The Dominion TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1921. TRADE WITH RUSSIA

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 91, 11 January 1921, Page 4

The Dominion TUESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1921. TRADE WITH RUSSIA

It has still to be seen whether the latest Anglo-Russian trade agreement will stand a working test or is destined like the last one to to wrecked by Soviet duplicity. In any case, while it is undoubtedly desirable that commerce between 'Russia and other countries should be re-established, the process, under the most favourable conditions that can be expected, is bound to be rather slow. Some optimistic theories that have lately been ventilated about Russia’s ability to pour out exports in exchange for the manufactures she greatly needs apparently rest only on imagination. According to American newspapers! which arrived by the last mail Russia has nothing immediately available for export except a little flax. It is added that after several years of railway construction on long-time credits something may be produced in Russia “if tb« Bolsheviki can make the peopje work.” Another American paper observes that even _ the dispatch of considerable quantities of gold to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway has failed to convince the hard-headed Scandinavian trader of the solvency of the Soviet authorities and their ability to produce and transport as -well as pay. The extreme difficulty of the situation is apparent. With her industries and transport system wrecked and disorganised, Russia is hardly in a position to open up trade unless she is granted long credits, and financial arrangements on • these. lines are seriously impeded by the untrustworthy character of her present ruling authorities. Britain, however, is undoubtedly taking the right course in . offering what facilities arc possible for the resumption of trade. Apart from the fact that Russia has an important part to play, as a market and base of supplies, in the economic life of Europe there is every reason to believe that the actual reestablishment of commercial relations will mark the beginning of her political and social regeneration. This, of course, is the name thing as saying that it will mark the first real 'step towards bringing about the downfall of the Soviet despotism. It is extremely doubtful whether the Soviet Government, in spite of all its professions on the subject, is sincerely desirous of opening up trade with Britain and other countries. Like other powers of evil it thrives best in darkness and isolation. With Its furious .denunciations of the blockade, it has no doubt convinced large sections of the Russian people that their economic troubles are due to the action of the Allied nations, but the truth, of course, is that the Soviet policy was bound to work out fn ruin and disaster, and would have reduced Russia to her present condition of distress even if there had been no blockade. In the period, of their dictatorship the Bolsheviki have to a great extent destroyed Russia’s industrial and commercial organisation, and this in itself was more than sufficient to strangle external trade. The facts are admitted, inferential!,?, even by those who speak as apologists for the Soviet Government. Mb. H. G. Wells, for instance, affirms that a Bolshevist Government is the only government possible in Russia, and that if it goes the nation will sink into Asiatic barbarism, lost to hCTself and a menace to the world. But he has stated also, and from a defender of the Soviet the admission is most damaging, that what Russia needs now is not food or medicaments, but “men of the foreman and works-manager type.” The essential need, that is to say, is the replacement of those elements in Russian industrial life and organisation which the Bolshevik fanatics have striven consistently to eliminate and destroy. The mere reopening of channels of trade will accomplish nothing for Russia unless her industries are re-establish-ed on an efficient basis. This of necessity implies the abandonment nf crazy communist theories and the adoption of more rational methods. It is most unlikely that the Soviet dictators will effect such a change willingly, but the. hope is now tentatively raised that they may ho driven by the pressure of popular needs and demands to establish conditions in which trade, will be practicable and that the effect will be to release forces of wholesome growth and reconstruction in Russia, which ultimately will overthrow the Red tyranny. There is no visible foundation for the belief expressed by Mb. Wells and others that Russia will sink into barbarism if the Soviet Government is displaced On the contrary, as the New York fiveiiinr/ Post observed recently, j what the Bolshevists have really j done is to stifle the capacity for self-development with which the Russian nation has shown itself well endowed The Russian people, the American daily remarks, in spite of its rulers and in less than half a century, cut down its illiteracy ratio by almost 50 per cent. The Russian people developed in the Zemstvos organs of local and provincial selfgovernment that carried on the national work in which the autocracy failed. It is this people that developed the principle of mutual help to the point of including more than half the population in the various co-operative societies. Only by overlooking these great democratic capacities, springing from Die roots of Russian life—capacities, incidentally, which Tsarism could not destroy, but which Sovietism has done its best to uproot—is it possible io build up the Wellsian picture of Russia as a degraded horde whom only the heroic, efforts of the Soviet are holding back from mass suicide.

As the same , paper justly observes, trade \ should be opened with Russia, not to strengthen the Soviet Government, but for just the opposite purpose—“to destroy once for all that great excuse of the blockade by

which Bolshevism has fortified itself against its own people,”, and “with the confident belief that in the light of publicity its last pretensions will be unmasked, and with the further confidence that when Bolshevism disappears it will be only to release the powers and aspirations of the Russian people which the present regime has done its best to stifle.”