I FIRST entered Soviet territory by the back door, Manchuria. I bade "good-bye" to Dr. and Mrs. Grant, my hosts in Peking, one evening in early July of 1925 and left for the station to take my train across Siberia. One of the officials of the Ministry of Education was at the station to see me off, a courtesy the Chinese never fail to show and one which I deeply appreciated. The train arrived at Harbin the morning of the second day. As was my wont when traveling, I immediately began to make the necessary arrangements for my departure. To my horror I discovered that I had left my passport in a drawer at Dr. Grant's home. As the Trans-Siberian ran but once a week at that time, I resigned myself to at least a week's stay in Harbin. A young American at the local branch of the National City Bank where I presented my letter of credit gave me excellent advice as to accommodations and stores. A Russian who could speak English was working at the hotel at which I stopped and became my guide during my stay.

Harbin was then a city of two nationalities, Chinese and Russian. There were at least 75,000 White Russian refugees who formed the Russian city, living as best they could, many of them in direst poverty. Most of them had been members of the upper and middle classes and were not accustomed to fend for themselves. However, there were some physicians and engineers who managed fairly well, a few of the engineers being employed by the government of the Chinese war lord, Chang So-lin. I had to have a tooth attended to while in Harbin and the Russian dentist proved most expert. The dentist was a woman who had studied in the United States. I admired the Russians' willingness to do the most menial tasks in order merely to live, and I particularly admired their efforts to help one another and to maintain whatever they could of the old Russian way of life. They had organized a few of the finer activities of civilized life, and on the second evening of my stay I attended a concert given by a volunteer orchestra. It was an excellent concert. The saddest aspect of the situation was the unhappy fate of the women, most of them refined women. Their opportunities were few and seldom pleasant. Some had become mistresses of rich Chinese. Some had fallen even lower. The Chinese treated the Russian refugees with disdain, but the refugees were glad of any haven from the Bolshevik terror.

My passport arrived before the end of my week in Harbin, and I visited the splendid building that had formerly housed the imperial Russian administration in Manchuria and now served as the consulate of the Soviets. There must have been four hundred smelly peasants milling around on the ground floor without anyone in sight to give them information. The atmosphere was suffocating. Finally, I mounted a flight of stairs which I saw in one corner of the room and found the second floor divided into offices containing clerks. I went into several of these rooms saying in each case, "Do you speak English?" When the clerk looked blank, I inquired, "Können Sie Deutsch sprechen?" and when he still looked blank, I asked, "Pouvez-vous parler français?" That was the end of my linguistic accomplishments and I usually met with no response. Finally one man who spoke very poor German led me to a room where there was a young woman who did speak English.

I shall always be eternally grateful to that young woman. She was kindly, intelligent, and efficient. She assisted me in filling out the many blanks which made up my application for permission to depart for Russia, and assured me she would try to push through the application so that I might leave on the train the following afternoon and not be detained another week. And she kept her word. When I returned the next morning she had arranged everything. Then I made a terrible blunder. I offered her---as delicately as I could---ten roubles. Her face flamed scarlet. "You miserable bourgeois," she exclaimed, "you think you can bribe poor people anywhere. But you will learn you can't bribe in our new society." I was never so apologetic in my life. I explained that I had just come from China where one could get almost nothing done without tipping. I begged her to excuse my ignorance of the "new society". All to no avail. She told me to get out. I did, and I made sure to get the train that afternoon. Incidentally, I discovered that any member of the "new society" working on the train would be far more willing to do a favor as the result of a tip than without one. However, I hasten to add that this young woman was but one of many sincere fanatics whom I met in Russia.

Because of my illness at Peking I had been advised to stop off for a few days at a "rest house" on the railroad, halfway up Manchuria. It had been established by the imperial regime as a kind of sanitarium for officials of the South Manchurian Railroad. I arrived at the place fairly early in the morning and after breakfast followed the usual procedure of visiting the physician's office for directions. The physician told me to undress and sit in the sun for two hours, then to go to my room and lie down and he would send someone to give me a massage. To my amazement and embarrassment it was a woman. She proceeded to her work in the most matter-of-fact way and without any embarrassment. She was a Swede, and spoke German and gave me a great deal of information about the surrounding country. I found out afterward when visiting hospitals in Moscow that the physicians did not cover the middle part of the body when performing an operation Our physicians do, out of consideration, I assume, for the feelings of our women nurses. But since a trained nurse must study human anatomy before being licensed, the Russian practice seemed to me the more rational. However, when I mentioned this to physicians at home, they reacted very negatively.

The rest house was not in a town or even a village. It was isolated and perfect for its purposes. There were horses that one could hire in order to roam about in the neighborhood. "Roam" is the right word to use; for Manchuria then was like our Far West in the mid-nineteenth century. One saw plains in every direction as far as the eye could reach. In all the country round about there was only one road, upon which Chinese peasants from Shantung might be seen almost daily moving north with all their household goods piled on their little carts. The cart was nearly always pulled by a tired horse and to the tail of the cart were tied whatever cattle a peasant might possess. They were fleeing from the civil wars and bandits in the homeland and seeking a haven in which to start life anew. The Chang So-lin government approved of their coming and they were rapidly filling up the country. When the Japanese seized control of Manchuria six years later, they had the government but the Chinese had the land. At that time almost 30,000,000 of them were there.

When I took the train again at the rest house railroad station I was fortunate enough to find on board Mr. Olin Wannamaker, the representative of Lingnan University in Canton. Both Mr. Wannamaker and I had been warned at Harbin that the food on the train might not be all that could be desired, so we had brought with us considerable amounts of tinned food. As a matter of fact the meals on the train were quite good; and when the train arrived at each town most of the peasants from the surrounding country were gathered at the station to sell excellent bread, a good many varieties of cheese, boiled milk, fruits, and cooked vegetables. The prices were amazingly low because a large proportion of the passengers were peasants. We bought a delicious broiled chicken for twenty-five cents. Unlike Russia itself, the region along the Trans-Siberian suffered from no famine conditions, and we fared well throughout the journey.

Except for the gatherings at the stations the journey was pretty monotonous. There was little variety of scenery, the railroad running across tundra as extensive as our western plains and as hot and dusty as ours. I had an amusing but somewhat unfortunate experience on this part of our route. We reached Irkutsk one day about seven in the morning. It had been a hot night. I was thirsty and anxious to get a good drink of bottled water. Now the Russian word for water is "voda" and is easily confused with Vodka. When I entered the station I pointed to bottles on a shelf and said "voda". I hastily lifted the bottle to my mouth and took a long drink. I thought my throat was burned out for good for the bottle contained Vodka which is almost 50 per cent alcohol. A soldier seated near by roared with laughter at my sputtering and discomfiture. He became quite abashed when I returned good for evil by giving him the bottle, which he promptly started to empty and did empty in a remarkably short time.

