I reached Ekaterinburg at an interesting time. Trotsky, the Minister of War, was expected there to begin the work of turning his Red Armies into Labour Armies, and making his victorious troops beat their swords into ploughshares.

It may not be known to some of my readers and may seem hardly credible to such of them as read the news from Russia and Poland to-day (July 22, 1920), but the abolition of war and militarism is one of the great objects of the Communists, and was, in fact, the cry which enabled them to overthrow the Kerensky Government in 1917. They are convinced that only by the adoption by all nations of the system of government which they have established will an end be put to land-grabbing by bourgeois Governments manipulated by capitalists eager for new markets and more supplies of raw material. And land-grabbing, they hold, leads to war. They have written whole books on this subject, and there is hardly an issue of their newspapers which does not refer to it, but I need not say any more about it here. To point out to the Bolsheviks that their practice belies their theory is futile and even unfair, for they answer that it was the attacks made on them by Denikin, Kolchak, the Czechs, the British, the French, the Americans and others which made them take up arms to defend their existence.

No sooner were Denikin and Kolchak crushed than Trotsky conceived the great project of turning several of his Red Armies into Labour Armies. It was just such an idea as would appeal to a clever journalist like Trotsky, and he carried it out with all the ostentation which the ex-Kaiser, also a man of an editorial turn of mind, would have shown in turning workmen into soldiers. In the first place Trotsky determined to visit Ekaterinburg for the purpose of doing the thing in style in the very town where he had been himself a political convict in 1905, and where, in 1918, Nicholas the Second had met with his tragic end.

A daily newspaper called The Red Tocsin was started in connection with this movement, just as lively, well-written newspapers are started by the Bolsheviks in connection with all their movements. It was printed by “the First Revolutionary Army of Labour,” and in stereotype at the head of the first page was a picture which would seem curious to the average Englishman, but which is common enough in Soviet Russia. In the foreground was a workman beating weapons of war into agricultural implements, but still carrying his rifle slung across his back in order to show that, if the necessity arose, he was ready to defend himself. In the middle distance was a Cossack ploughing, his sword by his side; and in the background rose an enormous factory with smoking chimneys, and a great crowd of factory-hands hastening joyfully to work. Overhead was the Red Star of Bolshevism.

All the contents corresponded to this picture. The success of Red workmen in repairing a bridge or a damaged locomotive was chronicled with the same enthusiasm as a British newspaper would describe a gallant feat of arms by British troops. The unit of the Red Labour Army to which these workmen belonged was given, just as we should give, in small wars, the unit to which victorious troops belonged. Every kind of achievement in the realms of industry and education was treated in the same way. The work of army and village and factory schools and the reduction of illiteracy were made matters of brisk competition; and, if The Red Tocsin is to be trusted, the various schools enjoyed this competition with the same zest as we enjoy cricket matches. Instead of sending news about husbands who poisoned their wives and ex-officers who murdered their sweethearts, corespondents in outlying districts sent exclusive wires about old women of sixty who had been taught to read, and about butchers’ boys who had qualified for professorships. There was poetry, too—a great deal of it—but it was not the poetry of war. It celebrated the work of the turner, the fitter, the ploughman, tinker, the tailor, the candlestick-maker, and not the exploits of the warrior. One poem which I saw was addressed by an engine-driver to a “sick” engine, as the Russian railwayman call a locomotive which is laid up for repair; and the point of it was that the thousands of “sick” engines with which the railway lines were covered should be nursed back to health with as much care as if they were sick children.

There was much inaccuracy and exaggeration in this paper—for example, I found it guilty of both inaccuracy and exaggeration in the glowing report which it published about the repair of the Perm Bridge—but it was certainly run on original lines. Was there any demand for it on the part of the public at large? The Bolsheviks laugh at such a question, for they have as little respect for democracy as the late Lord Salisbury had. They would never even dream of asking the public what it wants any more than they would dream of asking their horses. They give the public what they consider good for it, and deprive it of all possibility of getting anything else. Just as Peter the Great used to have his boyars forcibly shaved, so the Bolsheviks, when they started their great cleanliness and anti-typhus campaign in Ekaterinburg, used to seize grown men, shave them, cut their hair, and then subject them to a compulsory bath. When the Russian public has been educated on sound Socialist lines and has grown up, it will be able to look after itself; but at present, say the Bolsheviks, it is an infant which does not know what is good for it and cannot stand on its own feet.

