What Is Russia?

...The Bolshevists have taken the battle to the schools and it is there that it will be won or lost...

...America will accomplish nothing in this direction as long as religion is barred from our public schools...

...The burden of these things is not for Catholics alone, though certainly, if we believe what we profess in school, college and theological seminary, we should be among the leaders—and not the followers...

...America was never meant to be a battle field for such a struggle...

...Not these, however...

...His successors have every appearTHE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 ance of total disagreement with each other without any of them having worked out a clean-cut and concrete philosophy and plan...

...A number of high school boys and girls were arrested for disturbing a rather innocuous Communist antiprotest...

...Her children were taken from her and put in Bolshevik schools...

...He is assuming of course, in this defense, that his immediate hearers and revolutionary companions know what he means, and is haughtily contemptuous of the understanding of outsiders who may buy his book...

...His at even in the name of reform and democracy, program for putting the Marxian economic theories There is unquestionably much to remedy in the whole into concrete application by political means appeared system of the West...

...The following article may be considered an effort to draw a conclusion from these facts...

...cil system which was our own form in early New En- As a political revolution it became increasingly ungland...

...Those two remarkable men, Lenin and Trotzky, were quick to see that it was the only system in Russia with any vestige of democratic sanctions, when they attempted the first time to throw down the provisional government and were blocked by the unrecognized Council of Soldiers and Many years ago, when I was studying in Germany, Workmen's Deputies...

...It seemed then that while those eminent scholars were warning against the antireligious content their principal issue was with Marx's false economics...

...I think the recent arrests in Washington in connection with Bishop Freeman's meeting of protest illustrate very well the direction of the Bolshevist tide...

...That is the menace: not as a political system, not as an economic program, not as an armed avalanche crashing down on western Europe, but as a highly aggressive subversive philosophy of life, for which many other peoples are prepared consciously or unconsciously even though they reject many of its present outward manifestations as applied to themselves...

...We did that ourselves, and we are suffering the consequences of industrial exploitation today...

...We cannot blame the "alien" for the introduction of all those social and industrial evils he brought with him...

...There is no other reason why it should not work out reasonably well, and built on an intelligent and well-informed citizenry it might even work out very well...

...It takes complete dictatorship for that...

...She belonged to an ancient family and was therefore subjected to studied humiliation in the public services which she was ordered to perform and without which she could not have her daily ration of food...

...WHAT IS RUSSIA...

...delegates from the county councils make a provincial or state council, and in turn, delegates from these make a national council, of which the executive attract any large number of western peoples...

...It will not be accomplished by a growing enmity between the various racial groups within the Catholic communion in America nor by hostility toward the older Americans among whom they settled...

...Under democratic form a real dictatorship and tyranny had been substituted for an inept and slipshod bureaucracy...

...The semireligious the full import of the new gospel in its antireligious aspect of Bolshevism appealed to these as strongly aspect, and I cannot imagine that any one outside of perhaps in its way as Christianity appealed to the slaves Russia then could possibly have understood what I was of Rome...

...As a remedial economic system, still less...

...Sands, who listened to Lenin in the flesh, has listened carefully to voices speaking from contemporary Russia...

...We have committed two grave errors however, in constructing a new human society: first, we brought in African slave labor and later, the very people who quite rightly feared and condemned it brought in deliberately and without regard to potential citizenship unskilled labor from all of the world and on it built up here all the evils of the unprincipled and unrestricted industrial system that had replaced an oppressive feudal society in Europe...

...Quite likely he assumes that the bourgeois-capitalistic mind is incapable of grasping the content of these "isms," anyway...

...That has developed as the essence and foundation of Bolshevism and was not apparent at first...

...Asked by someone curious to know just what the new educational system is, she explained it as "based upon the exact reversal of the Ten Commandments...

...Each year in the last ten has added a new generation to the godless children of Russia trained in "the reversal of the Commandments...

...It is idle to continue to hold up Russia as a horrible example unless we go back to the roots of citizenship and try to reconstruct from the beginning the ideal America we lost sight of in the decades after the Civil War when all ties were loosed, and we set up here the most undesirable and dangerous part of that "European system" we had rejected...

...May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 39 IT SEEMS to me that the true import of the danger to the rest of the world from Russia does not lie in Bolshevism as a political organism nor as an economic system, but as a materialistic philosophy based not so importantly on denial of God as on actual warfare against God...

...peoples was beginning to be clear to Lenin himself, That was the system developing in Russia when the when Lenin died...

...Petersburg I went to hear Lenin itself was not philosophically disturbing, quite aside expound his interpretation of Karl Marx whenever I from the fact that it is always disturbing to be shot could get to where he happened to be speaking...

...Each leading member seems to have some vague and intangible emotion of his own to which Trotzky refers as "Leninism," "Stalinism," Trotzkism," "Boukharinism" and the like...

...One disagreed at first in Russia, with the methods advocated and used by Bolshevists to bring about the millennium rather than with the ostensible form of government or their catalogue of social and industrial evils which make life a desperate adventure in the civilization we have evolved...

...It is simply a form of democratic government which yields more easily than other forms to domination by a well-organized and ruthless minority, but it never seemed to me that it lent itself to the armed conquest of the world that many feared...

...By WILLIAM FRANKLIN SANDS In the interests of presenting the facts in the Russian case, we published some weeks ago a paper by an eyewitness, Mr...

...The direct anti-God element, while always present, still seemed confined to ultraradical factions, and sporadic...

...When Bolshevist revolutionary propaganda was discovered in the Russian barracks in 1905 and crushed, the Communist workers went out to the villages whence recruits were conscripted under the universal military service system...