We arrived at Moscow on scheduled time, doing as well---be it noted---as Mussolini's trains were then supposed to do. I do not know whether it was a unique performance of the Trans-Siberian to arrive on time or whether because of the importance of the Trans-Siberian it always arrived on time. I say this because the transportation system in Soviet Russia was in very bad condition not only in 1925 but nine years later when I visited Russia again. Derailments, breakdowns, collisions with loss of life were quite frequent and usually resulted in a prison sentence for the engineer, who might have been wholly guiltless. Soviet justice always demanded that someone suffer in such a situation. To go upon a railroad journey in either year one simply placed himself in the hands of God and hoped for the best.

It is impossible to follow intelligently events in Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 without some understanding of the philosophy underlying the Communist state. I am dealing with this briefly in order to explain the reflections I drew from my experiences.

In August 1917, Lenin wrote The State and Revolution, descriptive of his concept of the Communist state. With Russian ideologists, Lenin is "always right". According to Lenin, the chief characteristic of the bourgeois, capitalist, democratic state is the existence of two great classes, the exploiting capitalists and the exploited proletariat. Lenin, like Marx, maintained that the state is the product of the class struggle; it is always the dictatorship of the ruling class and cannot be anything else. Since it is absurd to assume that the ruling class in the bourgeois state, the minority of capitalists, will ever voluntarily give up their control and privileges, their downfall can be brought about only by their forcible overthrow by the majority, the proletariat. The proletariat will then become the ruling class and the government will be the dictatorship of the proletariat, only, however, as a transition step to the Communist commonwealth of the future. Until that commonwealth has been realized, the government will need the resolute leadership of a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party, i.e., the Communist Party.

The state can exist only so long as there are classes. The final aim of the proletarian revolution is the creation of a classless society, and the first step in that direction is the destruction of the instrument of capitalist control, private property, and the nationalization of all means of production. It cannot be expected that the transition from capitalism to Communism will be immediate. The proletariat, therefore, will need a state but a state that will "be so organized that it must begin at once to wither away". Lenin did not forecast when the state would "wither away", but merely asserted that in a classless society the state, the instrument of coercion, would have no raison d'être.

This is a very brief and, of course, inadequate description of Lenin's view of the state, a view accepted and maintained by Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Bukharin and the other Fathers. The Fathers were idealists unwilling to make the compromises apparently demanded by the events of subsequent years. All of them save the exile, Trotsky, were "liquidated", while Trotsky was later murdered in Mexico.

I had hardly stepped off the train at Moscow when I made my first acquaintance with one dreadful condition which existed in Russia at that time, namely, the hundreds of thousands of homeless children wandering from place to place. Their parents had been killed in the civil wars between the Red and White Russians or they had been separated from them, in most instances never to see them again. "Bitte, geben Sie mir etwas zu essen" said a little boy to me in excellent German. I gave him some money for which he expressed great gratitude. He belonged to one of the German colonies that had been established in South Russia by Catherine II, about 1780, with the object of providing good farmers whom the Russian peasants might imitate. The Soviet government was making great efforts to collect the children into communities, for they were rapidly becoming wild. Eventually the government succeeded.

I was met at the station by Mr. Harvey Anderson and Mr. Ethan Colton of the American Y.M.C.A., its last two representatives in Russia. Mr. Anderson had been permitted to remain because he was employed by the government as a teacher of physical training. He was very popular as a football coach though he was not allowed to violate Communist principles by arranging matches between teams. These men advised me not to accept the government's invitation to stay at one of its hotels, because I should always be subjected to supervision and espionage. I gladly shared the expenses of their ménage, which contained another American, Alvin J. Miller, now Professor at Kent State University. The Russians who ran the ménage could neither speak nor understand any language but Russian, so we felt free to talk frankly about conditions. Mr. Colton left for home shortly after the close of my visit and Mr. Anderson was later expelled. The only other men with whom I talked freely were the correspondents of American newspapers, most of whom I greatly admired. I afterwards met Walter Duranty in New York. He appeared to have the greatest influence of any of the correspondents with the Soviet government, probably because of the nature of his despatches home-which often resembled bed-time stories. Some years later Mr. Duranty wrote a volume entitled I Write as I Please. That must have described his attitude after his Russian experience. Despite the generally friendly attitude of the Russian authorities to American correspondents, I doubt that any one of them wrote as he pleased while in Russia. Later I also met in Paris William Henry Chamberlin, the representative of the Christian Science Monitor. He appeared to me to be the most analytical of all the correspondents. This may have been partly due to his seven years of residence in Soviet Russia. The correspondent I admired most was Joseph Barnes, who later joined the staff of the New York Herald Tribune.

While in Russia I was taken upon several expeditions arranged by the government bureau in charge of cultural relations with foreign countries. For these expeditions the bureau always provided one of its few automobiles and a man who acted as guide and interpreter. At that time the guides were a pretty poor lot, looking as if they had recently arrived from the slums of big European or American cities. When I visited Russia again a decade later there had been a marked improvement in their appearance intelligence, and subtlety in putting over their propaganda. However, on both occasions it was utterly impossible to make them believe any of the statements I made concerning the condition of workers in the United States.

I asked one of the most intelligent of the Soviet officials I met how true was the belief widely held in the United States that the Soviet regime was dominated by Jews. He laughed the idea to scorn. "Dr. Duggan," he said, "ours was a workingman's revolution. Even our leaders knew little about business, finance, and industry. But the Jews do and they also can speak foreign languages. Now many of the men who visit us from Western Europe and the United States are business men who hope to exploit us. They discuss business questions with our Jews who know how to meet them on their own ground. Then they return home and tell people that the Soviet Revolution was a Jewish affair. The Jews are not in control here and we should not hesitate to liquidate any of them if we found them engaging in wrong practices." I think this was a sound explanation. More than a million of the most able, intelligent and cultured Russians fled from their homeland at the time of the Revolution. The country was largely denuded of intelligence and ability. The Revolution abolished all race distinctions and the Jews, of whom Russia had several millions, received the first opportunity in Russian history to show their constructive capacity. Of the nine Commissars in office at the time three were Jews, a number out of all proportion to the size of the Jewish population.

