ABOUT RUSSIA

Hokitika Guardian, 16 November 1929, Page 3

ABOUT RUSSIA

IN' THE LANI> OF COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP, by Anatole V. Baikaloff.

This book is the work of a Russian Socialist who before the revolution was twelve times arrested by the Imperial police and was exiled to Siberia for three years, besides spending three years in the Czar’s prisons. Thus' be writes with no prepossessions in favour of the old regime, and his statements, .documented as they are at every point with reference to the Bolshevik Press, are unanswerable. At every point he corroborates the disclosures of the two Kentish miners who have just returned from a visit to Sovietland, and the indictment of Trotsky, who recently declared that Soviet rule bad produced nothing but disillusionment and bread queues. The plight of the workers he shows to be lamentable. One of the assertions of the Bolsheviks was that they had an infallible cure for unemployment. The best comment on this is the fact that— 1 The actual number of workers unemployed in Soviet Russia by the middle of 1929 was ivell over three millions. The percentage of unemployed to the total number of workers in Soviet Russia is ,as ;bigh as 20 or 2d Another very disquietening.fact is that employment is rapidly' increasing. As to the Soviet factories, the conditions in them are described as “appalling.” Windows are covered with thick layers of dirt and soot and do not allow sunlight to penetrate into the workrooms, which are thereby only dimly lighted. ..Machinery is not supplied with covering, rails, and. other safety devices. As the result: There were in 1925-6. 1,121 aecdents involving total or partial disability for every thousand workers engaged during the whole year in the industrial undertakings of' the Russian Soviet, and in 1926-7, 1,452 accidents. • No- other country in the world, he says truly, can show 1 such a “ghastly” record. Humanitarian regulations fire paraded by the Bolsheviks as eyewash, to deceive silly Westerners. Not the slightest regard is shown for these regulations in the Soviet factories. There is a nominal 6-hours day for non-man-ual workers. But we read :

The working day (for manual workers) according to the inquiry which was carried out in 11 most important Soviet towns is from 11 i to 14 hours. . .On the railways the 8-hours day exists only bn paper. . . .Ma.nv women workers work as a rule 9 hours a day, (and “wet” women 8 hours instead of 7. According to data supplied by the allUkrainian Coal Miners’ Union, every miner in the Don basin works on an average 45 hours’ over time a month. In some cases the number of overtime hours is much higher. Night work in nominally forbidden for pregnant and “wet’’ (nursing) women arid for young workers, but the reader will not be surprised to learn that no attention is paid to the regulation and that “women are now obliged to work night shifts.” As for the housing of the worker, nothing could be more horrible than Soviet conditions:

From 40 to ■SO people, sometimes even 70 to 80, are living in one room of 320 square feet of floor space . . . . At Naro-Famnsk. ... in one room; of i 62 square feet or floor .space 11 men are usually living. In some rooms two families are living together. Chairs are suspended from the ceiling, as there is no room for.them on the floor.

But while the working population of Russia lives in such squalor and misery, enormous sums are being spent by the Soviet on armaments. M. Baika--1 off’s view is that the Soviet is anxious for a great war: They (the- Bolsheviks) hope, no doubt, to find a solution of their domestic difficulties in a war; in addition to which, war, according to their conceptions, is hound to create favourable conditions for the Communist World Revolution.

If lie is right, this is. an additional reason for refusing these murderous muddlers a British loan or a British guarantee. We have no security that what- they got would not be spent on fresh armaments.