THE STATE OF RUSSIA.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 15319, 21 August 1923, Page 4

THE STATE OF RUSSIA.

,A series of articles was recently contributed to the London Times by a special correspondent, lately returned from Moscow. The principal impression made on one by the Bolshevist Government to-day is not so much wickedness as hopeless muddle, he wrote in a concluding survey. It is this helplessness and this administrative incompetence which make the Bolsheviks still remain the terror. There are two irreconcilable systems of government now face to face in Europe, and the Bolshevik system, though changing very gradually, is excessively alarmed by each change which is forced on it by external or internal pressure, not so much because the Bolshevik leaders fear this change in itself as because they fear it will give a handle to their enemies, weaken the fanaticism of their followers, and thus lead to their own destruction in circumstances of terror, similar to those which accompanied the destruction of the Russian middle classes in 1918 and 19 ML Meanwhile, the Soviet Government has changed so much that it is certainly not Communist; it would be hard indeed to describe what it is. The nearest approach to a comprehensive description that the writer can get is—an oligarchy of half a dozen men whose power is based on a well-organised political party of about 200,000 inspired by enthusiasm for a Communist system which has been abandoned, but holding on to power because they are afraid to let go. As a Chinese proverb says: "He who rides on a tiger can never dismount." One cannot help coming to the conclusion that Bolshevism is less dangerous on account of those principles which it loudly trumpets to the world than on account of those which are latent in it, and which it even tries to camouflage, but which are bound, nevertheless, to develop in proportion as Bolshevism itself develops. Latent is that terrible curse of the ancient world, a curse which Christianity abolished only very gradually and with the uttermost difficulty—namely, .industrial servitude, as complete as that which prevailed under the Roman Emperors, and more difficult to get rid of because the slave-owner is a fascinating abstraction called "the Workers' Revolution," "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat," and "the Government of the Poor and the Oppressed.' Their system tends logically to the destruction of weakly children or helpless old persons who can never be serviceable to that Moloch State which the Reds have conceived. When one studies the learned theories set forlh by the Communist philosophers, one fails to see how they can regard themselves or other men as anything better than machines without a soul or a God, or a hereafter, pieces of mechanism that should, if incurably inefficient, be sent to the lethal chamber.