That is, wholesale confiscation and debt repudiation were but a drop in the bucket in view of the mad Bolshevik finance.
It might be supposed that this report, at last, would be enough to satisfy the pseudo-liberal pro-Bolshevists as to the character of the Soviets. What is our amazement to find it also being interpreted as a pro-Soviet document! The same leading Democratic newspaper, one of the chief supporters of President Wilson in this country, already quoted in Chapter I, declares that the White Paper shows that Lenin and Trotzky "have been doing their utmost since they were freed of the threat of invasion, 'to establish a system of individual control in industry in place of the collective system which has proved a failure,' to repair locomotives and rolling stock, to revive industry and avoid famine by conscripting labor, to end bureaucratic control in local affairs and to encourage trade with other nations. They have not succeeded even passably in any of these undertakings, but it is plain that they have endeavored to apply a constructive programme in the face of disorganization and disorder for which modern history has no parallel.
"Whether disorganization and disorder would have struck so deep in Russia after the war with any other Government in power it is too late now to decide. Even to-day some of the countries of Central Europe are only a little better off than Russia; if they had been obliged to endure an Allied blockade they might have been no nearer recovery in 1921 than their neighbor to the east."
An unparalleled inversion of the facts. "Individual control" by Soviet bureaucrats is the control to which the White Paper refers, and this was accomplished a
