File No. 861.00/3212
[Enclosure]
The Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs
(
Chicherin) to the Chief of the American Red Cross
Commission to Russia (
Wardwell)2
Moscow,
September 11,
1918.
Dear Sir: It is only because the body
which you represent is not a political organization that I can
find it compatible with my position not to repudiate offhand
your intervention as a misplaced interference in the affairs of
a foreign state, but to enter in the friendly spirit
corresponding to the character of your organization into a
discussion of the matter involved. You affirm that your
organization did not hesitate to condemn acts of barbarity on
the part of our adversaries. Where are these utterances of
condemnation? When and in what form did the American Red Cross
protest when the streets of Samara were filled with corpses of
young workers shot in batches by America’s allies, or when the
prisons of Omsk were filled with tens of thousands of the flower
of the working class and the best of them executed without
trial, or when just now in Novorossiisk the troops of England’s
mercenary Alexeev
murdered in cold blood 7,000 wounded who were left behind by our
retreating army, or when the Cossacks of the same Alexeev murdered without
distinction the young men of their own race in whom they see a
revolutionary vanguard? I would be very glad to learn what the
American Red Cross has done in order to publicly brand these
untold atrocities, the everyday work of our enemies, everywhere
practised by them upon our friends when they have the power to
do it. But are these the only atrocities around us? In a wider
field, at the present period when the oligarchs who are the
rulers of the world drench the earth with streams of blood,
cover it with heaps of corpses and whole armies of maimed and
fill the whole world with unspeakable sufferings, why do you
turn your indignation against those who, rising against this
whole system of violence, oppression and murder that bears as if
for the sake of mockery the name of civilization, those I repeat
who in their desperate struggle against the ruling system of the
present world are compelled by their very position in the
furnace of a civil war to strike the class foes with whom the
life and struggle is raging? And in a still wider field are not
the sacrifices still greater, still more innumerable, which are
exacted every day on the battlefield of labor by the ruling
system of exploitation which grinds youth and life force and
happiness of the multitude for the sake of the profits of the
few? How can I characterize the humanity of the American Red
Cross which is dumb to the system of everyday murder and turns
against those who have dared to rise against it and surrounded
by mortal enemies from all sides are compelled to strike?
Against these fighters who have thrust themselves into the fire
of battle for a whole new system of human society you are not
even able to be otherwise than unjust. Our adversaries are not
executed as you affirm for holding other political views than
ourselves, but for taking part in the most terrible
[Page 715]
of battles, in which
no weapon is left untouched against us, no crime is left aside
and no atrocities are considered too great when the power
belongs to them. Is it not known to you that by the decree of
September 3 the death sentences are applied only for distinct
crimes, and besides banditism and ordinary crimes, they are to
be applied for participation in the White Guard movement, that
is, the movement which helps to surround us everywhere with
death snares, which unceasingly attacks us with fire and sword
and every possible misfortune and wishes to prepare for us, if
only it had the power to do so, complete extermination? You
speak of execution of 500 persons in Petrograd as of one
particularly striking instance of acts of like character. As for
the number it is the only one. Among these 500, 200 were
executed on the ground of the decision of the local
organization, to whom they were very well known as most active
and dangerous counter-revolutionaries, and 300 had been selected
already some time ago as belonging to the vanguard of the
counterrevolutionary movement. In the passion of the struggle
tearing our whole people, do you not see the sufferings, untold
during generations, of all the unknown millions, who were dumb
during centuries and whose concentrated despair and rage have at
last burst into the open, passionately longing for a new life,
for the sake of which they have the whole existing fabric to
remove? In the great battles of mankind, hatred and fury are
even so unavoidable as in every battle and in every struggle. Do
you not see the beauties of the heroism of the working class,
trampled under the feet of everybody who were above them until
now, and now rising in fury and passionate devotion and
enthusiasm to recreate the whole world and the whole life of
mankind? Why are you blind to all this in the same way as you
are dumb to the system of atrocities against which this working
class has risen? It is only natural then if you are unjust
against those whom you lightheartedly condemn, if you distort
even the facts of the case, if you see wanton vengeance against
persons of other views there, where in reality there is the most
terrible, the most passionate, the most furious battle of one
world against the other, in which our enemies with deadly
weapons are lurking behind every street corner, and in which the
executions of which you speak, executions of real and deadly
enemies, are insignificant in comparison with the horrors which
these enemies try to prepare for us, and in comparison with the
immeasurable horrors of the whole system with which we are at
present at grips in a life and death struggle.
I remain,
Yours truly,
