Potential Russia

Potential Russia

Richard Washburn Child

Edited and Introduction by

Lee A. Farrow

by ANTHEM PRESS

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2025

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and

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© 2025 Richard Washburn Child

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All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2024943701

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ISBN-13: 978-1-83999-336-7 (Hbk)/ 978-1-83999-337-4 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83999-336-7 (Hbk)/ 1-83999-337-5 (Pbk)

Cover Credit: GetArchive LLC, public domain

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

Introduction

1. Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

2. Cannon Meat

3. All for Russia

4. The Blight

5. Czar and People

6. Bureaucracy and National Spirit

7. Russia’s Better Half

8. The Miracle Measure

9. The Future of Russia

10. Resources and Development

11. A Call to America

Index

Introduction

In 1916, less than a year before the Russian Revolution, Richard Washburn Child rejected rumors of impending turmoil: Cool heads in Russia believe the idea of revolution is ridiculous. Something less dramatic is in store for Russia. On the contrary, Child detected a new nationalism, a surge in a Russian spirit infused with religion and fealty to the Tsar, that existed not only among the peasants and the military but even among bureaucrats and workers. Despite the stresses of war, he believed, There was not even the glimmer of revolution. Child wrote these words approximately a year before Tsar Nicholas II would abdicate the throne and Vladimir Lenin would return to Russia and lead the Bolsheviks in a seizure of power. Indeed, Child’s prediction about the impossibility of a revolution or a separate peace was but one of many things that he got wrong in his appraisal of Russia. But it is precisely these miscalculations that make his book a fascinating read. Child believed that he understood Russia, but his failure to sense the spirit of unrest raises interesting questions about the long-debated inevitability of the revolution.¹

The social and political breakdown that rocked Russia in 1917 had been developing for years, of course. Russia had been experiencing the growing pains of industrialization and modernization, including the growth of a working class and an industrial middle class, for decades. Its bureaucracy was simultaneously bloated and inefficient. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 gave a boost to the country’s economy, but it also struck at the heart of Russian traditional society. Meanwhile, Russia’s intelligentsia—that group of educated, questioning citizens—had grown from a small cluster of privileged nobles to a much larger group that included men and women from not only the nobility but also the children of teachers, bureaucrats, priests, and lawyers. Influenced by the various strains of socialism popular in Western Europe, these intellectuals eventually began to demand the rights and freedoms of their contemporaries elsewhere. The most radical of these became revolutionaries, advocating violence to bring down the system by attacking its center, the monarchy. To that end, in 1881, a group of revolutionaries assassinated Tsar Alexander II, throwing a bomb under his carriage as it traveled through the streets of St. Petersburg. When his son Alexander III became the new tsar, he targeted the growing revolutionary movement and imposed restrictions on universities and the press. The cycle of repression and revolutionary activity continued under Alexander III’s son and heir, Nicholas II.²

These threats to the monarchy were exacerbated by the enormous challenges on the international scene. In 1904, Russia and Japan went to war over territorial conflicts in Manchuria, ending in a humiliating defeat for Russia. It was, in part, Russia’s miserable performance in the war that led to the outbreak of revolution in January 1905. After months of demonstrations and strikes, in October 1905, Nicholas realized he needed to make concessions to his angry citizens. The result was a document called the October Manifesto, which created a nationally elected consultative assembly called the Duma. Though the Duma appeared promising on paper, it actually had very limited powers and could be arbitrarily dissolved by the tsar. Consequently, though Nicholas’s compromise may have satisfied some moderates, for others it was far too little and only intensified their revolutionary fervor.³ Still, the monarchy continued to function, relying on the same conservative policies as always.

