Social problems -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Day by day Jimmie was coming to place more of his hopes in Russia.
His little friend Rabin, the tailor, took a Russian paper published
in New York, the Novy Mir, and would translate its news and
editorials. Local Hopeland, thus inspired, voted a message of
fraternal sympathy to the Russian workers. In Petrograd and Moscow
there was going on, it appeared, a struggle between the pro-ally
Socialists and the Internationalists, the true, out-and-out,
middle-of-the-road, thick-and-thin proletarians. The former were
called Mensheviki, the latter were called Bolsheviki, and, of
course, Jimmie was all for the latter. Did he not know the
“stool-pigeon Socialists” at home, who were letting themselves be
used by capitalism?
The big issues were two--first, the land, which the peasants wanted
to take from the landlords; and second, the foreign debt. The
Russian Tsar had borrowed four billion dollars from France and a
billion or two from England, to be used in enslaving the Russian
workers and driving several millions of them to death on the
battlefield. Now should the Russian workers consider themselves
bound by this debt? When anybody asked Jimmie Higgins that question,
he responded with a thunderous “No”, and he regarded as hirelings or
dupes of Wall Street all those Socialists who supported Kerensky in
Russia.
When the American government, wishing to appeal to the Russian
people for loyalty in the war, sent over a commission to them, and
placed at its head one of the most notorious corporation lawyers in
America, a man whose life, the Jimmies said, had been sold to
service in the anti-liberal cause, Jimmie Higgins's shrill voice
became a yell of ridicule and rage. Of course, Jimmie's organization
saw to it that the Bolsheviki were informed in advance as to the
character of this commission--something which was unnecessary, as it
happened, because immediately after the overthrow of the Tsar there
had begun a pilgrimage of Russian Socialists from New York and San
Francisco, men who had seen the seamy side of American capitalism in
the slums of the great cities, and who lost no time in providing the
Russian radicals with full information concerning Wall Street!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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