The first Commissar I visited was Mr. Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, a delightful and cultivated man who despite his culture had joined the Communist Party in the pre-war days. It was he who, when the White Russians were within twenty miles of Leningrad, had helped Trotsky put in underground places of safety the chief treasures of the Hermitage, Russia's great art museum. Mr. Lunacharsky said to me, "Dr. Duggan, I hope you will visit as many of the Rabfaks as your time will permit and report what you think we ought to do with them." The Rabfaks were the Workers' Colleges and I performed my task rather thoroughly in and around Moscow and then reported to him. "Well," he said, "what ought we to do with the Rabfaks?" "Shut them all up," I answered. He laughed and said, "Pretty drastic treatment! Why?" "Because," I answered, "the Rabfaks have no entrance examinations, no tests on the way through, and no final examinations. You say you are building a new social system. The Rabfaks are turning out men to help build it who are wholly incompetent for their jobs. They are drags on the whole movement." Lunacharsky laughed again. "Dr. Duggan," he said, "you have politics in your country and we have politics in ours. Our politics don't admit just now of shutting up the Rabfaks. But I shall emphasize what all foreign educators say about discipline and examinations." In all probability the reports of the foreign educators would have had only slight effect, but it was discovered, particularly after the introduction of the Five Year Plan, that the technicians graduated from these schools were almost worthless. Shortly afterwards the Rabfaks were emptied of their students and the reforms that had been suggested were introduced. When I revisited Russia in 1934 I found the Rabfaks doing a good educational job.

Trotsky was the next Commissar with whom I had an interview. I believe he was called "Commissar of Foreign Trade". He was unquestionably a strong, dynamic, and dominating personality. Mr. Lunacharsky had talked to me in French because he did not know English. I thought I could talk to Trotsky in English because he had lived for a time in New York City (in the Borough of the Bronx) but he preferred to talk in German. Among other duties he was in charge of granting concessions to foreigners, and his talk with me had to do entirely with business relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. He insisted that the economies of the two countries were complementary, since the Soviet Union was a great farm and the United States a great factory, and that the Soviets needed equipment for building railroads, dams, and factories which the United States could supply. He said that Germany would do it if the United States did not, but he preferred the United States and hoped that recognition by the United States would not be deferred much longer.

I think Trotsky was sincere in what he said. He wholeheartedly believed in the principles of the Russian Revolution and hoped they might be successfully extended to all the world. He was not an opportunist like Stalin nor as much of a realist. By the time of Lenin's death (1924) it was obvious to Stalin and other practical-minded men in Moscow that world revolution would have to be indefinitely postponed. Stalin upheld the banner of "communism in one country", i.e. Russia, as a model for the rest of the world to imitate. Practically all the Old Bolshevik leaders sided with Trotsky. But as permanent secretary of the Communist Party Stalin had secured control not only of the party but of the government, and gradually safeguarded his place as dictator. In 1937 he accused the Old Bolsheviks of being Fifth Columnists for a foreign enemy, notably Germany. Most of them were condemned to death and at the same time the army was purged of doubtful adherents. This is usually the way with dictators. Hitler also was compelled to purge the Nazi party of many of his old comrades only a year after his accession to power in 1933.

One of the visits arranged by the bureau that had us in charge was to Prince Yussopof's beautiful estate about fifty miles from Moscow. Prince Yussopof was the nobleman who with some friends invited Rasputin to dine at his palace in Leningrad one night during the war. The friends rid Russia of that sinister figure on that night. His death did not prevent the Russian débâcle which came shortly afterward and for which he was to such a great extent responsible. Yussopof's estate had been turned into a rest house for teachers. It was one of many that the Soviet government had established throughout Russia for people of various vocations, chiefly workers---an admirable policy. I was shown about the estate by the party man in charge and was accompanied by a professor of history. The professor was one of the handsomest men I saw in Europe, tall, heavily built, with a noble beard. I had just come from Japan and was describing the damage done to the docks at Yokohama by the earthquake of 1923. In the midst of our walk a boy hurried up to the party man to say that he was wanted on the telephone for a call from Moscow. He had no time to provide a substitute and was hardly out of sight when the professor said in French, "The Japanese earthquake doesn't compare in its effects with the earthquake which occurred in this country in October, 1917." He then described to me the wretched life he lived, cut off from friends, compelled to teach an interpretation of history he did not believe in, and constantly subject to espionage and insult. I marveled at his willingness to speak so freely to me. I assume that he was so overwhelmed by despair that he simply had to talk as he did for relief. I have often wondered when the poor man was "liquidated", for by the time I returned to Russia practically all of his kind had disappeared.

The Soviet government invited me to visit the U.S.S.R. again in 1934 to discuss the possibility of organizing a summer session at the University of Moscow, the first ever to be held in a Russian university. The program was to be organized for American and English students and teachers, and modeled after American summer sessions. I gave a great deal of time in the winter of 1933-1934 to discussing the project with several American educators and with two representatives of the Soviet Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries who had been sent from Russia to the United States for that purpose. The result was a really fine program of courses designed to afford an understanding of the most important changes that had taken place in Russia since the Revolution, in education, literature, art, and social reform. The courses were to be given in English by Russian professors. Any intelligent foreigner attending them would naturally realize that they would not provide an objective exposition of the subjects considered, but would be heavily weighted in favor of the Communist point of view. Two hundred American and thirty English teachers and students registered for the courses. I went to Russia accompanied by my daughter some three months before the opening day in order to make sure that proper provision had been made to meet such eventualities as American experience indicated might arise. I left Leningrad early in June satisfied that the arrangements for the summer session were adequate and sufficiently well organized.

My daughter and I returned from Russia to England by way of Helsingfors, as the capital of Finland was then known. I encountered the same evidences of distrust and fear that I had observed when entering Russia by way of Poland. The Russian side of the border was lined with barbed wire and guarded by Russian soldiers, and we all had to alight and have our baggage searched to make sure that we were not taking out any forbidden things. A short distance farther on, a similar barbed wire line, guarded by Finnish soldiers, confronted us and again our baggage was searched, this time primarily to prevent the introduction of Communist literature. It is difficult to describe the change in conditions and atmosphere that one experienced in Finland---the cleanliness, the good food, the obviously greater contentment of the people, and the freedom of expression and movement. We remained in Helsingfors only a day and a night but it was a delightful visit. An attractive young man whom I did not know, but who was connected with the steamship line to England, invited us to spend the morning going about the bay in his motor boat, visiting the different islands and stopping at one of them for lunch. In the afternoon we roamed about the really charming little city and left it with regret at the shortness of our stay. The Finns won our hearty admiration, which was greatly increased a few years later by the magnificent fight they made at the time of the outrageous Russian invasion. Nevertheless they are now an ally of our enemies and I see no valid reason why we should not follow the example of Britain and declare them an enemy.

Shortly after my arrival in London I was invited to make an address on my Russian experience at the regular monthly meeting of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. One of the officials of the British Broadcasting Corporation who happened to be present asked me whether I would condense my address into a twenty-minute broadcast. On the day after I delivered the broadcast I received an invitation to lunch from Sidney Webb and his wife, and my good friend Sir William Beveridge, then Director of the London School of Economics, drove me down to their place in the country. The Webbs were at that time the best known supporters in Great Britain of the Soviet regime in Russia. They had invited me to lunch in order to discuss my broadcast, with which they found a great deal of fault. They were a remarkable pair, simple, unaffected and sincere, and I enjoyed my visit. But I have seldom met people who were so naïvely impervious to reasonable argument on the Russian experiment.

