VIEWS ON RUSSIA

Hokitika Guardian, 7 November 1929, Page 2

VIEWS ON RUSSIA

DOVER, Sept. 24

Poverty, filth, low wagi-s, food scarcity, bad housing, and inefficiency arc the impressions brought back from Russia by Air R. Soutlmn, a schoolmaster, who accompanied a delegation of two Kent miners on a tour of the Soviet mining areas. Air Soutlmn described his experience to an audience of miners of the Tilnmnstone Collieries, Kent, at a meeting to-night at Elvington, near Dover. He saw in Moscow, he said, such terrible sights of poverty as are almost indescribable. Streets were lined with thousands of beggars, who came into restaurants to gather scraps and even to pick hones loft on plates. Everyone was rationed for bread ahd sugar. Even in the officers’ mess m which he. dined as a guest the food , was so bad that both he and one of his companions were ill' for some days. NOTHING TO SING ABOUT. Mr W. Roome, who is a working miner and one of the delegation, said ; When we asked a Russian family to sing one of their national songs they said they had nothing to sing about. One person told us that if they could come to England they would be satisfied to live in tho workhouse, The bousing accommodation was very bad, and in some cases families lived and slept in one room, There were many thousands of unemployed in Moscow, Sanitation was dreadful and there were flies by the million. Describing a visit to a mine, Air Roome remarked:

On our way through the village we wore shown shacks which used tc house the miners in the old days, The officials who were conducting us through the village told us that they were kept thus standing as a reminder of the people of bygone times, but on going a little farther we saw exactly the same shacks occupied by minors, thereby leading me to believe that they took us to be green. Mr Hoome said he formed the opinion that a good deal of what he saw had been staged for the benefit of the delegation. For instance, when he visited a regiment of the Red army, lie. found officers playing dominoes with their men. He was taken round one of the rest houses where miners take their annual holiday. He asked if the peasants were also allowed a holiday. He was told that they wore if they paid their union contribution. “We asked how many peasants there were in the homo and were told none, so we thought a good deal.”

MURDER SOLVED. BERLIN, September 24. The mystery of the disappearance of Friedrich Deickert from a village near Frankford on the Oder, in 1919, has been solved. All these years the neighbours suspected that the wife and four sons, of Deickert, who was a farmer, had murdered him. Although arrested and questioned by the police, however, no evidence of their guilt was ever forthcoming. A cartwright in the village, desirous of winning the £SO reward offered,, has spent Sunday after Sunday boring in the ground with a long iron rod for the. farmer’s body. A few days ago, lie now states, Deickert appeared to bin; in a dream lliroa times running and told him where ho was buried. The police were notified and began to dig at the spot indicated—in a wood near the house of the vanished man—and at a depth of four feet discovered a skeleton. A silver watch was found nearby which the local watchmaker lias identified as the one worn by the farmer. Frau Deickert and three of her sons have again been arrested, and to-day one of the sons who is 37, confessed that lie murdered his father on a day when lie attacked his mother. He and his mother afterwards burnt the body, lie said, and Imried the bones where they were found.