HOW VISITORS ARE TRICKED IN RUSSIA

Hokitika Guardian, 6 July 1928, Page 1

HOW VISITORS ARE TRICKED IN RUSSIA

BELGIAN'CONSUL’S REVELATIONS.

The account which Al. Joseph Douillet gives of Soviet Russia in his striking book “Aloscou sails A r oiles” ought to he read by all the world. He speaks with great authority and wide knowledge. He is a former Consul for Belgium, and was chief representative of the Nansen Fund in South-Eastern Russia. He lived for 2G years in Czarist Russia, and was in Bolshevik Russia from 1918 to 1927.

Ilio first fact which he brings out is the cunning shown by the Soviet in deceiving the sillybillies who come from abroad to examine the working of Socialism in Russia. Thus when a British deputation was making a tour of Russia: ( “The peasants were mobilised suddenly with their horses and carts and required to take a large quantity of straw to a mill on the railway which had not boen working for years. The straw was burnt in the furnaces and soon clouds of smoke began to rise from the chimneys, conveying the impression that the establishment was busily at work.” .‘How simple these foreigners are,” remarked one of the Soviet Ministers to an official in M. Douillet’s presence, forgetting that M. Douillet knew Russian. Any person who, without authorisation from the Soviet, spoke to the British delegates was seized and punished. One man who gave the British visitors back a cap which they had left in a train was charged in virtue of Section 66 of the Soviet Penal Code with espionage in the interests of a foriegn Government; and though by some miracle he was not shot on the spot, he was shut up for three years in a concentration camp in Solovetsky Island. Tcheka (Terrorist police) guides are trained for deception of the foreigner. ■ They show deputations front abroard a number of mills, hospitals, infant uslyums, and sanatoria which are carefully prepared in advance with the inject of proving that in Sovietdom everything is irreproachable. Tlie real truth, M. Douillet says, is that the poverty and misery are much greater than under the Czars. “The official Soviet statistics, lie says, are false. I ascertained that lilast furnaces, which were officially returned as working, had only worked for a short period. . • • Then the furnace was blown out and another was started in another district, to he blown out itself, a little later. Thus an impression of activity was produced. Of the coal mines if. Douillet says that: “It is difficult to imagine the lamentable ruin which has overtaken the Donetz basin since the Communists occupied it. As an example of. Communist management the "iScholkotrust” silk mills of Moscow arc cited. “They were founded in 1889. In 1911 they had doubled in size: in 1914 they employed 2,000 people. To-day they scarcely exist and only employ '350 to 400 people. As for luckless Russian workers, who are treated as cattle by the foreign bandits who form the Moscow Government, we are told: “Russian workers at used these exact words to me; “Me are worse off than slaves. Before the Bolsheviks seized power we were able to rest on holidays; We passed the day with our families. Now, whenever there is a holiday we are made to go in procession from morning to night and by way of consolation we are told : ‘lt is our proletarian authority; it is the dictatorship of the proletariat. And it 'is really nothing of the kind. It is an odious dictatorship exercised against the proletariat. r As for unemployment in 1927. “By the optimistic statistics of the Soviet itself there were 21 million unemployed, a figure far larger than the total of 1.900,000 officially returned. ’ Of the state of morality and of the prevalence of venereal disease m Sovietland an appalling account is given. Tlie simple Simons who swallow Soviet fairy-tales might be advised to study M. Douillet’s account of the Moscow prisons—when they have not been specially prepared for visitors. He was an inmate of these horrible dens; so he ought to know.