The essence of the Washington answer is that the resumption of commerce with Russia will be possible only after we have returned to a bourgeois régime. This is pure nonsense. The English bourgeoisie who have signed a trade agreement with us did not consider this change necessary. We did not propose to the Americans to change their capitalistic régime for a communistic one.
But neither this provocative response nor anything the Bolshevists can say or do—no matter how aggressively revolutionary—can put a stop to the claims made almost daily by their diplomatic agents, foreign propagandists and "liberal" admirers that they have reformed. Each minor change in their policy is held to demonstate once more that now at last they have not only thrown the entire Bolshevist system overboard but have become "moderates" and adopted capitalism and democracy. During recent months hardly a day has passed without some Russian dispatch that the final step has been taken and Communism abandoned. Here is the crux of a typical dispatch (dated Riga, May 2, 1921):
Following the restoration of free trade to cooperative societies, the establishment of a system of taxation in kind, and other recent concessions, the decision to restore the coinage of silver marks, is according to recent arrivals from Moscow, Premier Lenin's final admission of the impossibility of the original Communistic theories at this time.
Now the original theory of the Russian Communist or Bolshevist Party was precisely that it is impossible to apply Communism to the dominating industry of Russia
