The book is in no sense of the word propaganda. For
propaganda, for the defence or attack of the Communist
position, is needed a knowledge of economics, both from the
capitalist and socialist standpoints, to which I cannot
pretend. Very many times during the revolution it has
seemed to me a tragedy that no Englishman properly
equipped in this way was in Russia studying the gigantic
experiment which, as a country, we are allowing to pass
abused but not examined. I did my best. I got, I think I may
say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist
could get to what was going on. But I never lost the bitter
feeling that the opportunities of study which I made for
myself were wasted, because I could not hand them on to
some other Englishman, whose education and training would
have enabled him to make a better, a fuller use of them.
Nor would it have been difficult for such a man to get the
opportunities which were given to me when, by sheer
persistence in enquiry, I had overcome the hostility which I
at first encountered as the correspondent of a "bourgeois"
newspaper. Such a man could be in Russia now, for the
Communists do not regard war as we regard it. The
Germans would hardly have allowed an Allied Commission
to come to Berlin a year ago to investigate the nature and
working of the Autocracy. The Russians, on the other hand,
immediatelya greed to the suggestion of the Berne
Conference that they should admit a party of socialists, the
majority of whom, as they well knew, had already expressed
condemnation of them. Further, in agreeing to this, they
added that they would as willingly admit a committee of