AS far as the American government is concerned, Russia does not exist. Its rulers have been outlawed, its diplomatic representatives are stopped at the frontier, American citizens are warned that if they go to Russia they do so at their own risk and must not count upon Washington to come to their assistance if they should get into difficulties.But, geographically speaking, Russia occupies oneseventh of all the dry land of our planet, it is twice as large as the whole of Europe and three times as large as our own country and it has as many inhabitants as the four biggest countries of Europe combined.Yet we have a minister in Monrovia and in Addis Ababa, but none in Moscow.

For all this there must be a reason. This reason, outwardly seen, is a political one.In reality it is of a decidedly geographic origin, for the Russian state, more than any other country I can think of, is a product of its physical background.It has never been quite able to make up its mind whether it wanted to be a part of Europe or of Asia.These mixed emotions caused a conflict of civilizations, and this conflict of civilizations is responsible for the present condition of affairs.All of which I hope to make clear with the help of a very simple map.

But first of all let us try to answer the question, is Russia a European nation or an Asiatic one?For the sake of argument suppose that you belonged to the tribe of the Chukchi and were living on the shores of the Bering Strait and that you did not like the life you were leading(for which I would not blame you, for it is pretty poor pickings in that frozen corner of eastern Siberia)and suppose that you decided you would follow Horace Greeley's advice and go west. And suppose that you were not much of a mountaineer and decided to stick to the flat plains of your childhood days.Well, you could walk west for a couple of years without any hindrances except the nuisance of being forced to swim across a dozen very wide rivers.In the end you would of course find yourself face to face with the Ural Mountains.But these Ural Mountains, which on all maps are shown as the dividing line between Asia and Europe, are not really much of an obstacle, for the first Russian explorers who moved into Siberia(fugitives from justice but elevated to the dignity of“explorers”as soon as they had found something valuable)carried their boats across the Urals;and you try to Carry a boat across the Rockies or the Alps!

After leaving the Urals, another trek of half a year or so would bring you to the Baltic. You would therefore have wandered from the Pacific to the Atlantic(for the Baltic after all is merely a branch of the Atlantic)without ever having left fairly flat country.And all that country would have been part of a plain which covers almost one-third of Asia and one-half of Europe(for it connects with the great German plain which only stops when it reaches the North Sea)and which suffers from one tremendous physical disadvantage, in that it looks out upon the Arctic Sea.

That was the curse of the old Russian Empire, which during hundreds of years spent most of its blood and treasure upon costly and useless efforts to reach“warm water”;and it is one of the greatest handicaps of the U. S.S.R.,the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(the political successors to the ancient and defunct house of Romanov)which is not unlike a structure consisting of eighty floors and eight thousand rooms, but with no other means of entrance or exit than two little windows connecting with the fire-escape of the third floor rear.

You are accustomed to think of our own Repubic as one of enormous proportions, compared to such funny little countries as France or England. But this plain, which flies the Russian flag from one end to the other, is forty times as large as France and one hundred and sixty times as large as England and three times as big as Europe, and it contains one-seventh of all the land of our entire planet.Its main river, the Ob, is as long as the Amazon.Its second biggest river, the Lena, is as long as the Missouri.Of its lakes and inland seas, the Casp-ian in the west is as large as Lakes Superior, Huron, Michigan and Erie combined.The Aral Sea in the center is four thousand square miles larger than Lake Huron while the Baital Lake in the east is almost twice as large as Lake Ontario.

The mountain peaks in the south, which cut this plain off from the rest of Asia, rise to a height which compares well with the highest summits of our own continent, for Mt. McKinley in Alaska is 20,300 feet and Mt.Elbruz in the Caucasus is 18,200 feet.The coldest spot on the surface of the earth is found in north-eastern Siberia, and the part of the plain that lies well within the Arctic Circle is as large as France, England, Germany and Spain put together.

