WHAT GORBY COULDN'T GRASP 70 YEARS LATER:

Spargo offers a stinging indictment of Bolshevik values:

The Bolsheviki did not want the ideals of the Revolution to be realized, for the very simple reason that they were opposed to those ideals. In all the long struggle from Herzen to Kerensky the revolutionary movement of Russia had stood for political democracy first of all. Now, at the moment when political democracy was being realized, the Bolsheviki sought to kill it and to set up something else -- namely, a dictatorship of a small party of less than two hundred thousand over a nation of one hundred and eighty millions. There can be no dispute as to this aim; it has been stated by Lenin with great frankness. "Just as one hundred and fifty thousand lordly landowners under Czarism dominated the one hundred and thirty millions of Russian peasants, so two hundred thousand members of the Bolshevik party are imposing their proletartan will on the mass, but this time in the interest of the latter." (The New International, April, 1918)

Lenin's figures probably exaggerate the Bolshevik numbers, but, assuming them to be accurate, can anybody in his right mind, knowing anything of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, believe that the substitution of a ruling class of one hundred and fifty thousand by one of two hundred thousand, to govern a nation of one hundred and eighty millions, was the end to which so many lives were sacrificed? Can any sane and sincere person believe that the class domination described by the great arch-Bolshevik himself comes within measurable distance of being as much of a realization of the ideals of the Revolution as did the Constituent Assembly plan with its basis of political democracy, universal, equal, direct, secret, all-determining suffrage?

We do not forget Lenin's statement that this new domination of the people by a ruling minority differs from the old regime in that the Bolsheviki are imposing their will upon the mass "in the interest of the latter." What ruling class ever failed to make that claim? Was it not the habit of the Czars, all of them, during the whole revolutionary epoch, to indulge in the pious cant of proclaiming that they were motived only by their solicitude for the interests and well-being of the peasants?

This analysis strips the Bolsheviks of even the vaunted "good intentions" that so endeared them to intellectuals who were viewing the events in Russia from a distance.

Spargo would return to the topic many times, including in his 1920 book Russia as an American Problem, which contained insights like "there could be no more complete confession of the bankruptcy of Bolshevism" than a "communist Utopia parasitically dependent on the capitalist enterprise of other nations!"

Russia as an American Problem accomplished two things. First, it pissed off Lenin, who complained about it in a secret speech. But more importantly, it caught the eye of Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby. He wrote to Spargo: "Your reasoning is as tight and close as that of a first-class lawyer, and your use of citations gives your chapters the power of a brief."

Spargo responded with a series of policy recommendations for the Woodrow Wilson administration to adopt toward Russia. To Spargo's surprise, his declarations were adopted almost word-for-word. It's key principal -- the refusal to recognize the Communists as the legitimate rulers of Russia -- became United States policy, and remained so until Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized Stalin's regime in 1933 (on the advice of the infamous Walter Duranty of the New York Times).

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