The Confidential Memo That Exposed What Was Going on in Russia

By the Editors

The November 1923 issue of an American magazine opened with these words: “No one will deny that the question of recognizing Soviet Russia is daily assuming greater importance in American political life.”

But a full decade would pass before the United States, under President Franklin Roosevelt, established formal diplomat relations with the Soviet Union. The magazine’s 1923 pronouncement proved far too bullish—probably because it reflected the Communist party line. The publication in question was Soviet Russia Pictorial, published by the Friends of Soviet Russia.

Some American progressive politicians, writers, and scholars had visited the Soviet Union. One who made the pilgrimage, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, declared, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Progressive senator William Borah of Idaho called for recognizing Soviet Russia as early as 1922.

But on December 6, 1923, not long after that issue of Soviet Russia Pictorial appeared, President Calvin Coolidge addressed the matter in his first annual message to Congress. Coolidge said of Russia, “Our Government does not propose…to enter into relations with another regime which refuses to recognize the sanctity of international obligations.”

Why did President Coolidge—like Woodrow Wilson and Warren Harding before him, and Herbert Hoover after him—refuse to recognize the Soviet Union? Coolidge had strong reasons for doing so, as a once-confidential memorandum reveals.

The Mathews Memorandum

Coolidge acceded to the presidency on August 3, 1923, after Harding died. Only two weeks later, Secretary of State Charles Evan Hughes sent the new president a memo of “exceptional interest,” detailing “conditions in Russia.” Hughes passed along a twenty-five-page report from Major Philip Mathews of the American Relief Administration.

Under Hoover’s leadership, the American Relief Administration helped feed the Russian people when a devastating famine hit the country in 1921. Major Mathews spent two years in Russia, “having charge of all the transportation of relief supplies,” Hughes wrote. The secretary of state informed Coolidge that Mathews had “exceptional facilities for ascertaining actual conditions.”

The Library of Congress now houses Mathews’s report in the Calvin Coolidge Papers. Major Mathews’s on-the-ground observations of Soviet Russia touch on a few themes that would recur throughout the USSR’s nearly seventy-year history.

The Soviet Ran a Totalitarian Regime from the Start

In his December 1923 address to Congress, President Coolidge said, “I do not propose to barter away for the privilege of trade any of the cherished rights of humanity.” The Mathews memo detailed how the Soviet regime trampled on those rights.

For example, Mathews reported:

“Russian citizens do not dare criticize their government…under pain of arrest with probable exile or death as the penalty.”

“This Government…is exactly what the leaders of the government in Russia claim it to be, a dictatorship. There is no universal suffrage, there is no creation of law by the representatives even of the Communist party…. The laws are issued in the form of decrees by the Central Executive Committee.”

“The Cheka [secret police] is still in existence, the name having been changed to the G.P.U. It still exercises without due process of law the right of search and arrest and the American Relief Administration has had hundreds of its Russian employes summarily arrested…and kept in jail without trial for many months.”

“The claim that the Soviet Government has established a just legal, civil and judicial code is false…. There are courts in Russia but the Judge of every court is authorized to exercise what is known as his ‘revolutionary conscience’…[which] annuls all law and decree which exists in Russia.”

“The public press in Russia being under control of the Russian government prints only the news that the government desires disseminated.”

“The Soviet Government does not keep its promises and…it has not carried out the obligations it assumed in relation to foreign governments. The Riga agreement entered into between the Soviet Government and the American Relief Administration, I, of my own personal knowledge know was violated in many instances.”

“The government is slowly but surely closing all the churches.”

“The American Relief Administration had its branches throughout Russia but that did not prevent the arrest and exile of thousands of people many of whom were personally known to the Americans nor did it prevent the Soviet Government from arresting and throwing into prison our own Russian employes.”

The Soviet System Hurt the People It Purported to Help

Lenin denounced capitalists as oppressors of the people. But the Soviet system, Major Mathews reported, did little to help its people, and often made their situations worse. In the memo President Coolidge read, Mathews wrote:

“The Soviet government has not bettered the condition of the peasant and the peasant has constantly complained of the tremendous taxes that he must pay.”

