Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921 -- Personal narratives; World War, 1914-1918 -- Soviet Union
“You people over here in Russia don’t want to make a mistake of setting
up the kind of a republic, of the kind of phony democracy like what
they’ve got in the United States. I lived in the United States for ten
years, and you take it from me, it’s the worst government in the world.
They have a president who is worse than the Czar. The police are worse
than Cossacks. The capitalist class is on top there just like they were
in the old days in Russia. The working class is fighting them, and they
are going to win. We are going to put the capitalists out just like you
put them out here, and don’t you let any American capitalists come over
here and help fasten on you a government like that one they still have
in America. It’s the capitalists that plunged America into war. The
working class never wanted it.”
These are two types of exiles which Russia has called back to her bosom
since the revolution, both of which constitute another grave problem
with which the distracted people are struggling. The sick ones, of
whom there are thousands, came back and more of them are coming from
Siberia at a time when food suitable for the sick is impossible to
obtain. There was almost no milk. Eggs were hard to get and were not
very fresh. Food of all kinds was getting scarcer every day. There was
a fuel shortage that threatened to make all Russia spend a shivering
winter, and what was to become of the sick was and still is a grave
question. There is a great shortage of many medicines. If fighting is
resumed the hospitals will be overcrowded. Doctors and nurses will be
scarce. Yet the exiles continue to come back, the long stream from the
remote villages continues to hold out its longing hands to the people
back home, who cannot deny them. And nearly all the exiles come back
sick and homeless and penniless. Russia must take care of those freed
Siberian exiles, and I don’t quite see how she is going to do it,
unless the miracle happens and they find a way of restoring peace and
order in the land. In that case they can do anything. They can even
deal with the kind of exile I heard talking on the Nevski.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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