When war broke out in August 1914, however, the political and social strains proved too great. As Russia began to suffer defeat after defeat at the hands of the Germans, Nicholas II dismissed his commander in chief in September 1915 and took command of the troops himself. In doing so, he left his wife, Alexandra, more or less in charge, a shortsighted decision given that she was a German princess by birth and unpopular with the Russian public. By this point, there were already rumors of treason in the palace, and matters were only made worse by the royal family’s attachment to the Siberian monk and self-proclaimed healer, Grigori Rasputin, who insinuated himself into the royal inner circle through his seeming ability to stop the pain and bleeding of the hemophiliac heir to the throne, Alexis. Rasputin came to serve as a spiritual advisor to the royal family and began to influence political decisions and appointments. Rasputin was murdered in December 1916, but by that time, the royal family’s association with him had weakened public perception of the monarchy.⁴

Historians may argue about the primary causes of the Russian Revolution, but in the end, most would agree that it was a combination of the problems discussed above that led to the collapse of the monarchy. In late February 1917 (according to the Julian Calendar, which was still in use in Russia at the time), while Nicholas II was still at the front, demonstrations and riots broke out in Petrograd.⁵ These spontaneous and unexpected demonstrations consisted of striking factory workers and housewives angry at food shortages and the continuing failures in the war. In the tsar’s absence, authority crumbled, and the population of Petrograd then turned to the Duma for leadership. Recognizing the potential danger in this situation, the tsar tried to dissolve the Duma, but its members ignored his order, and on February 27, 1917, they created a Provisional Government. Nicholas attempted to return to Petrograd, but he was stranded by railroad strikes in the city of Pskov, and there, faced with the realities already described, and aware that he no longer had the support of his army commanders, Nicholas abdicated both for himself and for his son, in favor of his brother Michael. When Michael failed to accept the throne with any decisiveness, the Romanov dynasty, which had lasted over 300 years, from 1613–1917, came to an end.⁶

Over the next months, the nominal body leading Russia was the Provisional Government, but it did little to address the problems facing Russia as it planned for elections to create a true constituent assembly.⁷ Meanwhile, Vladimir Lenin, the Marxist theorist and revolutionary who was eager to establish a workers’ state, had already gathered a faction of followers around him under the name of the Bolsheviks. When the revolution broke out in February, Lenin was in Switzerland, but he made it clear that he opposed the Provisional Government and hoped to topple it, after which he would take Russia out of the war. Lenin soon arrived in Petrograd in early April and began to try to persuade the other Bolsheviks that it was time to stage their revolution. Lenin promised to accomplish three things once he was in charge: to take Russia out of the war, to distribute land to the peasantry, and to give workers control over the factories.⁸ Finally, after several months, the Bolsheviks took action. On the night of October 24–25, the coup was carried out as Lenin’s supporters seized the vital centers in Petrograd, such as the electricity and railroad offices. The Provisional Government held out briefly in the Winter Palace, but their defenses were inadequate and unreliable; the majority of the soldiers in Petrograd supported the Bolshevik takeover.⁹

Over the next nine months, Lenin and the Bolsheviks worked to consolidate their control and began to shape Russian life. Immediately after the coup, Lenin named himself as prime minister and Trotsky as commissar of foreign affairs and began to tackle the problems which had brought down the monarchy and the Provisional Government. The new government approved the seizing of land by peasants, placed factories in the hands of workers’ committees, and issued a Decree on Peace, which called for an immediate end to the war with Germany. Shortly after, peace negotiations began in the city of Brest-Litovsk, the site of German military headquarters. Russia was not in a strong position to resist Germany’s demands, and in March 1918, the two countries signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Russia lost approximately 1.3 million square miles of land, including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, and most of Poland; Russia also agreed to recognize Ukrainian independence.¹⁰

Having extracted Russia from the war, Lenin continued to consolidate his power with more and more radical measures. In March 1918, he renamed the Bolshevik Party the Communist Party, and in May, he began a program of forced grain requisitions in order to get food for the cities. In July, a new constitution placed supreme power in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets and restricted civil rights and the right to bear arms to members of the working class. By this time, however, an amalgamation of various anti-Bolshevik forces had coalesced, resulting in a civil war that would last three years. One of the most radical measures of the Bolshevik regime occurred in the first months of the Civil War, when Lenin and his new government decided to eliminate the largest remaining threat to their power, the existence of the royal family. Since April, Nicholas II and his family had been kept as prisoners, hidden away in a small house with painted-over windows in the city of Yekaterinburg, near the Ural Mountains. In July, the entire family was executed, along with their pets and several servants. The first stage of the revolution was complete.¹¹ None of these events seemed even remotely possible when Richard Washburn Child recorded his observations about Russia and her great potential.

