SOCIALIST INQUIRY INTO BOLSHEVISM

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 192, 9 May 1919, Page 3

SOCIALIST INQUIRY INTO BOLSHEVISM

A SCATHING EEPOHT. ("Times" Correspondent.) Stockholm, March 10. Some time ago Lenin asked the Norwegian Socialist Party, with which' he had been coquetting, to send two members of tho party to ltussia to study the real conditions under Bolshevism. Tho Socialists of Norway deputed two Socialist lawyers, MM. Puntervold and Stang , , -to carry out this investigation. They have just returned after accomplishing their mission. Passing through Stockholm on their way back to Christiania, they communicated some of their impressions to the

Swedish Socialist organ "Social-Demo-kraten." They had been given every freedom to pursue their studies, had intorviewed most of the loading Bolshevists, beginning witli Lenin himself, whom they called a Peter tho Great of BolshevistRussia, and Trotsky, who is making of Biissia a Socialist military power. The latter boasted of haying created a large and well-trained army that could give a good account of itself against any invading force. The Bed Terror, nevertheless, continued undated, as tho soldiers belonging to the Red Army lived mostly on exaction's aud plunder and tho levying of blackmail. A summary Court was unceasingly at work emptying the prisons of hostages. Peters, the president of mo of-these Revolutionary tribunals, Jeclared that theso tribunals altogether 1 ad not executed more than 3000 "counter-revolution-aries." This statement the Norwegian investigator found later to be a great underestimation of the facts, us iliero aro over 500 of these tribunals at work, which must be credited, some with hundreds, eome with thousands of these summary executions. • . As regards tho working class, they could not be worse off than they are in Petrograd and Moscow, where they have no work and are starving. Starvation, moreover, was no vain word, for it is impossible to imagine anything more pitiable than the conditions prevailing in this respect in both capitals. ~ Tho complaints against the hoviet Government wero bitter, despito the severity of the police measures and tliß spying system in force. • Waitings and grumblings'wero heard everywhere from almost everybody. The starvation was mostly duo 'to faulty administration and tho deplorablo state of the railway communications. Aβ an instance of this, M. Puntervold states that of 7000 locomotives on the Tailway line* lie was told that over 4500 were out of use through disrepair. When he asked a leading railway official why they were not attended to the latter replied that the men were too weakened by hunger lo be oble to carry out such fatiguing work, and that it takes five men to lift the weight that one could raise easily before. -

"You cannot," ho said, "get them to work even at light jobs inoro- than a. couple of hours ii. day." It .is a vicious circle; men are starving because- tho locomotives are out of repair, and the locomotives continue out of repair because the workmen arp starving.

This vicious circle is now met with constantly in everything Russian except the mid imagination of the Bolshevist leaders, who continue to boast (hat Bolshev-

ism is conquering the world, \nat nil the -peoples before lon;.' will l/c i-on-verted to its tenets, and will impose them by force upon their reactionary governments.

"The great majority of the men who liavo returned to Oiford," says the "Field," "find in their spirits now the craving of the wanderer. They have seen Kgypt, Macedonia, i'rance, Belgium, and peihaps Russia; and they are restless, compelled by a desire of Wandering; so the calm and tranquillity which they appreciated so much before era now becoming tedious. They feel they must travel, and travel quickly." "A League is too vague and slack a conception to call forth the fire and selfeacriheo which go to the making of missionaries.. . . Who, save Christ', ever laid down his life for a planet?"— Sir lan Hamilton, in "The Millennium,"