Communism -- Soviet Union; Soviet Union -- Economic conditions -- 1917-1945; Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1917-1936
Polish accent and a steady succession of mistakes in grammar.
As we walked home along the railway lines, half a dozen of the
railwaymen pressed around Radek, and almost fought with each other as to
who should walk next to him. And Radek entirely happy, delighted at his
success in giving them a bombshell instead of a bouquet, with one stout
fellow on one arm, another on the other, two or three more listening in
front and behind, continued rubbing it into them until we reached our
wagon, when, after a general handshaking, they disappeared into the
night.
THE TRADE UNIONS
Trade Unions in Russia are in a different position from that which is
common to all other Trades Unions in the world. In other countries the
Trades Unions are a force with whose opposition the Government must
reckon. In Russia the Government reckons not on the possible opposition
of the Trades Unions, but on their help for realizing its most difficult
measures, and for undermining and overwhelming any opposition which
those measures may encounter. The Trades Unions in Russia, instead of
being an organization outside the State protecting the interests of
a class against the governing class, have become a part of the State
organization. Since, during the present period of the revolution the
backbone of the State organization is the Communist Party, the
Trade Unions have come to be practically an extension of the party
organization. This, of course, would be indignantly denied both by
Trade Unionists and Communists. Still, in the preface to the All-Russian
Trades Union Reports for 1919, Glebov, one of the best-known Trade Union
leaders whom I remember in the spring of last year objecting to the use
of bourgeois specialists in their proper places, admits as much in the
following muddleheaded statement:--
"The base of the proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, which
in general directs all the political and economic work of the State,
leaning, first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary form
of dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions,
as organizations which economically unite the proletariat of factory and
workshop as the vanguard of the revolution, and as organizations of the
new socialistic construction of the State. Thus the Trade Unions must
be considered as a base of the Soviet State, as an organic form
complementary to the other forms of the Proletariat Dictatorship." These
two elaborate sentences constitute an admission of what I have just
said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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