XIV.
THE NEW ECONOMIC PROGRAM.
When they carried out their uprising in 1917 the Russian Communists had been long convinced that in order for a proletarian revolution to be successful it would almost necessarily have to extend over several big countries simultaneously.[1] They realized that industry is international in scope; that all the nations are economically dependent upon each other, and that the possibility of a working class republic maintaining itself in one country, while the rest remained capitalist, was almost negligible. Hence, immediately they came into power they set about encouraging the indispensible revolutions in the great states of Western Europe. But their efforts failed: in each case the workers, ignorant and led by timid and treacherous leaders, were unable to rise to the heights of real proletarian revolution. In consequence, the Russians finally found themselves alone, with the admittedly next to impossible task on their hands of making their country a Communist society against the united opposition of the capitalist world.
With this superhuman problem on their hands, the Russian militants have struggled on since the revolution. Always hoping for supporting revolutions to develop in other countries, they have done their utmost to solve the baffling industrial problem with their own means; they rebuilt as best they could the railroad equipment and industrial plants destroyed in the civil wars; they tried to overcome the shortage of skilled labor by creating thousands of technical and vocational schools; they repressed sabotage with an iron hand, not hesitating to even use the firing squad when necessary; they carried on a great campaign to educate the
- ↑ Once when talking with a very prominent Russian Communist, and after we had reviewed the many industrial wants of the country, he expressed a widely-held opinion when he said, "After all, the only thing that Russia really needs is a revolution in Germany." The thought being that with the workers of Germany and Russia united in revolution; the ones possessing a magnificent industrial equipment and the others boundless natural resources, a proletarian economic block would be created that could sustain itself against the capitalist world.
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