size and the circulation of the
“bourgeois” papers.
A great deal of news, as we regard news, never gets into the papers at
all, or is compressed into very small space. For example there have
been a number of terrible railroad accidents on the Russian roads. Most
of these one never heard of unless some one he knew happened to be
killed or injured. Sometimes a bare announcement of a great fatality
was permitted. Thus an express train between Moscow and Petrograd was
wrecked, forty persons being killed and more than seventy injured. This
wreck got a whole paragraph in the newspapers, with no list of the
dead and injured and no explanation of the cause. The fact is that the
railroads are in a condition of complete demoralization and the only
wonder is that more wrecks do not occur.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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