HANDS OFF RUSSIA.
TO avoid obtaining applause under false pretences, let me confess at once that I speak as a bourgeois with hard-earned savings and not as a Bolshevik. Bolshevik, I understand, means one of the majority, and that is, alas! a position I have never had the comfort to occupy. I speak from your platform because you have offered me it, and I would as cheerfully hold forth in the House of Lords if they gave me facilities. I do not belong to the Red Army, unless you will spell it "Read."
Do not despise that "Read" Army—Lenin himself compares newspapers to bombs and guns, and thought it so dangerous that no Government in the world dares leave it uncensored. Even he has suppressed the opposition press, I am sorry to say. But I was relieved to find the suppression described as a temporary and extraordinary measure till the new order was firmly in the saddle. But he would have done better to leave the press free, especially as the Russian masses cannot read.
It is our press that is Lenin's real danger. A Muscovite when he reads that the gutters of Moscow run blood, knows whether the blood is really there, or only invented by the gutter-journalists. But we over here in the fog of peace, can never be absolutely sure that our journals are lying. The other day, I saw an article headed "Russian Dangers." On looking more closely I saw it was only "Russian Dancers." But so hypnotised was my brain by the popular chorus: "Hush, hush, hush, here comes the Bolshevik," that I read it even into a eulogy of the only good thing now admitted to come out of Russia—its ballet.
What a difference from the beginning of the war! Then, when I read about Archangel, I thought it was the Czar. Those were the days of Stephen Graham and 'Holy Russia' and Russian Supplements of The Times. On the first anniversary of the war, Count Benckendorff, the Russian Ambassador, emphasised on behalf of Czar and people "the hearty and constant union of views between Russia and Great Britain and the continued confidence and faith which each has in the other." In those days, for saying a word against Russia I was denounced as a pro-German. Now the danger is to say a word for Russia.
This is in one way a blessing: for now that Russia has taken the place of Germany as the enemy of the human race, now that Bolshevism is, in the language of Lord Denbigh, "a curse in com-