Child was a man of varied talents and careers. He was born in 1881 in Massachusetts, the son of a small shop owner. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate and published his first short story in the Saturday Evening Post when he was still in college. He went on to earn a law degree and opened his own law practice in 1911. His interest in writing continued throughout this period too, as he published pieces in Ridgway’s, McClure’s, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Shortly after, he became involved in politics, working for the Progressive Party. During the war, he worked briefly in the Treasury Department and then became the editor of Collier’s and worked as a speechwriter for Warren G. Harding, the Republican presidential candidate. When Harding became president, he thanked Child with the ambassadorship in Rome in 1921, a position he held for three years.

Child’s political leanings changed several times in his life, but he tended to be drawn to big, charismatic figures. He was especially influential in policymaking while he was ambassador to Italy, but following Harding’s death, his star fell, and he struggled to find meaningful professional opportunities, despite his repeated appeals to FDR for various jobs. In 1933, he chaired the organization of the League of Republicans for Roosevelt and initially was a great supporter of FDR’s spending on public works in the early days of the New Deal. But that enthusiasm quickly faded, and he soon began to criticize the cost of FDR’s policies. This shift did not come as a shock to those who knew him. In the words of one historian, His criticisms were an expression of disillusionment with the New Deal, not so much because it had failed in its promises to the country, but because it had failed in its promises to Richard Washburn Child. His initial allegiance to FDR had not led to a satisfactory appointment, and he always had a fuzzy understanding of loyalty.¹²

His private life also floundered. Child married and divorced several times, drank too much, and worried incessantly about money. Still, in the midst of all this, he was an amazingly prolific writer, publishing over seventy articles for the Evening Post, as well as a number of novels and stories. He also wrote several works of nonfiction, including Potential Russia (1916), Battling the Criminal (1925), and A Diplomat Looks at Europe (1925). Battling the Criminal, in particular, is revealing of Child’s view of the world. It was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1924 and 1925 and was his attempt to explain an increase in crime in the United States. Child’s position on the National Crime Commission raised his awareness of this problem, but he interpreted the issue through his own ideological lens. Child blamed juvenile delinquency on frivolous entertainment opportunities, such as bars and roadhouses; he believed that the boom in consumerism and wasteful spending, along with the transportation provided by the growing car industry, led young men astray. The result of all these shallow and meaningless pursuits was crime, amorality, and a declining work ethic.¹³

He is probably most well-known, however, for editing and publishing Benito Mussolini’s autobiography. Child was a fascist sympathizer and an admirer of Mussolini, believing that the leader’s actions and words revealed a certain mysticism and spiritual nature. Like many other Americans, he had a great deal of ambivalence about modernity and shared the general disillusionment after World War One that pushed so many into the arms of new, engaging ideologies like communism and fascism. He viewed modern man as materialistic and shallow, lacking in character, and believed that Italy was coping better with the problems of modernity than other countries. More than this, however, it may have been Child’s own personality that made him attracted to fascism. One historian described him as chauvinistic, narcissistic, and manipulative. He was xenophobic, aggressively ambitious, and ostentatiously macho, and these personality traits predated his encounter with fascism and Mussolini.¹⁴

Child died of pneumonia in 1935 in Manhattan at the age of fifty-three. His papers from his time in Italy are held at the Library of Congress.¹⁵

Child’s visit to Russia in 1916 is but one tiny piece of the much larger history of Russian-American relations. It may come as a surprise to many readers, but Russia and the United States had a good relationship for much of the nineteenth century, particularly during and after the American Civil War. Russia had refused to get involved in the Civil War, but in 1863