Red Dusk and the Morrow by Paul Dukes

As I put pen to paper to write the concluding chapter of this book the news is arriving of the affliction of Russia with one of her periodical famine scourges, an event which cannot fail to affect the country politically as well as economically. Soviet organizations are incompetent to cope with such a situation. For the most pronounced effect both on the workers and on the peasantry of the communistic experiment has been to eliminate the stimulus to produce, and the restoration of liberty of trading came too late to be effective. A situation has arisen in which Russia must make herself completely dependent for rescue upon the countries against which her governors have declared a ruthless political war.

The Communists are between the devil and the deep sea. To say "Russia first" is equivalent to abandoning hope of the world revolution, for Russia can only be restored by capitalistic and bourgeois enterprise. But neither does the prospect of refusing all truck with capitalists, preserving Russia in the position of world-revolutionary citadel, offer any but feeble hopes of world-revolutionary success. For the gulf between "the party" and the Russian people, or as Lenin has recently expressed it in a letter to a friend in France,7 "the gulf between the governors and the governed," is growing ever wider. Many Communists show signs of weakening faith. Bourgeois tendencies, as Lenin observes, "are gnawing more and more at the heart of the party. " Lastly and most terrible, the proletarians of the West, upon whom the Bolsheviks from their earliest moments based all their hopes, show no sign whatever of fulfilling the constantly reiterated Bolshevist prediction that they would rise in their millions and save the only true proletarian government from destruction.