The Bolshevik Way at Genoa

Hokitika Guardian, 24 June 1922, Page 4

The Bolshevik Way at Genoa

(By Rothay Reynolds/)

GENOA. The Jiolsheviks provide an entertainmeii for journalists at Genoa every afternoon. It is so successful tjiat women t of fashion, who have never written a line for a newspaper arrive early and secure a sent near the table at: which the Gliief performer. Comrade Gukovsky, the uncrowned Czar of tlie Ekrnine, takes his stand. The entertainment is given in all enormous bedroom at the Motel di Genova. It is supposed to begin at 0.30, hut in point of fact it never does, either because the “stars” are Into or because they fancy that an air of forgetting that time is of the slightest value will give a. Itussian touch to the proceedings. This studied uupii net uali tv. which nightly exasperates the 'fifty journalists who have, tonto to get the day's news. is. however, insufficient to create the illusion that anybody in the hodroom of the Hotel di Genova has the right to speak for Ilussin. None of them is a Itussian. There is the intel-lectual-looking English typist, in a pretty silk frock, who plays an overture to the entertainment, prestissimo, in her machine. There is an Italian who understands Comrade Gukovsky, and also a thin man with a German name and apprehensive Oriental eyes. As for Gakovskv, both he and his wife are Goiininnians. and in spite of their glittering position their son stoutly maintains 1 1 is determination to remain a Roumanian citiz.cn.

Converts nind sympathisers pop in and out. of an adjacent, room. Suddenly the overture on the typewriter ends and the Italian performer enters and begins to read out Bolshevik propaganda in French. It has nothing whatever to do with the news of the day.

Seme annoying person who emmet understand French gets the Italian to read the lecture all over again in English. Then nil Italian asks for it in kalian, and the rest boll over at last and loudly protest that they have to telephone to Paris and Berlin, telegraph to the other ends of the earth and have no more time to waste.

H is Ihe signal for the entry of Com- j rode Rakovskv. dressed as a states- ( man. He talks French perfectly and j lias the manner of a practised man of | the world. He gives some fragments; of information mixed up with a large! amount, of propaganda, and on the i slightest, encouragement flies off into a. J philosophical or juridical discussion. | And as the suave and elegant dicta-j ter of Southern Russia speaks T think j of the bloodstained prison of the Ex-j traordinary Commission in his fair citv of Kiev and the piles of corpses in its courtyard. And T think of the words of a Rus-I siaii workman with whom 1 talked . when the Poles were there: “Of course i I'm glad that the Polos have conic. T j should have been glad if the British had comp, or the Americans, nr even I the devil himself—anybody to rid us. of those Bolsheviks.” i