As the result of my broadcast on Russia, I also received an invitation from Lady Astor to lunch with some of the people who had accompanied her to Russia several years before. George Bernard Shaw was there as was Lord Lothian, with whom I had long been acquainted. Malcolm Muggeridge, then a chief exponent in England of the Communist peril, was another. I was delighted to meet again young William Astor, with whom I had collaborated a few years previously at the meeting of the Institute of Pacific Relations at Honolulu. But I was particularly glad to meet Mr. Ivan Maisky who was then and has since remained the Russian Ambassador to Great Britain. There was considerable good-natured chaff around the table concerning the exaggerated claims of the new Utopia in Russia.

My reason for being glad to meet Mr. Maisky was the bad news I had received that morning about the Moscow summer session. It appeared that when the American and British teachers and students landed at Leningrad they were met by the two Soviet scholars who had collaborated with me in New York and were told by them that there would be no summer, session. They vouchsafed no reason, but offered to arrange tours about Russia in lieu of the courses. Immediately after the lunch at Lady Astor's I inquired of Mr. Maisky whether he knew the reason for the cancellation of the summer session. He did not, but promised to cable to Moscow at once. However, he received no answer. When I finally reached home I inquired of Mr. Troyanovsky, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, but he could supply no information. Then I wrote directly to the authorities in Moscow and received no acknowledgment of the receipt of my letter. The whole incident was an outrage on the part of the Russian authorities.

Despite my keen disappointment over the outcome of our work for the summer session, I greatly valued my second visit to the Soviet Union because it enabled me to appraise some results of the Soviet experiment. As I walked the streets of Moscow and Leningrad the second time I was struck by the atmosphere of intense activity which prevailed. Building was going on everywhere---building of factories, workmen's houses, the new underground in Moscow and similar important enterprises. Whereas in 1925 Moscow and Leningrad had been largely paved with cobblestones, in 1934 they were to a great extent asphalted. The number of workmen's houses that, had been built was astonishing, and they were superior to the old ones. But as Moscow had less than two million people at the time of the Revolution and by the mid-1930's had nearly four million, the congestion was very great. A person with a room to himself and a family with two rooms were lucky. Privacy is not a privilege highly regarded by Communists and was then almost impossible of attainment in the great cities of Russia.

Whatever may be thought of the machine age in the West, the machine was the god of Russia in 1934. The number of factories that had arisen since 1925 was very large, and they seemed to be provided with the latest machinery. Attached to most factories were technical schools for the training of factory workers and also crèches in which mothers placed their infants while at work. The machine was the instrument by means of which the Communists hoped to realize one of their objectives, namely, to make Russia as nearly as possible a self-sufficient state. They borrowed from the bourgeois countries not only the most recent types of all kinds of machinery but also practices in factory organization, such as piecework, overtime, and bonuses for unusual accomplishment, all of which they had scorned a decade before. Attempts at running factories by councils had been given up. The Soviet government was in a hurry and only results counted. What has been accomplished since the Revolution in the rebuilding of Russian industry is little less than marvelous. In all industries the level of before World War I has been surpassed quantitatively. The best opinion seems to indicate, however, that it has fallen short qualitatively, that at least the consumers' goods produced are of lower standard. The amazing achievement of the Russian armies in World War II has revealed that in both quantity and quality Russia's new capital industries are probably unsurpassed.

The average wage was small, barely sufficient to support the workers upon the low standard of living to which they were accustomed; but the more intelligent and able received higher wages and could live better. What I have said about wages was also true of hours of work. The work-day was legally seven hours, and the week five days. But both these limitations were ignored when time was pressing. Sometimes I came across cases where men, and women also, had worked very long hours.

Then there were the Subotniks. Subotnik means literally Saturday, but the technical meaning is voluntary labor on the rest-day, the sixth day. All good comrades were supposed to devote part of their free day to voluntary work. In the case of the enthusiastic young Communist this was a fact, and it was really an inspiring sight to see groups of them marching in the pouring rain to some factory or public work singing lustily. But human nature in Russia is like human nature everywhere. Most comrades would have been only too glad to enjoy their rest-day undisturbed, and it was true that many performed their Subotniks largely because of social coercion. It did not look well to refuse to give some time, and it was not good policy to have the reputation of doubtful loyalty or enthusiasm. When I was in Moscow in 1934 it was estimated that one hundred thousand people were engaged in Subotniks. I watched them one day working on the new underground. I did not think it very productive labor. They were chiefly young people and apparently looked upon it as a kind of lark. I was told by unbiased non-Communists, however, that in time of stress very hard work was done. Certainly the new subway is a striking monument to Soviet initiative.

Soviet Russia is not a paradise for the workingman. He probably lives very little better than in 1913. Nevertheless, the great mass of workers are strong adherents of the present regime. Why? First, because they are not permitted to know that workers in other countries are any better off. Second, because of the benefits received in the way of educational and recreational opportunities, sickness and unemployment insurance. Third, and most important, because the Russian worker for the first time in his history is treated as a person and not despised. He is no longer harried by the police. He is not only permitted to participate in the administration of government, but he is a privileged member of the government.

It should be understood that Russia cannot be measured according to Western standards: not materially, because its standard of living in almost every respect is low compared with ours; not spiritually, because Russia has been shot through with the Asiatic attitude toward life, in which there has been a mixture of fatalism and mysticism, in which life has been held comparatively cheap, in which amazing hardship has been borne with little complaint, hardship that would have caused revolt in the West. Particularly is it true that the value of the person as an individual is simply not recognized in Russia. Everyone is a social, not an individual, creature, and his life is determined by the dictates of the state.

In the great Cathedral of St. Isaac in Leningrad, which is an anti-religious museum, there is a striking poster depicting the mass of the people, the peasants, supporting upon their bended backs the bourgeoisie, above whom are the aristocracy, and above them the Czar. That picture, so far as the peasants are concerned, is still true to the facts. It is upon the peasantry that the weight of the new regime falls. They support the proletariat and the bureaucracy, and in hard times they suffer most. In the winter of 1932-1933 famine prevailed in the Ukraine and the Kuban. The starving peasants flocked to, the cities, but the passport system was introduced for residents of the cities and the peasants were ordered to go home and till the soil, little if any help being extended to them because of the anger of the government at the results of their partial sabotage. Of course the people in the cities suffered also, the déclassés, i.e. the bourgeoisie, most. However, I was always irritated in the years following Mussolini's March on Rome when attending social functions at home, to hear violent denunciations of Bolshevism, coupled with admiration for the accomplishments of Fascism. The ideas were expressed, of course, by the socially elect who were afraid of losing their property in some way as the result of the increasing demands and influence of the workers. Certainly Mussolini's objective had little or nothing in common with the American social ideal of which these people were supposed to be adherents. My irritation at these people was always equalled, however, by disdain for the sentimentalists who accepted as truth Bolshevik propaganda describing Communist Russia as a heaven for workers and peasants.