Bolshevism is really run to a large extent by a clique of Socialist journalists. Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, Lunacharsky, and all the other leading Communists have been newspaper men, and Trotsky, though he does not speak English well, acquired in New York something of the vivid American style of journalism.

Resuscitate the late Mr. W. T. Stead; associate with him Mr. Wells, Mr. Sydney Webb, Mr. Dickinson, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, Lord Northcliffe, and the editors of the Nation, the New Statesman, the Manchester Guardian, and the Daily Herald; make them all fervent Bolsheviks; give them supreme power over a people as plastic and ignorant as the Russians; and they will do something like what Lenin and Trotsky have done. Mr. Wells will draw up rough scientific schemes for an entirely original, brand-new, machine-made civilization; he will get those schemes endorsed and touched up by mad but extremely learned professors who have been shut up all their lives in their studies, brooding over the idea of a perfect State; and his colleagues will instantly put them into execution. Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Shaw will dash off in their dinner-hour brilliant, paradoxical, and revolutionary proposals about agriculture, aviation, coal-mining, and education, which will meet with the same favourable reception; and Lord Northcliffe will centralize the Press as it has never before been centralized, and employ in its service telephonic photography, the radio, the wireless telephone, the aeroplane, and every other modern invention. All this may seem fantastic, but nothing more fantastic than the reality could be written about Russia. The development of the Press alone constitutes, as I shall afterwards show, one of the most marvellous achievements in the history of journalism. Despite the acute lack of paper, the Soviet Government is at present publishing Mr. H. G. Wells’ wildest pseudo-scientific romances, which it evidently regards as far superior to the New Testament or any of the other great books on which our “effete” civilization has been founded; but it has, so far, paid no attention to the same author’s recent incursions into theology. And, despite the extreme paucity of skilled electricians for the most humdrum work of modern life, it is spending millions of roubles weekly and employing scores of engineers on vast schemes for the electrification of Russia, schemes which seem to have been borrowed from a romance about a future, electrified, scientifically constructed world, which was written some years before the war by the well-known novelist Kuprin. The Bolsheviks forget Marx’s warning: “Wer ein Programm für die Zukunft entwirft, ist ein Reaktionär.”

If the Soviet Government succeeds in getting peace, money, and unlimited raw material, it will be most interesting to see how it is going to develop. The development will certainly be on new lines, as the Bolsheviks have not a particle of reverence for the past. Trotsky thinks himself a much cleverer man than St. Paul, with equal energy, a sounder doctrine, and a much firmer grasp on the realities of life. How can it be otherwise, he asks, seeing that St. Paul lived so long before the age of the radio, the aeroplane, and all the great scientific discoveries which have so completely changed our whole outlook on the world?

The scheme of the Labour Army might have come hot from the active brain of the great journalist who founded the Review of Reviews. As a matter of fact, it came from the brilliant brain of Trotsky. Ten years ago it would have been hidden away in the columns of some obscure Socialist newspaper. Now it has behind it all the resources of a great Empire.

Ekaterinburg was gaily decorated in honour of Trotsky’s visit, but the Bolshevik Minister of War came, unostentatiously enough, in the night-time, and refused to hold any parades, inspections of troops, or any other formal functions whatsoever. He even refused to shake hands with anybody on the ground that this custom is carried to ridiculous extremes in Russia, is a waste of time, and contributes, moreover, to the spread of typhus, and he had abolished hand-shaking in his train by imposing a fine of 100 roubles for each offence on subordinates found guilty of it. He was certainly right in saying that this mode of greeting is carried to excessive lengths in Russia. A slight-built wiry man of medium height, dressed as a private soldier and without any decoration, he wore on his head a curious cap which has been invented for the higher officers of the Red Army. It is of khaki cloth, is cut in the style of the steel helmet worn by the ancient Russian bogatyrs (Knights), and the whole front of it is covered by a huge star, the Red Star of Bolshevism. His ill-developed calves were encased in a neat pair of British Army putties, probably one of the many pairs we had sent to Kolchak.