In every possible way this region encourages extremes. No wonder therefore that the character of the people who inhabit these steppes and tundras has been so very definitely influenced by their natural surroundings and that they think and act according to a system or pattern which would be considered grotesque in any other part of the world.No wonder that for centuries they were able to practice a most devout form of piety and then suddenly could drop all ideas of God and banish Him and His name from even the curriculum of their schools.No wonder that for hundreds of years they were willing to submit to the rule of a man whom they considered infallible and divinely inspired, to arise one day and destroy him, and thereupon accept the tyranny of an impersonal economic doctrine which may promise to bring them great blessings in the future but which for the moment is quite as cruel and relentless and autocratic as any Czar has ever dared to be.

The Romans had apparently never heard of Russia. The Greeks who went to the Black Sea for their grain(remember the Story of the Golden Fleece?)just as we do today had there encountered certain tribes of wild men whom they called the“mare-milkers”and who, judging by a few pictures on vases that have come down to us, may well have been the ancestors of the modern Coss-acks.But when the Russians made their definite appearance upon the horizon of history, they lived in the Square formed by the Carpathian Mountains and the Dniester in the south, the Vistula in the west and the Pripet marshes and the Dnieper in the north and east.To the north, in the Baltic plains, lived their cousins, the Lithuanians and the Letts and the Prus sians, for the latter, who have given their name to the leading German power of modern times, were originally a Slavic tribe.To the east of them lived the Finns who are now restricted to the territory that lies between the Arctic, the White Sea and the Baltic, and to the south there were Celts and Germans or a mixture of both.

A little later, when the Germanic tribes began their wanderings through central Europe, they found it convenient whenever they were in need of servants to raid the encampments of their northern neighbors. For they were a docile race and accepted whatever Fate brought them with a shrug of the shoulders and a silent,“Well, such is life!”

These northern neighbors seem to have had a name for themselves which to the Greeks sounded something like“Sclaveni”. The dealers in human flesh, who raided the region of the Carpathians to stock up on their living merchandise, used to say that they had caught so many Slavs or slaves, until gradually the word“slave”became a trade-name for all those unfortunate creatures who were the legal property of another. That those same Slavs or slaves should eventually have developed into the largest and most powerful centralized state of the modern world is one of the great jokes of history, but unfortunately, the joke is on us.If our immediate ancestors had only been a little more far-sighted, we would never have found ourselves in our present predicament.As I shall try to explain to you in a very few words.

The Slavs lived peacefully in their little triangle. They bred profusely.Soon they needed more land.The road to the west was blocked by powerful German tribes.Rome and Byzantium closed the gateways that led to the fleshpots of the Mediterranean.There only remained the east and so eastward they flocked in search of further territory.They crossed the Dniester and the Dnieper and did not stop until they reached the Volga, the Big River, the mother of all rivers, as the Russian peasant calls it, because with its superabundant fish-supply it was able to feed hundreds of thousands of people.

This Volga, the biggest of all European rivers, takes its origin way up in the north among the low hills of the central Russian plateau, those same hills which offered such splendid opportunities for the building of fortresses that most of the early Russian cities are to be found right there. In order to reach the sea, the Volga is obliged to skirt these mountains and to make a wide circle towards the east.It follows the outline of this ridge so carefully that the right bank is high and steep while the left bank is low and flat.The detour caused by the hills is quite considerable.In a straight line, the distance from Tver, near where the volga begins, to the Caspian Sea is only 1000 miles.But the road the river actually travels is 2300 miles long.As for the drainage or basin area of this biggest of all European rivers, it beats that of the Missouri by some 40,000 square miles(Volga 563,000 and Missouri 527,000)and it covers a territory as big as Germany, France and England put together.But like everything else in Russia, this river must do something just a little queer.The Volga is an eminently navigable river(before the war it had a fleet of its own of 40,000 little boats),but when it reaches the city of Saratov it has descended to sea-level.The last hundreds of miles are therefore run below sea-level.This however is not as impossible as it sounds.For the Caspian Sea into which it flows, situated in the midst of its salty desert, has shrunk so considerably that it now lies 85 feet below the level of the Mediterranean.Another million years and it will be a fit rival for the Dead Sea, which holds the record with 1290 feet below sea-level.

