THE STORY OF A BRITISH OFFICER CAPTURED IN SIBERIA
“I attempt in the following pages to give some account of my experiences among the Bolsheviks from January to April of the year 1920. My story is neither Propaganda for Bolshevism nor Propaganda against it. I simply give all the facts, whether they tell against Communism or in its favour ; and, if I indulge in deductions from those facts, my readers are at liberty to draw whatever other deductions they like. The main thing is that all the facts be placed before them ; and that I have tried my best to do. The result may possibly be that this book will displease not only the Bolsheviks, but also those equally fanatical anti-Bolsheviks who believe that Lenin and Trotsky lead lives of phenomenal debauchery, that cannibalism is common in Moscow, that all Russian women have been nationalized, that the Red Army is composed of Letts and Chinese who have to be driven into action by means of whips and machine-guns, and that anyone who disputes these facts is a Bolshevik himself. I really hate Bolshevism as much as these people do, but I also hate Propaganda in so far as that word means the selection of all the facts supporting a certain theory, and the deliberate suppression of all the facts which tell against that theory, or vice versa.”