He wore no belt and carried no weapon; his face is sallow, Mephistophelean, and distinctly Jewish; his eyes dark and bright; his beard and moustache scanty. His movements are quick and animated, and his capacity for work superhuman. The employees on his train told me that they led a dog’s life of it. The typewriting girls were kept working all day and far into the night. His numerous secretaries were glued to their desks all day. His telephonists were speaking into the receivers or taking down telephone messages for twenty hours out of the twenty-four. Moreover, he published on the train a newspaper called En Route, in which he had articles every day, and he dictated, besides, numerous contributions for the local papers in the towns through which he passed. He delivered long public speeches several times a week, and spent at least six hours every day presiding over conferences of Commissars, railway officials, and factory men. He even dared once to do a thing which Marshal Foch, Sir Douglas Haig, and even Mr. Bottomley might have shrunk from—he questioned the infallibility of doctors!

As if all the above work were not enough, Trotsky devoted himself at Ekaterinburg to transport reorganization, a task which would alone absorb the energies of a dozen Sir Eric Geddeses; and when Krassin went to England the Leader of the Red Army calmly took over the Commissariat of Ways of Communication on the ground that, as railways played such a great part in military operations, he had better take charge of them as well as of the Army. All this testifies to Trotsky’s audacity and indefatigability, but it also betrays a fatal lack of organizers in the ranks of the Reds. And, it is almost unnecessary to add, Government work is not well done. Despite the electric thrill which the presence of the Red Army Commissar communicates to every Government department which he enters, there is a glut of work which clogs the whole machinery, and there are not enough experts to deal with that work. The offices are in a chaotic state, filled with visitors who cannot be attended to, and with incompetent clerks rushing hither and thither. Many of the old bureaucrats are, it is true, dribbling back from Paris with their tails between their legs, but as they are distrusted and are always placed under incompetent Reds, no really good work can be expected of them. The Bolshevik War Minister had fitted to his train a wireless apparatus which kept him in constant touch with Moscow, and he received daily interminable messages about the Eastern Front, the Southern Front, the Polish Front, the North-Western and Finnish Front, as well as copies of all the communications received from the British and other foreign Governments, not to speak of a vast amount of technical material sent by his own War Office. He employed about a dozen secretaries, a tame editor to run his paper, a number of tame diplomatists to look after diplomatic affairs, and several domesticated Tsarist officers to deal with purely military matters. He put the fear of Trotsky, if not the fear of God, into all these subordinates; but they rather gloried than otherwise in their servitude.

Most Russians like to serve a relentless master who knows his own mind, and I am not sure but that the same can be said of many Englishmen too. I was once attached to a British Battalion which was composed mostly of Labour men, and in which the discipline was very slack. When the weak and benignant C.O. was replaced by a ruthless man of purely Prussian mentality, the discipline became perfect, and the soldiers not only became proud of their iron-minded Colonel, but finally died almost to a man in carrying out his orders.

The stories told of Trotsky’s revels and dissipation are obvious nonsense. The only dissipation the Bolshevik War Lord allowed himself in Ekaterinburg was a short walk every day in a beautiful pine-grove where I used to walk myself, and an hour’s hard physical exercise daily shovelling snow from the railway track. In this physical exercise he made every man, woman, and child in his train take part; and the example he thus set was good, for, as I think I have already remarked, the educated Russian has the same contempt for manual labour as the White Sahib has in India. Even Mrs. Trotsky, Master Trotsky (a boy of eleven or twelve), and Master Trotsky’s governess, a young Jewess of twenty or twenty-five, had to shovel snow like the rest; and this craze for manual work remained even when Trotsky was not looking on, for, when I afterwards travelled to Moscow with the above-mentioned governess, I noticed that she sometimes got out at the wayside stations, took the pickaxe from the muzhiks who were breaking up the thick layer of ice that had formed on the station platform, and set to work herself with an enthusiasm which was, however, very much greater than her skill.

No sooner had he arrived in Ekaterinburg than Trotsky plunged straight into work, and I marvelled at the audacity with which he tackled matters which ought, one would think, to have been left entirely to experts. I shall give one example, the typhus question, for I know something about it, having had, a year earlier, to visit all the typhus hospitals in the Urals to interpret for Colonel Clarke, the head of the Canadian Medical Service, whom General Sir Alfred Knox had sent to the Front with the object of doing something to stop the terrible wastage of men caused by typhus among Kolchak’s troops. Dr. Clarke found that a good deal of the responsibility for this state of things was due to the apathy of the Russian doctors, who would do nothing unless they were given unlimited quantities of unprocurable insecticides, though, as Dr. Clarke told them until he was hoarse and exhausted and finally caught the disease himself, heat would have served their purpose equally well.