Incidentally it is the Volga which is supposed to be the mother of all the caviar we eat. I purposely use the expression“is supposed to be”for very often the Volga is only the caviar's stepmother and the tunny-fish rather than the sturgeon has been responsible for that far-famed Russian delicacy.

Until the general introduction of the railroads, rivers and oceans were the natural routes which people followed in search of trade or plunder. Cut off from the open sea by their Teutonic enemies of the west and their Byzantine competitors from the south, the Russians were forced to depend upon their rivers as soon as they were obliged to look for more free land.And the history of Russia from the year 600 until the present day is forever connected with the two big rivers, one the Volga, which I have just mentioned, and the other the Dnieper.But of the two, the Dnieper was by far the more important, for it was part of the main road that led from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and that was undoubtedly as old as the caravan route that led through the great German plain.Please look at the map and try to follow me there.

Starting in the north we find that the Gulf of Finland is connected with Lake Ladoga(about the size of our Lake Ontario)by means of the Neva, the river on which Leningrad is situated. Then there is a small stream running due south from Lake Ladoga and which is known as the Volkhov, the connecting link between Lake Ladoga and Lake Ilmen.On the south side of Lake Ilmen we find the Lovat River.The distance between the Lovat River and the Duna River is not very great and the country is flat enough to allow people to use it as a portage.Once he had overcome this difficulty, the traveller from the north could then float leisurely down the Dnieper until he finally reached the Black Sea, a few mile west of the Crimean Peninsula.

Trade is no respecter of boundaries and commerce is not very much interested in race. There were profits to be made by those who carried merchandise from the land of the Norsemen to that of the Byzantines and that is why they came to establish themselves definitely in these parts of the world.All during the first five or six hundred years of our era this was a trade-route, pure and simple, and it followed the geological depression between the hills of Galicia and Podolia(the outskirts of the Carpathians)on the one side and the central Russian plateau on the other.

But when this region got gradually filled up with Slavic immigrants, conditions changed. For then the trader became the political overlord and he ceased his endless wanderings and settled down to become the founder of a dynasty.The Russians, with all their brilliant qualities of mind, have never been very good administrators.They lack the more rigid mental precision of their Teutonic neighbors.Their soul is too full of doubt.Their mind is too often upon other things.And they are too fond of talk and speculation to be very good at a game that demands concentration and quick decisions.Hence the comparative ease with which a number of men were able to set themselves up as local potentates.Of course, at first their ambitions did not reach very far.But they needed a place to live.And when they had built themselves a semi-royal residence, they needed homes for their retainers.That is the way most of the old Russian cities came into being.

Cities, however, especially when they are young and vigorous, are apt to attract the attention of the outside world. Missionaries in Constantinople heard of this wonderful new opportunity to save souls.They paddled northward along the river Dnieper as the Norsemen had paddled southward several centuries before.They combined forces with the local rulers.The monastery became the annex of the palace.The stage was set for the Russia of the Romanovs.Kiev in the south and the rich commercial city of Novgorod the Great(no relation to Nizhni-Novgorod, which is situated on the Volga where the Oka joins it)became so opulent and famous that even western Europe heard of their existence.

