New-York tribune., 1918-02-24

The Last Stage of the Russian
Debacle


latest news from Petrograd that among
many of the upper and middle classes
there is Joy, or relief, at the oncoming
of the Germans that whole regiments
have surrendered to the invaders, and
that, so far from meeting with resistance,
the Teutonic armies are marching through
a practically undefended territory.
1t is hard at this distance to realize how
far not merely the disintegration of the
Russian spirit but the actual dismem-
berment of the empire has gone. The Rus
sia that we think of, the typical Russia,
the Russia of Petrograd and Moscow, is
now but a huge headless, armless and leg
less trunk. 1t had been cut off from the
chief manufacturing section, which lay in
the west and included Poland, and this
cut heavily into the supply of every sort
of manufactured goods, textiles shoes,
clothing and the like. Its separation from
the Ukraine, the great granary of Russia,
now completes what the decentralization Of
the railroads had more or less established
that is, the isolation of northern from
southern Russia.
Add to all this the detachment of the
Caucasus and of the Don country, and the
larger part of Russias supply of coal, iron
and oil were gone. What is left are
merely the vast plains of central and
northern Russia In the centre of this,
round about Moscow and Petrograd, a
considerable manufacturing industry had
been built up, but this had been sadly
crippled by the curtailment of supplies
and still more by the decentralization of
the workmen.
In word, the anarchy of Russia is not
merely that of the spirit, not merely that
of an ignorant, undeveloped peasant
population lost in dreams of socialism
and immediate riches; it is economic and
commercial as we'll. We reviewed yester-
day highly informative article from the
pen of Mr.. William T. Ellis. In another
number of "Thc Saturday Evening Post"
another returned traveller from Russia,
Mr. Ernest Poole, deals more specifically
with the paralysis of communication, the
clogging of the channels of business,
against which the Kerensky government
battled in vain, which was perhaps the
chief factor in the triumph of the Social
lists and which is now proving the undong
of the Lenine-Trotzky government as well.
The railroads, said Mr.. Poole, were
demoralzed before the revolution, and
even before the war were most made
euate. Vast areas of the country still
depended on post roads. There are tens
of thousands of sledges moving on the
long, icy roads of Russia to-day, and an
other large share of the traffic is borne
by tremendous network of rivers and
canals. In winter, of course, this traffic
is stopped.
More than half of the population still
lives in lonely villages, miles from any
railroad line The railroads, after the
revolution, were in part seized by the SOL
diers, who rode about on the trains they
had captured. 1t was even proposed that
each section of the roads was to be man
h aged by local committee Of the working
VI men; and a railroad section in Russia is
only sixty or seventy miles long.
Both the mails and telegraph had gone
all to pieces. Even letter from Moscow
to Petrograd took a week or more going,
and sometimes never arrived at ALL The
average telegram was equally uncertain
And all this applied not merely to the
public but to the government business
as well, with the result naturally that or
ders sent out by the government never
arrived; momentous things happened and
people did not know
Mr.. Poole tells of long lines Of freight
cars upon sidings, empty, broken down,
or as often as not filled with food sup
plies that were sorely needed somewhere.
AT Tornea, at the gateway from Norway,
were acres of boxes, barrels and crates
reaching from the train yards off into the
depths of the forest. On the Siberian
line, which our American engineers took
hold Of, tens of thousands of tons of our
goods and munitions We're waiting for
cars to haul them. The good work of Mr..
Stevens's commission was just beginning
to show when the Socialist coup d'etat
came, followed by the wholesale substi-
tuition of the former functonaries by the
peasants.
We may get some of the picture if we
were to imagine the most ignorant of our
foreign population, or if you please, and
the comparison is not so unfair, the col
ored population of the South, suddenly
intrusted with the vast transportation
business of our own country.
A yet more demoralizing influence than
anv ono in this country can realize WaA