“The Soviet Government does not recognize ownership of land in fee simple…. The Government itself was making no attempt to repair and keep up property and as result the buildings were rapidly deteriorating and the Government realized that it was only by individual effort that anything could be done. Because of the poverty of the former owners, the lack of material available for repairs and the high taxes demanded by the Government, but few of the property owners availed themselves of this opportunity to take back their property for a term of years. The Soviets did not annul their own ownership of the property; it was still nationalised. The peasants do not own the land. They are simply permitted to till such land as is assigned to them by the Government.”

“Workmen are not authorized to organize trade unions. There are professional unions in Russia, and none other is permitted. If you do not belong to a professional union you cannot belong to any. No person is permitted to register for employment at any of the government agencies unless he is a member of a professional union.”

“The Soviet Cooperatives are stores in which people belonging to the professional unions may deal. They are restricted to the use of certain classes and their management is most inefficient. There was a Cooperative store which I passed every morning for over a year and the line would form outside that store early in the morning and would be there all day long regardless of the weather or temperature. The sales in the store were made at a very slow rate and there was no choice of selection.”

“Leo Tolstoi’s daughter, who has continued her father’s work with and for the peasants, told me that the peasants were opposed to the Soviet government but were afraid of it. Miss Tolstoi is still in Russia and would undoubtedly be punished if the above statement should in any way get back. She has already been threatened with exile for attempting to publish her father’s books in Berlin.”

“Graft and bribery are very common in Russia today…. The Government itself endeavored to graft on the relief supplies [delivered by the American Relief Administration]. Whenever supplies were received at a port or at a trans-shipping point it was necessary for us to search all the workmen after the day’s labor in order to make them give up the foodstuffs intended for the starving that they had stolen.”

The Soviet Regime Had Many Weaknesses

Major Mathews picked up on glaring weaknesses in the Soviet system, giving President Coolidge a realistic sense of what was happening in Soviet Russia. Mathews reported:

“The government is not supported by the people…. Conversations with Russians in all walks of life reveal the fact that there are very few outside the members of the Communist party who are favorable to the Soviets.”

“Communism that is taught in the Red Army is not enduring and as soon as the young peasant boys return to the farm they forget their communistic training.”

“[The Soviet military] consists of a fair infantry force, a fair cavalry force, mediocre artillery and a very poor air force.”

“Russia is not recovering rapidly from an economic or any other standpoint. Its industry is rapidly disappearing, its finances are not stable.”

“In the city of Orenburg in the winter of 1921–22 there were many vacant houses in the city, due to the inhabitants having gone to the west of Russia in the hope of obtaining food…. It was almost a daily occurrence to find the nude body of a man or a woman in one of these two-story houses which were vacant. By investigation it was learned that these people came to their death through walking along the sidewalk and as they passed one of these houses a noose would be dropped over their head and the bandits would haul the victim up to the second story, where if he were not dead already through having his neck broken, they quickly despatched him, stripped his body and left him there.”

“Anyone who desires to trade with Russia is at perfect liberty to do so, and, so far as I can see, the only obstacle to trading with Russia is the lack of trustworthiness of the Russian Government. If it will not keep its contract with an organisation which is giving away supplies, without any hope of profit, and by which the Soviet Government alone is the winner, how then can it be expected that it will keep its contract with a concern which is not altruistic and which is endeavoring to make money?”

Cutting Through Soviet Propaganda

A reader today might not find much to be shocked by in Major Mathews’s 1923 memorandum. But such a clear-eyed view of life in the Soviet Union proved hard to come by, then and for decades to come.

The Soviets’ authoritarian regime and its aggressive propaganda arm hid the harsh realities of life in the USSR. The Soviets hosted Western politicians, intellectuals, and journalists, carefully orchestrating their visits to showcase the wonders of the “Soviet experiment.” In the 1930s, Walter Duranty of the New York Times passed along Soviet propaganda to his readers—and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. For decades, many Americans missed, or downplayed, the USSR’s failures to provide for its people, its abuses of human rights, and its structural weaknesses.

Fortunately, President Coolidge had sources on the ground who cut through the propaganda.