Under the first Five Year Plan the farms had been collectivized, and farming organized as a large-scale industry with the use of machinery. But only in 1934 did the total crop equal that of 1913. Collectivization had not measured up to the expectations of the Communists. The Kolkholz (collective farm) I visited was admirably organized and administered. The people seemed well fed and fairly well housed. The two schools were filled with bright children, and a goodly number of cattle were in evidence. The peasants in that Collective were apparently content with their situation. But it must not be forgotten that as a guest of the government I was naturally brought to one of the most successful Collectives.

In the dictatorship of the proletariat, aristocrats, bourgeoisie, clergymen and anyone else profiting by the labor of others were disfranchised and had no political rights. This restriction was removed by the Constitution of 1936, but the new regime is essentially a government of workers and peasants administered by Communists. The Soviet government and the Communist party are one and the same thing, however much the government may attempt to disguise the fact. About three million Communists are today (1943) governing one hundred and seventy million non-Communists in Soviet Russia. Inside the party itself iron discipline prevails and no dissent of any kind from the decisions of the Party Congress is permitted. Within the never-to-be-forgotten limitation that no criticism of the Communist regime itself is permitted, great freedom of criticism of local government, industrial conditions, and bureaucratic inefficiency is permitted to workers and peasants. This is the "democracy" about which the admirers of the Soviet system in foreign countries grow lyrical. But similar criticism from former bourgeoisie or aristocrats would be considered counterrevolutionary and would mean prison, Siberia, or death. As a matter of fact members of those classes avoid talking to a foreigner even when he has letters of introduction, for the espionage system is as ubiquitous as under the autocracy and far more efficient.

On one occasion in 1925, I had been invited to Sunday supper at a bourgeois home in an apartment house. I was admitted by a man who acted as concierge. He had owned the house under the old regime, but now was only permitted to have a small apartment in return for his service as janitor. The bourgeois whom I was visiting lived with his mother in their small apartment. He had no job and they were dependent upon the money they received from abroad as the result of the sale of jewelry that had been smuggled out by friends. What they would do when that resource was exhausted they did not know. While we were talking I heard a man with a magnificent voice singing in the court below and threw down a coin. Immediately my host and his mother showed that they were greatly disturbed. They said someone would surely report to the authorities out of which window the coin had been thrown to the singer, a former army officer who could get no work. "But," I said, "the man will starve if no one helps him." "Yes," my host answered, "but the help must be given surreptitiously. It is expected, and intended, that all bourgeoisie shall starve." Whether that is what actually happened to my host and his mother I do not know. In 1934 I could find no trace of them. However, many things other than starving might have happened in the interval of nine years. Nevertheless, I had unconsciously done an imprudent thing.

In 1934 William Bullitt was our Ambassador to Russia, the first American Ambassador since the overthrow of the Czar1st regime in 1917. I knew him slightly at home and paid a courtesy call upon my arrival in Moscow. Certain acquaintances in England had asked me to give some helpful things to friends of theirs in Moscow upon my arrival there. When I mentioned the fact to Mr. Bullitt he urged me not to do it. "As soon as you left," he said, "those people would be visited by an agent of the OGPU, to discover why they had been called on by a foreigner. It would probably get them into trouble."

Though more stores were open than during my first visit, and though they were much better stocked, the Russians still presented a pretty drab appearance from the standpoint of dress. Practically no Russian man or woman wore a hat. Men wore caps; women, berets. To be well dressed meant that one was a foreigner. In 1925 it was comme il faut to disdain to be well dressed. The sincere Communist looked upon good dress as bourgeois and most of the rest of the people had none to put on. But in 1934 even Communists aspired to bourgeois dress. At the opera house and theatre, filled almost exclusively with proletarians, silk stockings of inferior quality, an incongruous array of colored shawls and shirtwaists, and necklaces of great variety gave evidence that the extra money made by piece-work and overtime was used by many women for personal adornment. Human nature will always conquer ideology. I was much interested in watching the way the women stared at my daughter's clothes when we attended the theatre or opera though she had intentionally worn very modest apparel. Because of her silk stockings and good shoes they regarded her legs with particular interest when we walked in the foyer while they munched their apples or bread. Even many of the Russian men tried to make a better appearance in dress. However, I made the great mistake on the night of my arrival in Moscow of attending a dinner given in my honor in a dinner coat. It was the only time I used it!

It is hardly possible to overestimate the spiritual transformation that has taken place in Russia since the Revolution. The old culture in practically every aspect was scrapped and a deliberate effort made to produce a new human creature. Nowhere did the Communists lose sight of their prime objective or the determination to realize it at any cost---a classless society in which there will be no exploitation of men.

It is unnecessary to speak at length about the accomplishments of the Soviets in spreading education among all ages from infancy to adulthood and about their use of the most modern devices, like the radio and the cinema, for educational purposes. When World War I broke out in 1914 illiteracy in Russia amounted to 70 per cent; in 1939 it was 18.8 per cent. In 1914 there were about 8 million pupils in Russian elementary and secondary schools; according to the census of 1939 there were almost 32 million. At the start of World War I there were slightly more than 100,000 in institutions of higher education; by World War II, in the neighborhood of 600,000. In 1939 almost 90 per cent of the population with a secondary education and 70 per cent with a higher education were under 40 years of age. This means that they had received their education and their ideals of life under the Soviet regime. But it is worthy of mention that between 1925 and 1934 ill-considered experiments in elementary education were discarded. The Dalton Plan and the Project Methods went the way of the Dewey system and of other systems, and the Russians stabilized their elementary education according to their own ideas. All children were taught the same things: boys like girls were taught sewing and girls like boys manual training. The teacher regained his authority and, except for a greater freedom from discipline, a visitor to a Russian school would see little difference in methods from those of the West. Pedagogy made great strides both in materials and methodology. I visited an Institute of Children's Books which was quite entrancing. The books were well printed and attractively illustrated, and in content and structure seemed based upon sound principles of child psychology. The intelligent teacher in charge was showing lantern slides of places in foreign countries to an excited group of children. When his talk was finished he lent them books dealing with the places described.

