Raymond Robins Own Story

in conversations, and negotiations with the government of Lenin. Throughout that period he saw Lenin personally three times (on an average) a week. Incidentally, the degree of eagerness felt by the Allied and American governments to make Lenin's acquaintance and to learn his actual character and his actual purpose, good or bad, may be judged from the fact that during all those months Col. Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross was the only Allied or American officer who ever actually had personal conferences with Lenin. Lenin speaks English fluently. He was talking one day about Russia's industrial backwardness and he made a saying which Robins now calls especially to mind. Russia's backwardness in industry is a grave handicap to Russian Socialism. Russia is poorly prepared for the socialist experiment. Lenin knew this. Whatever else he may be, he is a man of knowledge, of great knowledge, a laborious student and scholar. He was speaking of the prospects of Socialism in Russia, and he said: "The flame of the Socialist revolution may die down here. But we will keep it at its height till it spreads to countries more developed. The most developed country is Germany. When you see a Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies at Berlin, you will know that the proletarian world revolution is born." We see that Council to-day, and we see Allied and American diplomacy considering it and striving, in one way and another, to deal with it. That is why Colonel Robins is especially moved to speak at this moment. He saw the diplomatic methods which failed to deal successfully with Bolshevism at Petrograd and Moscow, and he feels that he has every reason of practical experience to believe that they will equally fail at Berlin and at Budapest and at Munich and at every other place where they may be tried. The failure at Petrograd and at Moscow was complete. The United States went away from Petrograd and from Moscow diplomatically vanquished. Colonel Robins ventures to state the fundamental reason for our discomfiture. But, before stating that reason, I must, in one respect, state him. He is the most anti-Bolshevik person I have ever known, in way of thought; and I have known him for seventeen years. When he says now that in his judgment the economic system of Bolshevism is morally unsound and industrially unworkable, he says only what I have heard him say in every year of our acquaintance since 1902. He was living then at a settlement in Chicago called the Chicago Commons. It had an open forum called, I think I remember, the Free Floor. On that Free Floor, and in little halls on North Clark Street, and in all sorts of other places, Robins and I heard all sorts of Bolshevik oratory in the Chicago of the early innocent twentieth century. We did not need to wait for the developments of the year 1919 in order to know that Bolshevism, after all, was not invented during the Great War by the German General Staff as a war measure. We heard Bolshevism in Chicago, all of it,the Dictatorship of the Proletariate, the Producers' Republic, the Election of Legislators by Industries, the Abolition of All Classes Except the Working-class-absolutely all of it, in the oratory of sincere and eloquent fanatics almost two decades ago. And it existed long before we heard it. " --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.