On February 19 Trotsky summoned the D.M.S., listened with unusual and ominous calm to his statement that there was no chance of typhus decreasing, in any case, till the month of April, and then attacked him with a violence which nearly frightened that worthy functionary out of his wits. “I am no doctor,” said the Bolshevik War Lord, “but I understand from you that typhus is communicated by lice. Now it must be possible to destroy these lice by delousing apparatus and by a certain degree of heat, which could, if necessary, be produced in some of our public baths. Several of the baths are very nearly hot enough for the purpose as it is; and, even if the soldiers have not got a change of clothes, they might wash in one part of the bath-house while their clothes are being disinfected in another part. I am not a believer in this doctrine of fatalism that you preach. I will immediately appoint a committee to investigate this question; and if I find that you do not at once take some steps in the matter, I will hand you over to the Extraordinary Commission. Good-day.”

Next day an excellent bath-house was opened free at the railway station, and I myself enjoyed the first bath that I had had for three months. The Committee was nevertheless appointed, and I have given its findings in Chapter IV. It published everything, even details of hospital mismanagement that were enough to make one’s hair stand on end, for the Bolsheviks, when it suits their purpose, allow the fullest liberty to the Press.

The great propaganda engine which had raised the Red Army and smashed Kolchak and Denikin was then turned on to the typhus question; and all Ekaterinburg was soon placarded with posters preaching cleanliness and denouncing dirt. Some of them contained representations of a louse magnified to the size of a small cow, and pointed out in the accompanying letterpress as a worse enemy than the “Supreme Ruler.” “Kill it,” yelled the posters, “as you would kill Kolchak. It is a far more dangerous enemy. Kolchak has put to death thousands of Communists. IT puts to death tens of thousands.” The number and the variety of these warnings were very great; and there was every kind of striking lifesize picture in glaring colours to attract the attention of the illiterate, as well as good medical hints to impress those who could read. There were pictures of washerwomen killing enormous lice with the smoothing iron. There were horrible pictures of death seizing on the young unwashed. Communists were told that it was their duty to the Republic to keep themselves and their clothes clean, and that they were traitors if they did not. One of the commonest posters showed incidentally the nomadic condition of life which hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians are now leading. It was generally to be found at railway stations, where crowds of people habitually cuddle down on the floor in their sheepskins at night-time and go to sleep without undressing, and it ran as follows: “Don’t lie down wherever you happen to find yourself at nightfall until you first make sure that the place is free from lice.”

This propaganda resembled in some respects the old frescoes we sometimes find in ancient English churches where the fear of sin is taught by means of devils and fearsome representations of hell, but it resembled, far more, the most up-to-date American advertising. Every device known to the patent-medicine quack was made use of—suggestion, fear of sickness and death, party feeling, and hatred of enemies.

I shall afterwards show that the same all-powerful engine of propaganda is employed for other purposes, to teach Communism, to enlist support for the Red Army, to foster a hatred of England, to excite a craze for education, and to produce a contempt for priests and Christianity. The science of advertising is now taught in American Universities, and though contemptible in its way, it is a “science” which presupposes an intimate knowledge of mass-psychology, and which is capable of being used to produce the most amazing effects on the minds of a whole people. When we go deeply into the matter, indeed, we find that the whole modern world is tending more and more to be “run” by propaganda and advertisement—an inevitable outcome, it seems to me, of the system which makes public opinion rule, and which naturally leads therefore to the manufacture and the influencing of public opinion. Propaganda popularizes not only pills but also Premiers, and “floats” not only commercial companies but also creeds and kings. None of the old-established monarchies advertise, but the Soviet Government certainly means to do so, and no Government in the world is so alive to the possibilities of advertisement. Fortunately the Soviet Government is short of paper.