...The majority were plain Anglo-Saxon...

...Paul Scheffer...

...Gradually, however, it became apparent there was something very different underneath it all...

...imperial government fell to pieces and ordinary life had to go on in the face of war and revolution...

...It shows a curious indefiniteness as to the objectives of any one concerned in it...

...It is the children that matter...

...It seems to me that expectation of physical battle which is keeping Europe from disarmament is less to be feared than the battle of ideas within the bosom of each nation...

...In the first years of Bolshevik domination in Russia, there was a lady living in one of the principal cities...

...When it came the turn of those sons and daughters to continue as parents the religious development of their own children one might expect perceptibly less knowledge, and each succeeding generation passed through the public schools would obviously have less...

...Later, when Lenin and Trotin their way by having members of their flexible and energetic Bolshevik organization elected right through the council system to be its national deputies at the capital and so took on the appearance of being the only body expressing the popular desires and will...

...We rather complacently expect names of such persons to have a Slav or Israelitic ring...

...That democratic element in it is probably tility to Europe...

...That is a thing of the schools, and we shall not be successful there unless we put our effort on training men and women rather than on building luxurious quarters for credit hunters and for "social reasons" as one of our most eminent Churchmen puts it...

...That in zky first came up to St...

...The Soviet form of government which has become anathema is not in itself very important...

...There was much in the speeches to me to be loosing on the world a thing which might of Lenin that appealed strongly to all people who felt overshadow the world war, but I did not yet realize themselves oppressed in any form...

...Delegates from the town council form a county likely that the Russian experiment had anything to council...

...It will not be accomplished by endeavoring to elect men to office because they are Catholics, rather than men whoever they may be, who subscribe to a definite set of acceptable principles and live up to them...

...She had been able to get the boy restarted in the right direction, but not the older girl, "for she found in western Europe the same mode of life, though perhaps in less sordid fashion...

...There remained, as a positive danger, its effect on Asia and Africa as committee and the chairman conduct the national gov- a means of expressing a growing—and justified—hosernment...

...The democratic experiment can never succeed, however, unless upon a basis of accepted principle, and there is no sanction for principle outside of religion...

...The declining appeal to western what has appealed to so many people...

...Let us admit that definite religious teaching was forbidden in our public schools in order to be fair to all differing theological opinions and on the assumption that religion would be taught adequately at home...

...It is a continuation of their very first tactics as a party...

...Lenin's powerful and prophet-like persontalking about, when I called the attention of our State Department to what was happening...

...Ten years later when the world war had called up every man to barracks who was capable of bearing arms, the villages, the factories and the universities furnished the revolutionary material which Lenin and Trotzky organized and Stalin rules...

...We never intended to permit the extension to America of "the European system...

...Its leaders can afford to play with an ignorant and confused but still powerful peasantry and occasionally to relax their extreme anti-religious laws when strategy requires it...

...That will not be accomplished by acrimonious dispute between Christians nor with those who whether Christian or not, subscribe to that system of ethics which we claim as Christian, and which was given in the Ten Commandments to the Jews, by whom Christianity was given to the world...

...Just how this antitheistic doctrine is taught is quite apparent to recent observers who are not blinded by the beauties of the new political and economic experiment, and Russians themselves are well aware of it...

...He finds that the doctrine upon which Sovietism has been based is consistently incoherent, but that it nevertheless represents to Europe a real menace in the form of "a highly aggressive, subversive philosophy of life...

...In the intervening years since the death of Lenin that has grown to be the one consistent policy of Bolshevism...

...That might work for a generation in spite of the fact that most parents of children in the public schools (supposedly well grounded themselves in their religious beliefs) would have a hard struggle to guide the religious development of their sons and daughters under the pressure of industrial life...

...Our public schools have their great place in the American experiment...

...Just as in China the mission Church puts much of its effort on rescuing abandoned children and orphans, rearing them and with them founding Christian families, so has Russian Bolshevism concentrated on the children...

...That is natural enough, since Lenin the prophet was quite frank about the impracticability of the Marxian theory...

...It is in essence simply an extension of the town counality carried many westerners along on a wave of enthusiasm, such as Jack Reed of Harvard and many of the Society of Friends' relief workers...

...The disturbing factor, the real menace is the common acceptance by them and their powerfully organized adherents (no matter how divided in theory) of a consistently materialistic and actively antitheistic philosophy of life "already widespread in other countries which have not yet had any revolutionary upheaval resulting in the casting away of traditional institutions...

...It will not be accomplished unless we Catholics undertake to form understanding citizens rather than egocentric politicians...

...That appearance of philosophical uncertainty is confirmed in Trotzky's recent publication...

...The Editors...

...Again, it is correct that as a recent writer has said "those who hold to Christian faith and morals must make mighty efforts in every sphere, by prayer and work, by spiritual, social, political and intellectual activities" to meet what I think I was right in forecasting thirteen years ago as a menace that might overshadow the world war...

...Until its effects become general in the world, its leaders know that their efforts in other lines are futile...

...There is no remedy for the evils of western civilization against which socialism in all its forms has arisen in protest but in a sound economic and social system based squarely on Christian principles...

...After a time she succeeded in rescuing them and getting them out to Germany—though the youngest died on the way...

...I tried to balance in my own mind the social doctrine of They took possession of the only force that stood Karl Marx and the writings of Father Cathrein and other Jesuits on his doctrine...

...We shall fail unless we develop in our Catholic youth some sense of personal and social responsibility, a sense conspicuously absent at present...