Communism; Industrial Workers of the World; Socialism
"Where is the dictatorship of the proletariat and working
peasantry? It has been supplanted by the dictatorship of the
Central Committee of the Bolshevist Party, governing with the
assistance of a swarm of extraordinary commissions and punitive
detachments of imported soldiers."
Though the Russian Socialists overthrew the government of the Czar in
the hope of securing liberty, liberty, under the Bolshevist regime, is
farther off than it was before. The British High Commissioner, R. H.
Bruce-Lockhart, in a telegram sent to the British Foreign Office,
November 10, 1918, among other things said:
"The Bolsheviki have established a rule of force and oppression
unequaled in the history of any autocracy.
"Themselves the fiercest upholders of the right of free speech,
they have suppressed, since coming into power, every newspaper
which does not approve their policy.
"The right of holding public meetings has been abolished. The vote
has been taken away from everybody except the workmen in factories
and the poorer servants, and even amongst the workmen those who
dared to vote against the Bolsheviki are marked down by the
Bolshevist police as counter-revolutionaries, and are fortunate if
their worst fate is to be thrown into prison, of which in Russia
today it may truly be said, 'many go in but few come out.'"
V. M. Zenzinov, a member of the Central Committee of the
Socialists-Revolutionists, in an article published in "Struggling
Russia," April 12, 1919, speaking of absence of liberty under
Bolshevism, says:
"It was during my stay in Petrograd in April, 1918, that a
conference of factory and industrial plant employees of Petrograd
and vicinity was held, to which 100,000 Petrograd workingmen (out
of a total of 132,000) sent delegates. The conference adopted a
resolution sharply denouncing the Bolshevist regime. Following this
conference an attempt was made, in May, to call together an
All-Russian Congress of workmen's deputies in Moscow, but all the
delegates were arrested by the Bolsheviki, and to this day I am
ignorant of the fate that befell my comrades."
Justice, as well as liberty, is a dead letter in the land of Lenine, and
conscription is rigidly enforced by the Russian Socialist Government. R.
H. Bruce-Lockhart, to whom reference has been made, in his telegram to
the British Foreign Office, November 10, 1918, stated:
"The Bolsheviki have abolished even the most primitive forms of
justice. Thousands of men and women have been shot without even the
mockery of a trial, and thousands more are left to rot in the
prisons under conditions to find a parallel to which one must turn
to the darkest annals of Indian or Chinese history....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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