Meanwhile the patient peasants continued to increase their numbers as they had done during the last ten thousand years and, once more finding themselves in need of more farms, they burst the bonds of their homeland, that fertile valley of the Ukraine, the richest granary of all Europe, and they began to move into the central Russian plateau. As soon as they had reached the highest point, they followed the river that ran eastward.Very slowly(what is“time”to a Russian peasant?)they crept down the valley of the Oka until at last they reached the Volga and founded another New-Town or Novgorod, which was to cormmand the plains that were to be theirs for all eternity.But“all eternity”,in history at least, never seems to last so very long.For early in the thirteenth century the Great Disaster put a temporary check upon all their ambitions.Through the wide gap that lay between the Ural Mountains and the Caspia Sea, the salt-infested wilderness of the Ural River, thousands of little yellow men came trotting westward until at last it seemed as if Asia was to pour its entire population into the heart of Europe.The little Norse-Slavic principalities of the west were caught completely by surprise.In less than three years the whole of the Russian plain, rivers, seas, hills, were all of them in the hands of the Tarars, and it was only a matter of great good luck(an epidemic among the Tartar ponies)which saved Germany and France and the rest of western Europe from a similar fate.

As soon as they had raised a new crop of horses, the Tartars once more tried their luck. But the bulwark of Germany and Bohemia held fast and the invaders, describing a wide circle, hacked and plundered and burned and murdered their way through Hungary and then settled down in eastern and southern Russia to enjoy the spoils of victory.During the next two centuries Christian men and women and children were forced to kneel in the dust whenever they met a descendant of the terrile Genghis Khan and kiss the stirr-up of his horse or suffer the penalty of instant death.

Europe heard of this, but Europe did not care. For the Slavs worshipped God according to the Greek rites and western Europe worshipped God according to the rites of the Romans.Therefore, let the heathen rage and let the Russian people become the most abjectly miserable slaves that ever trembled at the crack of a foreign whip, for they were heretics and deserved no better fate.In the end, this indifference was to cost Europe very heavily, for those patient Russian shoulders, which accept whatever burden is put upon them by“those in power”,acquired that disastrous habit of unreasoning submission during the two and a half centuries of Tartar domination.Left to themselves, they would never have been able to throw off that terrible yoke.The rulers of the little principality of Moscow, an old frontier post of the Slavs in the east, were responsible for setting their country free.In the year 1480,John　Ⅲ(the Ivan the Great of Russian history)refused to pay the annual tribute to the master of the Golden Horde.That was the beginning of open resistance.Half a century later, the foreign visitation came to an end.But although the Tartars disappeared, their system survived.

The new rulers had a fine natural feeling for the“realities”of life. Some thirty years before, Constantinople had been captured by the Turks, and the last of the Eastern Roman Emperors had been killed on the steps of the church of the Holy Sofia.But he left a distant relative behind, a woman by the name of Zoe Palaeologa.She happened to be a Catholic.The Pope, seeing a chance of bringing the straying sheep of the Greek church back into his own fold, suggested a marriage between Ivan and Zoe.The wedding took Place and Zoe changed her name to Sophia.But nothing came of the deeply laid plans of the Pope.Instead, Ivan grew more independent than ever.He realized that this was his opportunity to assume the role formerly played by the rulers of Byzantium.He adopted the coat-of-arms of Constantinople, the famous double-headed eagle, representing both the eastern and western Roman Empires.He made himself sacrosanct.He reduced his nobles to the rank of servants.He introduced the old strict etiquette of Byzantium at his own little court of Moscow.He played with the idea that he was now the only“Caesar”left in the world and his grandson, emboldened by the continued success of his house, finally proclaimed himself Emperor or Caesar of all the parts of Russia he was able to conquer.

In the year 1598 the last descendant of the old Norse invaders, the last scion of the Rurik family, died. After fifteen years of civil war, a member of the Romanov family-Moscow nobles of no particular consequence-made himself Czar, and from then on the geography of Russia is merely the reflection of the political ambitions of these Romanovs, who had many positive faults but a corresponding number of such very positive virtues that we may well overlook some of their failings.

