Economic Force and the Russian Problem

ACCUSTOMED to think in terms of our own political experience, we Americans habitually regard all problems of government as easily solved by the application of American principles. We hailed the Russian revolution as a conquest of democracy, awaiting with almost childish faith the extension of all the blessings of our own system to the great people of Russia. Because the Russian revolution, controlled-just as our own was-by economic and social forces acting and re-acting through local institutions, has followed courses defined by actual conditions of life and not by American idealism, we, of all people, seem the least capable of understanding. Judging the situation by traditional and constitutional standards and forgetting that our own government was produced by the operation of relentless economic forces, we can never understand. Governments cannot exist in theory or imagination. They are not founded upon the idealism of other lands. They spring from the very lives and aspirations of the men and women who compose them. They are brought into being by facts and forces which are not to be resisted by phrase or propaganda. The fall of the Czar in 1917 was the natural result of unrelenting economic force. European Russia, with a balance of trade in excess of $200,000,000 in her favor for the year 1912, after two years of war was unable to support her armies or to feed her people. As in France, so in Russia the economic factor was the primary and direct cause of revolution. All classes being united against the Czar, the mass of the Russian people soon made clear to their new leaders the demands which they intended that the revolution should meet: peace, land, industrial reform--primarily economic, every one of them. In November, 1917, the bolsheviks gained power because these economic demands had in no measure been met, nor even answered. Economic disorganization had progressed. The problem of food supply had become worse, instead of better. In the

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