Siberia (Russia); Siberia (Russia) -- Description and travel
We have people at home, who have lived for years under our form of
government, who do not yet grasp our meaning of liberty and freedom.
We cannot expect the Siberians to grasp the principles of republican
government over night. They have had no demonstration of our system of
government, and they find some of their own people who have experienced
our system of government, going back to Siberia to slander us. They
go back with the cry that they were exploited here, in our mills and
packing-houses. Their ignorance was exploited, and our government
is blamed. They assert that their ability was exploited. They do
not realize that in confessing that they were exploited, they are
admitting ignorance. That may not excuse their exploitation, but it
accounts for it.
One of my Russian orderlies, who had been in this country some ten
years, first as a steel worker in Pittsburgh, and then as a barber,
told me how he had finally induced his brother to come to America and
work. So he sent his brother passage-money. The brother got aboard a
ship for America--and found himself practically sold into slavery in
the Argentine, where he worked more than a year for miserable food
and quarters. By that time he had been located by his brother of
Pittsburgh, who sent passage-money to come to New York and fare to
Pittsburgh. But he got aboard a ship for Russia, having had enough
of “America.” He was killed as a Russian soldier in the war against
Germany. He told everybody in his home town what a terrible place
America was. The United States was blamed because he could not get here
when his ticket was purchased for him--so far as he was concerned,
life as a peon in a turpentine camp in the Argentine represented labor
conditions in the United States. He never could be made to understand
that Argentina was not the United States. It was all “America.”
In the same way, immigrants from Russia have been lured to Russian
boarding houses in this country, stripped of their little cash and few
belongings, and turned adrift. They blame the United States, when it
was their own countrymen who robbed them. Their ignorance was being
exploited.
We at home hear that the Trans-Siberian Railroad is running. So
are our transcontinental lines. A railroad is a railroad, to us.
In Siberia, however, it took me ten days to go by rail a distance
that would take ten hours at home. There I traveled in what we would
consider a fairly good cattle-car; here I moved in a palace on wheels.
There, I was glad to pay a dollar for a bowl of greasy cabbage soup;
here, I got a complete meal served in luxurious surroundings, for a
dollar.
These are some of the reasons why we require a mental readjustment when
we think of Siberia. It is impossible to use the same terms and convey
the same idea. And these differences in usual things and usual terms,
explain the difficulty we have had in visualizing and understanding
Bolshevism. We think of a theory at home; in Siberia we see the result
of the theory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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