For one thing, they were all of them possessed of the fixed idea that no sacrifices were too great when it was a question of giving their subjects direct access to“open water”. They tried it in the south and hacked their way through to the Black Sea, to Azov and Sebastopol, only to find that the Turks cut them off from the Mediterranean.But these campaigns assured them the royal allegiance of the ten Cossack tribes, the descendants of the old Kazaki or free-booters, adventurers or runaway serfs who during the previous five centuries had fled into the wilderness to escape from their Polish or Tartar masters.They engaged in a war with the Swedes who had held practically all the territory around the Baltic since their successful participation in the Thirty Years War, and finally, after half a century of fighting, Czar Peter could order hundreds of thousands of his subjects into the marshes of the Neva to build him his new capital of St.Petersburg.But the Finnish Gulf was frozen over for four months of every year, and“open water”was as far off as ever.They followed the Onega River and the Dwina River right through the heart of the Tundra region—the mossy plains of the Arctic—and they built themselves a new city on the White Sea which they called after the Archangel Michael;but the inhospitable Kanin peninsula was as far removed from Europe as the frozen shores of the Hudson Bay, and the Murman coast was carefully avoided by all Dutch and English skippers.The task seemed hopeless.There remained no other way out than to try the eastern route.

In the year 1581 a band of runaway slaves and adventurers and prisoners of war from half a dozen European nations, all in all some sixteen hundred men, had crossed the Ural Mountains and, driven by necessity, had attacked the first Tartar Khan whom they met on their way east, the ruler of a region called Sibir or Siberia. They had defeated him and had divided his possessions among themselves.But knowing that the arm of Moscow reached far, they had offered this territory to the Czar rather than await the day the troops of the Little Father should follow them to hang them as deserters and rebels, instead of rewarding them as true patriots who had contributed to the glory of their beloved sovereign.

This strange method of colonization was kept up for almost a century and a half. The vast plain that lay stretched out before these“bad men”was sparsely populated.It was fertile.The northern half was prairie but the southern half was covered with woods.Soon they had left the river Ob behind them.Then the Yenisei was reached.As early as 1628 the advance-guard of this unsavory army of invasion reached the Lena and in 1639 they stood on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk.Further towards the south they built their earliest fortress on Lake Baikal, shortly after the year 1640.They explored the Amur River in 1648.In the same year a Cossack by the name of Dejnev had sailed down the Kolyma River in northern Siberia, had followed the shores of the Arctic Ocean until he reached the strait that separates Asia from America and had returned to tell the tale, which however attracted so little attention that when Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in Russian employ, rediscovered these straits eighty years later he was permitted to give them his own name.

From 1581 till 1648 is a period of 67 years. When you consider that it took our own ancestors about two centuries to cover the distance between the Alleghenies and the Pacific coast, it becomes evident that the Russians are not always as slow as we are sometimes led to believe.But not content with having added the whole of Siberia to their original holdings, the Russians finally crossed from.Asia into America, and long before George Washington was carried to his grave, there was quite a thriving Russian colony around a fort called after the Archangel Gabriel, now known as Sitka, the town in which the formal transfer of Alaska from Russia to America took place in the year 1867.

As far as energy and personal courage and reckless bravery were concerned, these earliest Rusian pioneers compared more than favorably with our own. But the Asiatic conception of Empire that still dominated the minds of those in power in Moscow and Petersburg prevented the normal development of a region where riches of every sort awaited the men who would know how to exploit them.Instead of developing the pastures and the forests and the mines, Russia turned Siberia into a gigantic jail.

The first prisoners arrived during the middle of the seventeenth century, fifty years after Yermak had crossed the Urals, and they consisted of priests who refused to say mass according to the orthodox formula and who were therefore sent to the banks of the Amur to starve and freeze to death. Since then there has never been any interruption of that endless procession of men and women(and ofttimes children)who were being driven into the wilderness because their European sense of individualism had come into conflict with the Asiatic notion of conformity that was the basic law of the old Russian form of government.The peak of these deportations was reached in the year 1863,shortly after the last great Polish revolution when more than 50,000 Polish patriots were moved from the Vistula River to the neighborhood of Tomsk and Irkutsk.No precise statistics have ever been kept of the total number of these involuntary emigrants, but from 1800 to 1900,when the system was slightly modified under heavy pressure from abroad, the mean annual average of exiles was about 20,000.That, however, did not take into account the ordinary criminals, the murderers and petty thieves and pickpockets, who as often as not were shackled to men and women of great spiritual refinement whose only error consisted in loving their fellow-men more than they deserved.