On the day after his arrival Trotsky addressed a large Communist meeting; and here I might remark that no such thing as a public meeting in our sense of the word is ever held in Red Russia. The Bolshevik leaders only address meetings which have been carefully packed with their supporters, and I only know of one case in which it was announced beforehand that they were going to speak. It is impossible for anyone who is not a Bolshevik to find out when Lenin is going to speak in Moscow, the reason being simply fear of assassination, and it is next to impossible for a non-Bolshevik to hear him. Trotsky, who is a consummate orator, made a very able speech, of which the keynote was briefly this: “We have defeated Kolchak, but a much more serious enemy remains—namely, the ruined economic system of the country. To put that right we must work harder than men ever worked before since history began. Sixty per cent. of our railway locomotives are out of action, and if they continue breaking down at the same rate, we shall have 99 per cent. out of action within three months, which means a total breakdown of our transport system, and therefore of our system of Government. These engines must be repaired. The men who repair them must have food and fuel. The railway lines must be cleared of snow. Wood must be cut and brought to the railways. The Ural factories must be started. This means that all must work, work, work.”

He certainly painted a picture gloomy enough to warm the heart of Mr. Winston Churchill, but he did it with a purpose; he wanted to alarm his followers thoroughly, and to make them see that the economic situation was extremely serious. He did not go so far, however, as to make them despair, and I afterwards discovered that he deliberately understated the actual extent of the economic breakdown, and omitted altogether to touch on many very disquieting features. He ended on a note of robust confidence and caused a sensation by announcing that 600 million roubles in gold had been captured with Kolchak, although he must have known that the amount was only 300 million. This news, by the way, had been carefully withheld from the public until the head of the Red Army could use it, as he did, in an effective peroration.

I was surprised at the rapidity with which this speech was, by previous arrangement, echoed and re-echoed all over the country. “The Fight against Economic Ruin” became a catchword like “Wait and See,” or “We want eight and we won’t wait,” or any of the other famous catch-phrases of British politics. It became a stereotyped newspaper headline. It stared at one from placards on all the walls. To judge from the reports in the Press, it was repeated by every village orator throughout the Urals. At a meeting of the Ekaterinburg Soviet which I attended, it was the principal subject of discussion, and at a meeting of the Communist “League of Youth” which Trotsky attended, Miss Yurovskaya, daughter of the Tsar’s murderer and President of that League, delivered a good speech on the same lines. Trotsky must have smiled his Mephistophelean smile when he heard all this parrot outcry, most of it almost a repetition of what he had said himself. No wonder he has a profound and undisguised contempt for democracy. The same absolute unanimity prevails whenever the Bolshevik leaders raise any cry whatever, and a Britisher misses painfully the healthy controversial spirit and dogged individualism of his own people.

Trotsky’s treatment of the working-classes was marked not only by an absence of flattery, but even by an autocratic touch which one would never have expected. Finding on his way from Moscow to Ekaterinburg that the workmen in a certain Ural factory were not working hard enough, he had fifteen of the worst “slackers” arrested and placed on their trial before a workmen’s tribunal in Ekaterinburg. At one point on the line his train was stopped by snow, whereupon he had the whole of the local Soviet taken into custody for disobedience to the order for removing snow from the track. They also were tried before a jury of their peers; and, while the case was still sub judice, Trotsky wrote, over his own name in the newspapers, a ferocious onslaught on the accused, whose condemnation was thus made certain. He did not say anything about their delaying him, but he inveighed against them for delaying the trains which brought bread to the women and children of Moscow and to the Red workmen who had hurled the tyrant from his throne and stood in the breach against Denikin and Yudenich.

Trotsky’s train was not one of the old Imperial trains, and could not be described as sumptuous; it consisted of about a dozen carriages, mostly wagons-lits, and all of them save Trotsky’s own car were very much overcrowded with personnel, typewriters, desks, writing-tables, and documents. All the personnel ate together in a large dining-car. The Minister of War had, I believe, a small dining compartment, where he had his meals with his wife and family and a few of his principal assistants. The dining-car was used most of the time as an office, for conferences, for socialistic lectures, and for educational purposes. There was also a library car packed with Propaganda literature, and a printing office on wheels for the production of the newspaper to which I have already referred.