I have already stated that the machine is the god of the Soviets. This is reflected in their educational system. From beginning to end, but particularly in secondary and higher education, applied science and technical subjects almost monopolize attention. The humanistic subjects occupy a very inferior place. During my last visit to the U.S.S.R. I asked a young woman student of engineering who spoke English to let me see her program of work for the current semester. There were 160 hours each of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and mechanics, 120 hours of "philosophy", and 40 of foreign language. When I asked her whether she was studying the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle or Descartes and Leibnitz, she answered, "None of that nonsense, I am studying Leninism." The girl was thin and obviously was working too hard. She was an enthusiastic Communist and in addition to her studies performed her Subotniks faithfully. When I asked her whether she studied history or literature, she told me that she took them as voluntary subjects at night---when she was too tired to appreciate them. Education, of course, was free and at that time students received stipends from the government in addition to board and lodging in dormitories. But many also had outside work, for family or other reasons, and these students were obviously overworked, as are most such students in the West. A recent government decree provides that hereafter only elementary education will be free---another indication of the move away from the "classless society", despite adherence to ideology.

The Russian university in our sense of the word disappeared in the Revolution. The First Moscow University consisted of a group of Instituts, chiefly of a scientific and technical character. Not all Institutes were part of or affiliated with the University; for example, the Institute of Law was not. Some of these Institutes were doing remarkable work. Probably nowhere in the world were more fruitful studies being made in anthropology than under the Institute of Anthropology in the distant parts of the U.S.S.R. In other branches of science valuable discoveries were made with the most inadequate equipment of books and apparatus. Everybody in the academic world is familiar with the fine work done by Pavlov in the Institute of Psychology in Leningrad. In 1934 I had the good fortune to have a talk with that remarkable old scholar of eighty-five, who was still to be found daily at the Institute supervising the work of a group of chosen disciples. In public health great progress had been made and the sanatoria, particularly in the South, were among the finest in the world.

But I doubt whether the physicians graduated from Soviet Institutes were as well trained as those of the West. In fact, despite the excellent work done in several of the fields of science and the undoubted scholarship of some of the professors, I do not believe that higher education even in science could be compared in the mid-1930's with that of the West. But when I mentioned these views to groups of students they expressed the greatest incredulity. Of course in the social sciences and humanistic branches---history, economics, politics, sociology, and philosophy---a research student going to Russia would quickly discover how the material of these subjects can be pressed into the service of Marxian dialectics. Nevertheless, I believe that whatever our political relations with Russia are to be, our educational relations should be the same as with other countries. Intellectually Russia is partly in darkness due to the ignorance resulting from isolation. News of the outside world is colored to suit the views of the government. I am convinced that the restoration of Russia to more reasonable views of Western attitudes toward human affairs will be greatly facilitated by the visits of our teachers and students to her institutions and of her teachers and students to our institutions. I do not think it would be unduly difficult to prevent efforts at propaganda. It is along lines such as these that cooperation between Russia and the West must be made, for to the observer who has information from those unfriendly to the Soviets as well as from those in government circles, there seems to be no prospect of an early change in the present regime.

The school is the chief instrument of the Communists for the perpetuation of their regime. From the kindergarten to the university, incessant propaganda is carried on in the principles of Communism and in instilling atheism and hatred of the capitalist regime and all it stands for. Every subject of study is interpreted from the Communist standpoint and any other point of view is presented not for purposes of scientific investigation and comparison but of ridicule. Should any teacher of history, politics, economics, sociology or philosophy attempt to interpret his subject from any other than a Communist standpoint, he would lose his place at once. There can be hardly any doubt that in this campaign the Communists are meeting with a large degree of success with the rising generation. This is partly due to the psychological law of repetition. It is even more due to the character of the school and university population. There are not enough seats. for all applicants for admission, especially to the universities; hence preference is given first to children of the proletariat,. then of the peasants, then of other people, and few of the last can be admitted. Not the least hard of the many discriminations suffered by the remnants of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie is the knowledge that their children are growing up with only so much of the heritage of culture as they themselves can impart. The most tragic people in Russia are the intellectuals who suffered persecution and exile under the Czarist regime for the sake of liberty of thought and its expression and who find themselves today the chief suspects. under the present regime.

In no field of culture has the early Soviet attitude changed more than in religion. That change was not due to any lessening in antagonism toward theistic religion, but to the lessened fear of the Church. The Church had been regarded as the greatest bulwark of the old regime and was to be harried out of existence. The results of ten years of persecution were evident during my visit in 1934. Moscow was formerly known as the city of forty times forty churches---undoubtedly an exaggeration. In 1934 there were but one hundred and forty-six left and fifty of these had been turned into museums and headquarters for Komsomols (Young Communists). But the flaring sign that I saw in Red Square in 1925, "Religion is the opiate of the people", had disappeared. The Anti-Religious Museum, instead of being the source of merely ridiculous propaganda, had been turned into a place for scientific study of the evolution of religion.

To what extent religion has disappeared from the lives of the mass of the people is a question that only time can answer. Every instrument of propaganda has been employed to discredit it and to ridicule the priest and the nun. In the Collective which I visited a young peasant showed me with pride his house which was unusually clean and attractive. In the corner of the main room were a number of ikons. "These are for my mother," he said, "I have no use for them." I attended a service one Sunday in a village church and was quite surprised to find it about half full. It was evidently baptism day and, though the majority of the congregation was composed of old and middle-aged people, there were some fifteen mothers who had brought their infants to be baptized. This showed that religion was not wholly dead, for it took courage to oppose the prevailing attitude. Neither was superstition dead, as was made evident by the kissing of the ikons that took place in the church after the service. This mixed attitude was well illustrated when one visited Lenin's tomb. There the peasants from the country would move respectfully around the rail separating the body of Lenin from the rest of the red chamber inside the tomb and then, upon leaving the tomb, would cross the Square to enter very reverently the most sacred religious shrine in all Russia, the "Iverskaya". Since 1934, improvements in the Red Square have necessitated demolition of the shrine.

When the Czarist police state fell in 1917, religion was almost extirpated. Its sanction of morality likewise disappeared and the early years of the Soviet regime were characterized by much licentiousness. Faced by intervention, civil war, and famine, the Soviet leaders, none of whom approved of the prevailing license, had little time to devote to moral problems. It was the existing immorality that permitted the myth of the nationalization of women to be accepted in the West, and with it the belief that the Soviets wished to destroy the family. With greater stabilization came a sterner attitude toward immorality. I found the Soviet leaders were Puritans. They frowned upon drunkenness, debauchery, and graft as great obstacles to the realization of their objectives. As in America, they introduced Prohibition, but they soon repealed the law because of the need for revenue. I saw but two drunken men during my second visit.

Divorce had been made easy. I visited the marriage and divorce bureau to see how it worked. It was merely a matter of filling out forms, whether one wanted to be married or divorced. Probably the facility of divorce, as well as the condemnation of sexual license, may account for the diminution of the latter. In the case of divorce the father of children must, according to law, give a certain percentage of his wages to their support. But Russia has been to a considerable extent a land of migrants, and an inefficient administration sometimes had difficulty in following the changes of residence of divorced men. As far as my personal observation enabled me to judge, there was very little danger of the disappearance of the family as an institution. Family life appeared to be about the same as in the past. The peasant did not beat his wife as much as formerly, partly because he did not get drunk so often but chiefly because the law emancipated woman from the status of little more than a beast of burden and placed her upon an equality with men in every relationship of life.