When their actual time of punishment had come to an end, the survivors were given little pieces of land near one of the exile villages and were allowed to become independent farmers. On paper this was a marvellous scheme to get the country inhabited by white men, and it allowed the imperial government to show its European stock-holders that it was really not as bad as it was some-times painted-that there was some system in all this Siberian madness—the“criminal”was being educated to become a useful and productive member of society.In practice, however, it worked so well that the greater part of these socalled“free settlers”disappeared from the face of the earth without leaving trace of their whereabouts.Perhaps they went to live with one of the native tribes, became Mohammedans or heathen, and bade farewell to Christian civilization.Perhaps they tried to escape and were eaten by the wolves.We don't know.Russian police statistics show that there were always between thirty and fifty thousand ex-convicts on the loose, hiding in the forest or the mountains, preferring any sort of hardship to the prison—yards of the Little White Father.But the imperial flag no longer flies over the Siberian bull-pen.It is now the flag of the Soviets.There has been a new deal.But the cards are the same, and they are of Tartar origin.

What happened to Russia when the old agricultural system of barter and serfdom came to an end and was replaced by capitalism and industrialism is a matter of general knowledge. A few years before Lincoln signed the act of ema-ncipation, the Russian serfs had been set free.In order to keep them alive, they were given a little bit of land, but never quite enough, and the land that was given unto the slave was taken away from the master.As a result, neither the master nor his former servant got enough to be able to pay his way.And all the time, foreign capital was reaching out after the hidden mineral treasures of the vast Russian plain.Railroads were built-steamship lines were organized—and European engineers waded through the mud of semi-Asiatic villages built around a replica of the Paris grand opera and asked themselves whether such things could be.

That primitive barbaric strength that had given the founders of the Russian dynasty the courage to attempt the impossible had spent itself. A weak man, surrounded by priests and women, now sat on the throne of the great Peter.And when he pawned that throne to the money-lenders of London and Paris and accepted their terms which forced him to take part in a war that was abhorrent in the eyes of most of his subjects, he signed his own death-warrant.

A little, bald-headed man, a graduate of the great Siberian school of exile, took hold of the ruin and began the work of reconstruction. He discarded the old European model and he discarded the old Asiatic model.He discarded everything old.He built ever with an eye for the future, but it was still the eye of the Tartar.

What that future will be, we shall know a hundred years hence. Here it is sufficient if we give you a vague outline of the modern Soviet state, but only a very vague one, for the system is in a constant state of flux.The Bolshevists are engaged in an experiment, and they are as ruthless in discarding what proves impracticable as a chemist who suddenly realizes that he has been working according to the wrong formula.Furthermore, the system is so absolutely diff-erent from anything to which we ourselves have been accustomed these last five hundred years that it is difficult to reduce it to the usual European or American terminology of statecraft with its continual references to“representative government”and“democracy”and“the sacred rights of the minority”.These terms mean nothing to a youngster brought up in a Bolshevist school.He has never even heard of them, except as an example of the folly of his ancestors.

In the first place, the Bolshevist conception of government is not based upon that rule of government of all the people, by all the people, for the benefit of all the people, which we teach our children as the most desirable ideal of statesmanship, whether we quite believe in it or not. Bolshevism recognizes only one class of society, that of the proletarians, the wage-earners, the workers preferably those who work with their hands.And in order that this class may attain some of the good things of this world from which it has so far been deprived, it has declared a ruthless war upon all those who in any way could remind the people of the year 1932 of the old“bourgeois”or middleclass form of government which was based upon private profit and private gain.