All the outside of Trotsky’s train was covered with advertisements of Bolshevism and incitements to class hatred. Imagine our Secretary of State for War touring the country (except at election time) in a train plastered all over with posters like that of a travelling circus. Such a thing would not be done even by a President of the United States. And yet, side by side with this ultra-Americanism and ultra-modernism (the ultra-modern side being represented by Cubist and Futurist productions that looked like nothing on earth), was a good deal of hoary old Tsarism. Close to the Futurist posters stood Lettish guards, who were as merciless as the janissaries of an Ottoman Sultan. About a dozen of them travelled on Trotsky’s train, and kept unostentatious but careful watch on everyone who approached or entered it. The police precautions taken to protect Lenin and Trotsky are as minute though not as evident as those formerly taken to protect Nicholas the Second. Thus, the more Russia changes the more it is the same thing. It has had a tyrant who dragged it savagely—by the hair of the head, so to speak—abreast of contemporary civilization. It has now a tyrant who thinks that he is driving it far ahead of all modern civilization. But it always has a tyrant. Feminine races invariably have tyrants, just as wives who are too feminine invariably convert the best-intentioned husbands into bullies.

It was forbidden for any outsider to enter Trotsky’s train without permission, and the names of all persons who had the entrée were pasted up inside the doors. Few of those who are entitled to enter the office car of a National Commissar can go right through the train. The nearer they approach the Presence, the shorter grows the list of names, until finally at the Commissar’s car they find only three or four names, one being that of the Private Secretary, the sole link between the Holy of Holies and the common herd. And these arrangements were not lightly to be put aside by anyone. An official of Sverdlov’s train who boarded Trotsky’s train at Ekaterinburg without permission was promptly arrested, and had such difficulty in getting released that he is not likely to do so again. A lesser person might very easily have been shot.

Trotsky, to do him justice, is an extraordinary man, and is idolized by the Bolsheviks, who say, not without some truth, that he is the most remarkable Minister of War that Europe has produced during the last six years of Armageddon. He formed a numerous and well-disciplined army out of men who were sick and tired of warfare, and who only supported the Bolsheviks originally because the Bolsheviks promised them peace. He did this despite the fact that he himself had never been in the Army or studied warfare, except as an extremely anti-militarist war correspondent during the first Balkan War. He had been all his life an obscure journalist, and, if he had joined the British Army in 1914, would never have risen above the rank of lieutenant, would have been used exclusively as an interpreter, and would have had for his main occupation the buying of eggs for some Brigadier-General’s breakfast-table. But if, on the other hand, he had entered British politics, he might have been as great a success as Disraeli was; and it would not matter which party he joined, for he has Jewish adaptability, has no very fixed principles, and possesses the gift, invaluable to a political adventurer, of throwing himself heart and soul into any cause he takes up. He could denounce South African Concentration Camps or defend the Black-and-Tans with the same burning eloquence, exactly as he denounced the Black Hundred pogroms in 1905 and defended Red pogroms in 1918, or as he thundered against war in 1914 and beat the jingo drum in 1919. Or he might have been very useful in Russian politics. If, when he summoned the First Duma, Nicholas the Second had become a genuinely constitutional monarch and abolished all Jewish disabilities, he might still be on the throne, with Trotsky as the brilliant head of a Coalition Government.

Trotsky’s Jewish adaptability, to which I have referred above, was strikingly illustrated one day when he unexpectedly found himself seated next a Court lady at table. His rough comrades expected to find some occasion for mirth in their leader’s behaviour on this occasion, but he acquitted himself with perfect propriety, conversed pleasantly in French on eminently suitable subjects, and at the end of dinner kissed the lady’s hand, as the Russian custom is, with all the finished grace of an old French aristocrat.

The War Minister of the Reds possesses a very exceptional power of organization, an extraordinarily quick brain, and a marvellous faculty for mastering in a short time the most difficult and complicated subjects. Most men find it hard enough to deal with one engrossing subject at a time, but he switches from one important matter to another a dozen times in the course of a single day, and comes to a rapid and generally a right decision each time. Leroy-Beaulieu says that “the Jewish mind is an instrument of precision; it has the exactness of a pair of scales”; and Trotsky has all the mental precision and the extreme intellectuality of his race. Owing to this fact, and to the fact that he is very ambitious and is endowed with a ruthless physical energy and a personal bravery which one does not always expect to find in a Jew, I am doubtful if he will always remain a Bolshevik or will always submit to the deeper but less agile Lenin. Trotsky in many respects resembles Lloyd George, whose brilliant work in the Ministry of Munitions is quite on a par with Trotsky’s brilliant work in the Ministry of War; and I should not be surprised if, like Lloyd George, he becomes practically a dictator. He could do so to-morrow if he liked, for he has the Red Army with him, and his War Office in Moscow is a veritable fortress bristling with machine-guns and filled with troops who are devoted to him. It must be remembered that Trotsky never, until 1917, saw eye to eye with Lenin, who, in 1915, publicly denounced the present head of the Red Army, on more than one occasion, as a “bourgeois opportunist.” In the 2nd Social-Democrat Congress, held in 1903, Trotsky opposed Lenin.