Children, moreover, were much freer in their attitude toward parents; But the family picnics that one saw along riverbanks and lakesides seemed to indicate about the same solidarity as in the West.

In the arts also the Soviets have gradually receded from their early extremism. The traditions of excellence of the old regime again govern the stage. There is no theatre, opera, or ballet in the West to compare in excellence and magnificence with the Russian. Even the most insignificant parts in a drama are played by real artists. The staging, the equipment, the lighting are wonderful. And this was even true in 1934 whether one attended the Moscow Art Theatre, where the older dramatic tradition held and where the seventy-year-old Stanislavsky still reigned, or the more modern and simple Kamerny Theatre supervised by Tairov. Nothing could have been more stimulating than the two Children's Theatres that I attended, at one of which I saw a splendid performance of "Tom Sawyer". In the early years after the Revolution most of the plays were purely Communistic propaganda, excellently staged and performed, but made to order. That could not last forever. The best of the propaganda plays, like "Red Bread" and "Fear", continued to be performed for a decade or more, and that they still had their effect was evident by the thunderous applause that always greeted the success of the Communist hero; but there had been a steady drift toward other subjects for plays, and toward the older dramas like the "Cherry Orchard", which was performed during my second visit. The rapt attention given by the proletarian audiences not only at the theatre but at such operas as "Prince Igor" and "Lohengrin", would put to shame audiences in the West. The people forgot their troubles.

What has been said about revitalizing the drama is equally true of the novel and the poem. In the 1920's Rapp, the official organization whose approval was needed in order to secure a hearing for a new book, was practically in absolute control. The result was an output of novels which became so stereotyped that no one read them. In 1932 Rapp was disbanded and a literature of greater verisimilitude came into being.

In one field of spiritual life, namely, intellectual freedom, the Soviets have not changed their position. Despite the new Constitution of 1936 restrictions are still enforced against freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of teaching, if criticism of Communism or of the Soviet regime is undertaken. That is regarded as counterrevolutionary. Whereas ten years' imprisonment is the maximum penalty for any other crime, including murder, death is the penalty for counterrevolution. Hence it seldom raised its head.

I had felt for some time during my second visit that I was free from one form of government repression, namely, espionage; and then an incident happened which caused me to doubt. I felt very tired one afternoon and quietly slipped out of the hotel and walked to the park under the shadow of the Kremlin, where I enjoyed watching the children play. When my daughter later came down stairs to go out, the manager asked pleasantly, "Isn't your father going out with you today?" "He is out," answered my daughter. "He is out, where has he gone?" said the manager obviously disturbed. "I don't know," answered my daughter. "But he may get lost, or something might happen to him." Obviously, the hotel people were quite concerned, and they appeared much relieved upon my return. My daughter and I had been accustomed to going out together and it was an easy matter to keep tab on us if that was what was wanted. But it was the first time I was made aware that my movements were watched.

A very different experience brought me again into touch with government espionage, this time of an undoubted character. I had learned soon after my arrival in Moscow that the ablest foreign representative there was the German Ambassador, Baron von der Schulenburg. I had received in Germany letters of introduction to various people in Moscow, some one of whom must have spoken about me to the Ambassador, for my daughter and I soon after our arrival received an invitation to lunch at the Embassy. It must be remembered that the time was about fifteen months after Hitler had become Chancellor, as the result chiefly of his anti-Communist campaign. After we entered the drawing room and had been greeted by the Ambassador, he said, "Come over here to the window. Do you see that man in the window of the house opposite? Either he or someone else is always stationed there to report who visits this Embassy."

The result of the censorship which prevailed in Russia was that the mass of people and even the intelligentsia were ignorant of the true meaning of what was taking place outside of their own country. They were kept fairly well informed by the press, but the facts were presented in such a way that they focused on one conclusion---the superiority of the Communist regime. This led to a real and widely spread belief in Russian superiority. While in Leningrad I gave a lecture in the Hall of Science to those who could understand English. It was entitled, "The Psychology of the American". I began my lecture by saying, "We Americans have unquestionably been boasters. We have told other peoples of our great achievements and assured them that to improve their condition they had only to imitate us. Then came the economic depression of 1929. We learned the virtue of humility and bequeathed all our boastfulness to you Russians." They laughed heartily and applauded. After all, it was a well educated audience and though they too were pretty well doped with propaganda, they surmised that a good deal of it was mere braggadocio.

My observations and experiences in Russia during 1934 convinced me that once more history was repeating itself. In 1917 we witnessed a tremendous upheaval in human affairs in which old traditions, old values, old attitudes toward life were all thrown into the discard. Only seventeen years had passed and already some of the fundamentals according to which men must live in order to survive, together with some of the evils resulting from the weaknesses of human nature, were slowly regaining recognition. In industry, in education, in administration, in diplomacy, discarded practices were being resumed. Many evils had been extirpated, and certainly many benefits destroyed. Communist Russia was slowly receding from extremism. But Russia will never again be anything like what it was before the Revolution. Neither will the capitalist West, for Russia has given an impetus to state control that is being felt in every corner of the globe. I do not want to give the idea that the Russian Communists had by 1934 relinquished their objectives. Where they yielded it was from necessity, not desire. If the world revolution had a minor place in their program it was not only because they found it did not pay, but also because they had convinced themselves that as capitalist society was in process of decay, they had but to wait for the realization of their objective. By 1934 they were firmly entrenched in power. The party numbered less than three million, and though undoubtedly some self-seekers were found in it, the partyworker's enthusiasm, determination, and ruthlessness were maintained by the difficulty experienced in becoming a member, by the strict discipline enforced, and by the periodic purgings that took place to get rid of slackers. Not only the men at the top, but the leaders below in the ranks were sincere and devoted. They were all overworked. They were all trying to do too much in too short a time. The result was a great deal of inefficiency in administration. Promises were not kept, commitments were not honored, delays were interminable. But I believe these faults were due not to insincerity in promising, but to attempting more than was humanly possible.

