I have done my best to indicate the essential facts in Russia's problem today, and to describe the organization and methods with which she is attempting its solution.I can give no opinion as to whether by these means the Russians will succeed in finding their way out of the quagmire of industrial ruin in which they are involved.I can only say that they are unlikely to find their way out by any other means.I think this is instinctively felt in Russia.Not otherwise would it have been possible for the existingorganization, battling with one hand to save the towns front starvation, to destroy with the other the various forces clothed and armed by Western Europe, which have attempted its undoing.The mere fact of continued war has, of course, made progress in the solution of the economic problem almost impossible, but the fact that the economic problem was unsolved, must have made war impossible, if it were not that the instinct of the people was definitely against Russian or foreign invaders.Consider for one moment the military position.
Although the enthusiasm for the Polish war began to subside (even among the Communists) as soon as the Poles had been driven back from Kiev to their own frontiers, although the Poles are occupying an enormous area of non-Polish territory, although the Communists have had to conclude with Poland a peace obviously unstable, the military position ofSoviet Russia is infinitely better this time than it was in 1918 or 1919.In 1918 the Ukraine was held by German troops and the district east of the Ukraine was in the hands of General Krasnov, the author of a flattering letter to the Kaiser.In the northwest the Germans were at Pskov, Vitebsk and Mohilev.We ourselves were at Murmansk and Archangel.In the east, the front which became known as that of Kolchak, was on the Volga.Soviet Russia was a little hungry island with every prospect of submersion.A year later the Germans had vanished, the flatterers of the Kaiser had joined hands with those who were temporarily flattering the Allies, Yudenitch's troops were within sight of Petrograd, Denikin was at Orel, almost within striking distance of Moscow; there had been a stampede of desertion from the Red Army.There was danger that Finland might strike at any moment.Although in the east Kolchak had been swept over the Urals to his ultimate disaster, the situation of Soviet Russia seemed even more desperate than in the year before.What is the position today! Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland are at peace with Russia.The Polish peace brings comparative quiet to the western front, although the Poles, keeping the letter rather than the spirit of their agreement, have given Balahovitch the opportunity of establishing himself in Minsk, where, it is said, that the pogroms of unlucky Jews show thathe has learnt nothing since his ejection from Pskov.
Balahovitch's force is not important in itself, but its existence will make it easy to start the war afresh along the whole new frontier of Poland, and that frontier shuts into Poland so large an anti-Polish population, that a moment may still come when desperate Polish statesmen may again choose war as the least of many threatening evils.Still, for the moment, Russia's western frontier is comparatively quiet.Her northern frontier is again the Arctic Sea.Her eastern frontier is in the neighborhood of the Pacific.The Ukraine is disorderly, but occupied by no enemy; the only front on which serious fighting is proceeding is the small semi-circle north of the Crimea.There Denikin's successor, supported by the French but exultantly described by a German conservative newspaper as a "German baron in Cherkass uniform," is holding the Crimea and a territory slightly larger than the peninsula on the main land.Only to the immenseefficiency of anti-Bolshevik propaganda can be ascribed the opinion, common in England but comic to any one who takes the trouble to look at a map, that Soviet Russia is on the eve of military collapse.