If to be a great orator is to have an extraordinary command of language and gesture, a facility for finding the right word and coining the perfect phrase, a capacity for leading up to a climax where the audience holds its breath and you could hear a pin drop, before the roar of delirious applause greets the last master touch, then Trotsky is a great orator. His style is necessarily that of Limehouse; and he certainly finds plenty of material in the capitalist system and in the diplomacy of Europe for the last two years.

In one of the many speeches he delivered in Ekaterinburg he quoted a despatch of Lord Curzon in which that statesman considered the question of acknowledging for a moment not the Government but the existence of the Bolsheviks, in case the latter mended their manners and respected the ordinary conventions of international intercourse.

“Ordinary conventions of international intercourse!” quoth Trotsky, with grim and deliberate emphasis; and then he went on to describe the troubled period of July, 1918, when the foreign Ambassadors left Moscow. He said that Mr. Lockhart, then our Consul-General in Moscow, used often to call on him at that time, and to show great sympathy with him in his difficulties, but that Captain Sadul of the French Mission warned him that Lockhart was all this time engaged, with his English and French colleagues, in a plot to murder Lenin and Trotsky, to blow up railway bridges which would have meant the starvation of thousands in Petrograd, to dynamite trains full of soldiers, and to bribe many leaders and soldiers of the Red Army to desert. “And these are the people,” thundered Trotsky in conclusion, “who complain that we do not observe all the niceties of diplomatic etiquette!”

I quote this merely as an example of his style of oratory, which is logical and adroit, crushing and vitriolic.

I might add that, untrue as the charge against Mr. Lockhart and his colleagues clearly is, a mass of documents which were afterwards submitted to me by the Extraordinary Commission in Moscow seemed to prove that, at various times during the last two years, and especially on the occasion of Yudenich’s advance on Petrograd, the most widespread anti-Bolshevik plots were hatched in Russia with the object of bringing about insurrections and a coup d’état, and that the means which some of the plotters proposed to make use of were as abhorrent to English ideas as are the means employed at present, according to the Sinn Feiners, by the English military command in Ireland. But I am sure that if there is any truth at all in these accusations, which is doubtful, the authors of these murderous plans drew them up in both cases without the knowledge of any responsible British authorities. The more desperate of the Russian Reactionaries are as little scrupulous about their choice of means as are the Bolsheviks themselves, and others may have been cognizant of conspiracies whereof we knew nothing.

People so tired of oratory as we are in England can form no conception of the delight which the Siberian workmen take in hearing plain speaking about capitalists and kings. They themselves are often political convicts or the sons of political convicts, and for hundreds of years their country has been a vast prison where the word “freedom” dare not be breathed. Nor dare be breathed now, but the yokel does not notice this in his delight at hearing the volcanic eloquence of the Bolshevik War Lord, and at seeing the red-capped ex-convict, who makes kings tremble on their thrones, standing with his foot on the neck of a dead Tsardom and his hand pointing to the Revolutionary banner overhead. I think that perhaps Trotsky’s eloquence gained in effectiveness from being addressed to a simple people extremely fond of the spoken word, and unaccustomed to such oratorical fireworks as Trotsky treated them to; and perhaps the phrases which told most were those which they understood least. In all lands, indeed, it is not the clear and perfectly understood battle-cry, but the large, vague, beautiful, suggestive phrase which unlooses the most formidable tempests in the hearts of men. The cries which have stirred up the most furious storms in Red Russia are as little understood by the bulk of those who utter them as Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwock” is understood by a child of ten.

