ter as simple
and clear as possible, I have not tried to deal with the numerous
manifestations of Bolshevism in other lands, but have confined myself
strictly to the Russian example. With some detail--too much, some of my
readers may think!--I have sketched the historical background in order that
the Bolsheviki may be seen in proper perspective and fairly judged in
connection with the whole revolutionary movement in Russia.

Whoever turns to these pages in the expectation of finding a sensational
"exposure" of Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki will be disappointed. It has
been my aim to make a deliberate and scientific study, not an _ex-parte_
indictment. A great many lurid and sensational stories about the Bolsheviki
have been published, the net result of which is to make the leaders of this
phase of the great universal war of the classes appear as brutal and
depraved monsters of iniquity. There is not a crime known to mankind,
apparently, of which they have not been loudly declared to be guilty. My
long experience in the Socialist movement has furnished me with too much
understanding of the manner and extent to which working-class movements are
abused and slandered to permit me to accept these stories as gospel truth.
That experience has forced me to assume that most of the terrible stories
told about the Bolsheviki are either untrue and without any foundation in
fact or greatly exaggerated. The "rumor factories" in Geneva, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, The Hague, and other European capitals, which were so busy
during the war fabricating and exploiting for profit stories of massacres,
victories, assassinations, revolutions, peace treaties, and other momentous
events, which subsequent information proved never to have happened at all,
seem now to have turned their attention to the Bolsheviki.

However little of a cynic one may be, it is almost impossible to refrain
from wondering at the fact that so many writers and journals that in the
quite recent past maintained absolute silence when the czar and his minions
were committing their infamous outrages against the working-people and
their leaders, and that were never known to protest against the many crimes
committed by our own industrial czars against our working-people and their
leaders--that these writers and journals are now so violently denouncing
the Bolsheviki for alleged inhumanities. When the same journals that
defended or apologized for the brutal lynchings of I.W.W. agitat