e
antagonism from without. It is true that the co-operative movement is
going ahead in Russia, but it is not because of, but in spite of,
Bolshevism. The co-operative movement in Russia is not the product of
the Bolshevist Government; it existed and progressed under Tsardom.
The help which the co-operative societies rendered to the Russian
people during the war is beyond all dispute. The majority of the
co-operators in the area under Bolshevist domination are forced to
work with the Bolshevist Soviets in order to save their societies from
dissolution. The co-operative societies in Siberia, representing two
million affiliated families, a population of about ten millions, have
been the backbone of the opposition to the Bolshevist Government east
of the Urals.

Bolshevism in Russia is, in fact, a revival of the Anarchism of
Bakunine, tinged with certain Marxist theories which the Bolshevik
refugees have gathered during their numerous sojourns abroad. It is a
worship of the Revolution to which everything must be sacrificed. In
its adoration of the Goddess of Liberty it is willing-to crush the
freedom of human beings. The change from Tsardom to Bolshevism is, to
use Trotzky's cynical phrase, "the turn of the wheel."

The Bolshevist Government has now dominated the central portion of
European Russia for more than a twelvemonth. It bases its demand for
general recognition on the fact that it has lasted a year without
being overturned, and contends that that proves it has the support of
"Soviet" Russia. The brief statement of internal conditions at Moscow
and Petrograd made above suggests that the reports of terrible food
shortage in those great cities, which come from independent sources,
are not entirely destitute of foundation. And yet the apologists of
the Bolsheviks here assure us that in Russia at the present time we
have a "Socialist Republic of a very high order"!

These facts require to be made thoroughly well known among the working
classes of these islands. The idea is being assiduously put about,
more subterraneously than openly, that there is now established in
Russia a genuine Socialist Republic, or, at all events, a real and
conscious attempt on the part of the workers and peasants of Russia to
establish such a Republic. Given this idea, there is every reason for
a popular agitation to prevent anything being done by the British
Government and its allies to hamper that Socialist Republic in the
early stages of