CHAOS COMING.

Taranaki Daily News, 8 January 1921, Page 10

CHAOS COMING.

ANARCHISM WILL FOLLOW SOVIET’S FALL. THEN A REGENERATION. (Correspondent New York Herald). London, Oct. 9. “After Bolshevism, anarchy—utteranarchy—and nothing else,” was the way a trained diplomatic observer outlined Russia’s future to the correspondent of the Herald to-day. He has been in Russia for six months, disguised as a workman, investigating conditions and framing a report to his Government, which is “one of the most advanced” in Western Europe. “Then, little by little, Russia will be regenerated on a reconstitution of society,” he continued. “This will not be a process for a day, but for a decade —perhaps . longer. And Bolshevism is now near its end.”

The report of this diplomatist has already had a notable effect on the framing of the policy of that “advanced” Government with which he is connected. Indeed, there is evidence here that it is having even further effect, for the proposed trade agreement between the British Government and the Russian Soviet represented by the Krassin mission here has been held up mysteriously. The informant of the Herald correspondent had no delusions regarding a Russian panacea. He assessed the military efforts of the Poles and of General Wrangel against the Bolsheviki as worth nothing. “A historic picture of a retreat from Moscow was painted a hundred and eight years ago,” he said. “Why repeat it.” But he was perfectly definite about a collapse of the present Bolshevist regime being imminent, although he admitted his own predisposition in favor of Some system of Communism when he went into Russia. “The Russians have been living on a capital aecumulatibn through centuries,” the returned observer said. “That capital is approaching an end. Then, when they reach an end of it, they are through. Eight thousand pairs of boots were manufactured in Petrograd last summer. What is that in the face of a population of 2,000,000? “Last winter almost every wooden house in Russian cities was torn down and used for fuel. There are no more wooden houses there this year. This means that thousands of persons will die of cold. Russian workers have stopped producing.” When asked why the Russians had stopped) producing, the observer declared: “AU incentive to produce, except to save themselves individually from starvation, is gone. The Soviet authorities themselves recognise this.” He produced from his pocketbook a slip of paper on which was an order for the delivery to him of two pounds of bread. “That was my wages—a very large extra wage—for .working May Day,” he said. In these circumstances, quite naturally this observer interprets recent reports of mutinies in the Bolshevist armies and industrial riots in the Russian cities as cracking the last vestige of Soviet power.. And he stated plainly that the Soviet was the last vestige of any power in Russia. He placed no faith in any “White schemes, asserting that the peasant workers had lost faith in everything except themselves. He said he foresaw a condition in which every little natural community would repudiate all outside interferences, hoarding its own primitive resources and defending them. “Under such a state of affairs, naturally, only the strongest could survive,” he continued. “Gradually they will work out their own minute organisation of life in their own petty circle. As it spreads, constant with others, eventually the organisation —literally, molecule by molecule—there will come the reincarnation of the spirit of work and of rewards commensurate with the work done. “It is a historic process—the prehistoric process of the ages. It will be a long agony for Russia, but it is the only theory Which fits in with the hard facts of the Russian situation.” ♦. Meanwhile Nikolai Lennin, Bolshevist Premier, is making a desperate effort to go on with his world revolution in an effort to bolster up what appears to be his falling star of destiny.