Whoever turns to these pages in the expectation of finding a sensational
"exposure" of Bolshevism and the Bolsheviki will be disappointed. It has
been my aim to make a deliberate and scientific study, not an _ex-parte_
indictment. A great many lurid and sensational stories about the Bolsheviki
have been published, the net result of which is to make the leaders of this
phase of the great universal war of the classes appear as brutal and
depraved monsters of iniquity. There is not a crime known to mankind,
apparently, of which they have not been loudly declared to be guilty. My
long experience in the Socialist movement has furnished me with too much
understanding of the manner and extent to which working-class movements are
abused and slandered to permit me to accept these stories as gospel truth.
That experience has forced me to assume that most of the terrible stories
told about the Bolsheviki are either untrue and without any foundation in
fact or greatly exaggerated. The "rumor factories" in Geneva, Stockholm,
Copenhagen, The Hague, and other European capitals, which were so busy
during the war fabricating and exploiting for profit stories of massacres,
victories, assassinations, revolutions, peace treaties, and other momentous
events, which subsequent information proved never to have happened at all,
seem now to have turned their attention to the Bolsheviki.
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