Moreover, they still had the faith of religious fanatics. I discussed their ideals with some of their intellectual leaders, pointing out that other great idealistic movements such as Christianity, the Reformation, and the French Revolution were of necessity seriously modified with the passage of time. Their answer was that those movements never got down to fundamentals, that their leaders, unacquainted with the philosophy of economic determinism, were unaware that the profit motive was at the bottom of practically all human evils. I discussed especially their belief that they were transforming human nature. I pointed to the illicit trading and speculation which were quite general in Russia, and they answered that seventeen years were a very short time to eradicate such entrenched evils. I asked whether they expected such human traits as ambition and pride and envy and hate to disappear, and they answered in the negative, but insisted that they could be directed to better purposes. I asked whether they did not believe that, generally speaking, those endowed with superior talents would eventually gain control. They answered that we in the West confused individualism, which they despised, with individuality, which they approved. As an instance, they pointed to the fact that as soon as they discover superior musical or artistic talent in a child they withdraw him from ordinary education to receive special training. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that a new governing class was already in process of development. The technician and bureaucrat of high rank, because of the compelling need for their services, form the new aristocracy who receive higher wages better housing and other privileges. Lip service to Lenin's ideal is still the order of the day, but Leninism is more honored in the breach than in the observance.

The contradiction between theory and practice is too flagrant to be ignored even among Russians doped with propaganda. Stalin, who now is the one "always right", has explained the discrepancy. It is due, he maintains, to the capitalistic environment of Russia and to the activities of foreign spies and saboteurs. However, Stalin insists that the first stage in the history of the Soviet Union, namely, the liquidation of the exploiting classes, is over and that the Soviet Union can now proudly march forward to the realization of the principle of integral Communism: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Can it be done? Already the principle is interpreted, "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his work," i.e., his accomplishment. Communism has accomplished some great things, but the answer to the question will probably be determined by the issue of the war and conditions which prevail at its close.

I have stated that the Soviets were in a hurry to realize their objectives. This perennial haste had a profound effect upon their foreign policy. As already mentioned, it was resolved to begin in 1928 an intensive scheme of industrialization under the Five Year Plan. For its success peace with the outside world was essential. Japan was an ever-present potential enemy, but nevertheless, the Soviets wished to avoid war with Japan if possible. They knew they were not ready. Part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad still had not been doubletracked, and the munitions plants in Siberia were by no means complete.

Until the rise of Hitler, Russia was the strongest European advocate of disarmament and of the release of the defeated nations from the restrictions of the Versailles Treaty. From the date of the Rapallo Treaty with Germany in 1922 she regarded Germany as her one friend among the great powers and was loud in her denunciation of the imperialistic victors of Versailles. Hitler's success in a campaign directed against the Communist peril changed all that. Hence occurred the complete reorientation in 1934 of Soviet foreign policy toward cooperation with France and her allies of the Little Entente, whom Russia had regarded as her worst enemies a decade before. The Soviet leaders were realists. To them disarmament now meant German rearmament, and a rearmed Germany the Soviets then considered as great a menace to them as to France. In the case of war with Japan a French alliance would in all probability immobilize an enemy in the West. In 1917, the Soviets announced that they had broken completely with the diplomacy of the past. In 1934, they were leaders in that same diplomacy.

Russia under the Czarist regime was a great land mass with but inadequate outlets to the sea. Russian foreign policy had for one of its main objectives securing more seacoast, especially on warm waters. As a result of the first World War and the Communist Revolution, Russia lost immense territories through the erection of Poland, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania as independent states. Later Bessarabia was taken by Rumania. All these territories had seacoasts and Russia became more landlocked than ever. The Soviets were never reconciled to their territorial sacrifice and waited for a favorable opportunity to recoup their loss. The opportunity arrived when it became increasingly evident that the relations between Germany and the Western Powers, France and Great Britain, would end in conflict. Both sides started to bid for Russian support. The Anglo-French negotiations were carried on with obvious distrust of Russia and with considerable reluctance. The fact is that the conservatives of England and France would have been glad at that time to divert Hitler into a conflict with Russia and thereby become rid of both the Nazi and Communist menaces. Germany had no more faith in Russia than did England and France, but was actuated solely by the needs of the moment and offered greater and more immediate gains. With German acquiescence the Soviets coerced Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania into union with the U.S.S.R. When Germany attacked Poland in the summer of 1939, the Soviet Union in the manner of Catherine II united with Germany in its partition. Then in true imperialist fashion it demanded the cession of strategic parts of Finland and when the demand was refused began war upon that country. It was a far cry from the ideals of 1917.

The agreement Hitler made with Stalin was not of long duration. Stalin probably entered into it to enable Russia to complete the rearmament which he believed might be necessary to fight whichever side would be victorious. Hitler had entered into it so as to be relieved of that nightmare of the German General Staff, a war on two fronts. Secured on his rear, Hitler smashed his way through western Europe, failing only to conquer Britain. The loot he secured was enormous, but he needed many additional raw materials and minerals, especially oil. He fixed his eyes upon Syria, the terminus of the Mosul oil fields in Turkey, but the British forestalled him by occupying Syria. It was essential that he secure, somehow, the necessary additional quantities of oil and raw materials. In Mein Kampf he had already stated that these could be obtained in the Caucasus and the Ukraine.

On June 22, 1941 Hitler treacherously attacked his "friend" Stalin without warning. Stalin immediately became the ally of Great Britain whom he had sold out to Germany less than two years before, a sell-out which had resulted in so much ruin in the West. The Russian soldiers showed unusual bravery and the Russian commanders remarkable ability. It is true that in a few months the German armies had smashed their way to Leningrad, Moscow, and later Stalingrad, but they captured none. Nor did they realize their boast to destroy the Russian armies. As Czar Nicholas I said in the Crimean War, they had immense difficulty in fighting Général Janvier and Général Février.

The Russian campaign was a godsend to Great Britain and its new ally, the United States. They are furnishing aid to Russia to the limit of their capacity in their own interest and in that of the world generally, and in the meantime are preparing for the final showdown with Hitler. In this they should receive the enthusiastic support of all lovers of individual freedom and national independence. Many ultra-conservative Americans, however, have insisted that while we must aid Russia to win the war we must be on our guard against her at the peace table. No war was ever won by an alliance founded on distrust.

If harmony and unity are maintained among the chief members of the United Nations until victory has been won, all of them will want to meet the desires of their fellows to as great an extent as possible in the ensuing peace which, as is usually the case after a great war, will be a compromise peace. It is to be hoped that Russia will be willing to implement the second of the Four Freedoms, freedom of worship, which Great Britain and the United States have so much at heart. She has not only given evidence of a real desire to do that but, of even greater importance, she announced, on May 22, 1943, the abolition of the Comintern, the organization devoted to the spread of the world revolution within other countries. As the fear of the Bolshevisation of their countries was the chief reason for support of the Nazis by people in other nations, the abolition of the Comintern was a great force in strengthening unity among the United Nations. At the same time, one of the principles of the Atlantic Charter, to which the United States is committed, provides that each nation shall have the right freely to decide upon its own form of government. It is to be assumed that the United States sincerely believes in that principle and expects to see it realized at the peace table. For Americans now to doubt Russian sincerity or for Russians now to doubt American sincerity is to endanger the survival of freedom in all its forms.