So far so good. Violent upheavals are nothing new in this world.Charles of England and Louis of France lost their heads a long time before Lenin was born.But when they died, a man, rather than a system, came to an end.When Nicholas　Ⅱwas murdered, it was not only a man but also the entire system this man had embodied and represented which was scrapped and which was forcibly removed from the Russian consciousness.The old account was dosed and two little red lines were drawn at the bottom of the page.Then a fresh, new page was started and at the top of it appeared the name,“The Communist Party of Russia, Inc.”

Now Communism as an economic system is nothing new. The old monas-tic orders were really communistic institutions and they in turn were based upon the communism of the early Christian Church, which recognized neither rich nor poor and did not believe in private property.The Pilgrims, when they came to America, intended to form a communistic community.But all these efforts to bring about a more equitable division of this world's goods had been conducted on a relatively small basis.They had never touched the lives of the people at large.And there is where the Bolshevist experiment differs from all others.It has turned the whole of the Russian plain from the Baltic to the Pacific into one vast Political and economic laboratory where everybody is supposed to work for just one purpose-the well-being and happiness of the mass, regardless of the present happiness and well-being of the individuals.But just as in the older days it was never quite possible for a Russian to rid himself of that duality of character which had been caused by the dual nature of his country, half-Asiatic and half-European, so the new Russian too is suffering from a conflict of enthusiasms which very frequently defeat their own ends.

The basic structure of the new Soviet Society is undoubtedly of European origin. The methods employed to put it into action are entirely Asiatic.Karl Marx and Genghis Khan have joined forces to bring about the Millennium and what will come of this extraordinary experiment I do not know.One prophecy is as good as the next.

But already Bolshevism has accomplished certain results with which the rest of humanity will have to deal very seriously at the risk of seeing its own civilizations go to pieces.

In the older days, Russia was ruled for the sole benefit of a small group of land-owners and supporters of the Czar, just as it had been in the days of the Tar-tars. It is still being ruled by a small group of people.But now they belong to the inner circle of the Communist party.They are fewer in number than the old-style nobility but even more devoted in their loyalty to the principle of autocracy.

There is however a great difference between the dictatorship of the Czars and that of the Bolshevists. The small group of people who are now governing Russia are not working for their own benefit.They receive such wages as any American plumber or stevedore would sniff at, provided he happened to have work and was receiving any wages at all.And the truly gigantic energy developed by these new tyrants(who are infinitely more ruthless than the Czar's ministers ever dared to be)is directed towards one single object to make everybody in the world work and to see to it that the workers, in exchange for their labors, are guaranteed enough food, enough living space and every possible opportunity for leisure of the more intelligent sort.

To our western way of thinking, all this is about as topsy-turvy as Einstein's conception of a four or five dimensional universe. But one-seventh of all the land of this planet, a country three times as large as our United States, is now living under this system and it is making itself felt all over the world.It is not being preached by some poor little country like Norway or Switzerland, but by one of the richest nations on earth, possessed of every form of wealth.Pious prayers and angry editorials will hardly upset it because the Russian people are completely cut off from the rest of the world, read very few foreign books, never see any but strictly censored foreign newspapers, and might as well be living on the planet Mars for all they really know about their neighbors.The leaders, of course, are aware of the criticism that is levelled against them, but they don't care.They are too busy doing other things, organizing their White Russian Republics and their Ukrainian Soviet Republic and their Trans-Caucasian Federation of Soviet Republics and their Kirghiz Soviet Republic and their Bashkir Republic and their Tartar Soviet Republics, to spend much time worrying about the approval and disapproval of that western world which they profess to regard as a pathetic historical revival, a nice exhibition for the museum of anti-religion, opened a year ago in the Czar's former palace.

Time will show us what is to become of this strange experiment, this Asiatic mysticism combined with the European sense of actuality. But the Great Russian Plain has come to life and the rest of the world would do well to take notice, for Bolshevism may be only a dream, but Russia is a fact.