Before I leave Trotsky, I might say something about the great object of his visit to Ekaterinburg, the launching of the grandiose Labour Army scheme. He launched this scheme in the speech I have already referred to, and he made it look splendid, the realization of the dreams of mankind for a thousand years. Soldiers would fight no more. They would work for the common good. Owing to their discipline and their union, they could quickly carry out vast enterprises that ordinary workmen would take a long time to accomplish. But Trotsky had overlooked insuperable practical difficulties that any Clydeside fitter could have pointed out to him. How could all the soldiers work together if some were spinners and others boiler-makers and others belonged to various other trades? It was proposed that the skilled workmen should be sent each to the particular factory where his services would be most useful, and that the unskilled labourers should work all together at shovelling snow and carting timber. Trotsky would not have this, for it would mean that the skilled mechanics, who are the backbone of the Red Army and of Bolshevism, would be separated from the other soldiers, with the result that the Army would cease to exist as a potential striking force. And he must, he said, have a potential striking force, for the Japanese might advance from the east or the English from the south-west. He therefore kept all the troops together, with the result that, while all the Ural factories were idle, the men who could have set them going were carting snow and wood. And they carted snow and wood badly. One of the overseers of the work, a man who had had great experience in the employment of labour, told me that it took twenty soldiers to perform a task which three men accustomed to the work could do better. And, knowing something of how the military life unsuits one for civilian work, I could quite believe him. Besides, my own eyes showed me that the whole thing was a farce.

Then, again, Trotsky had declared that the man who deserted from the Red Labour Army would be treated as a soldier who deserted in front of the enemy. Did this mean that he was to be shot? The “professional Unions,” as they are called, also had a word to say about the War Office monopolizing skilled mechanics who had “done their bit,” and consequently ceased to be soldiers. To cut a long story short the whole great project came in the end to nothing, and when I talked to Trotsky about it in the Kremlin a month afterwards he was rather snappy. By that time he had given way to the “professional Unions,” had been frightened by the dissatisfaction of Labour, and disturbed by the criticisms of his grand idea, which came from England. As far as I know, the whole Labour Army scheme has now melted away as completely as last winter’s Siberian snows, amid which it was hatched. All the waste of time and energy which it involved might have been prevented if Russia had had a free Parliament and a free Press to discuss it before it had been put into operation. Trotsky tried to make an army that could both fight and work, but only succeeded in making for a time an army that could do neither.

I have borne frank testimony in this chapter to Trotsky’s energy, brilliancy, and tirelessness, but now I hear the rasping voice of the blunt, matter-of-fact, English critic saying: “This is all very well. You have given Trotsky a fine character. But what right has he to be autocratic? What right has he to go rushing about like a Tsar, arresting workmen without a warrant, suppressing democratic newspapers which criticize him, and treating people generally as if they were children?”

My reply is: “No right at all.” He belongs to a party which numbers, according to his own account, 604,000 men, but which has, by a coup d’état, imposed its rule on 125,000,000 Russians. It is carrying out a policy which 124,396,000 Russians do not believe in and which most foreign Socialists dislike, and which more than 99 per cent. of the Russian workmen detest.

That policy has not even the name of Karl Marx to recommend it, for it is not Marxism. It is the invention of the two men, Lenin and Trotsky, who issue on their own authority pontifical decrees on the most difficult questions of government and of social science, and enforce these decrees by violence and terror. The entire Bolshevik party is fast becoming a bureaucracy. Only 70,000 of that party are genuine workmen; 36,000 are party officials; 12,000 are Trade Union and Co-operative officials; 162,000 are military officials and soldiers; 318,000 are officials of the State and the Municipalities; 6,000 are shopmen. In Moscow there are 100,000 workmen and 230,000 Bolshevik officials, male and female.

The irony of Trotsky’s position is that he leads now the same kind of life which he denounced others for leading. He is a superman who spends his day signing papers, presiding over committees, receiving deputations, just as Stolypin did. His boy is getting a far better education than any of the common herd, and will, if he and Bolshevism survive, stand a much better chance of obtaining a good Governmental position when he comes of age than any of the Bolshevik rank and file, or even than any scion of our great governing families in this country. Like all the other Commissars, Trotsky is surrounded by swarms of toadies and place-hunters for whom he must find “jobs” irrespective of their merit. I found the keenest competition for the spoils of office going on among the smaller fry, and several candidates confessed to me that nobody but friends and relations of the great Commissars stand any chance. About a year ago Sverdlov, a powerful Commissar, died; and his brother succeeded him simply because he was his brother: a thing which could hardly happen in English Cabinet politics.

No, Trotsky has no right at all to dragoon the people of Russia; and he realizes perfectly well his lack of credentials and the extreme instability of his position.