LIFE IN RUSSIA.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 2133, 27 May 1920, Page 1

LIFE IN RUSSIA.

HOW BOLSHEVISTS DEAL WITH STRIKERS. A remarkable account of tin; maimer in which 1 ho Bolshevists treat strikers is given by the l Berlin correspondent of flu; Economist, on information from the Russian Bolshevist newspaper Ekonomitcheskaya Zhiza (Economic Life). The Commissary of Labour, Sehliopnikoff, declares that workmen's factory councils have brought a decline in production and injury to plant. Therefore the councils have been abolished and the Bolshevists have set “dictators with unlimited power of life and death over the workmen at the head of all important undertakings. ’’ ’ Piece payment, the Taylor system (of intensive production), premium payments, black lists, and money and food Hues have prevailed ‘•'not without success." Aioscow has a “regional commission for combating mass idleness" which treats absence- from work by masses of employees as ..“malicious sabotage,”-, amf “hands the culprits over to the administrative organs for confinement in forced labour concentration camps.” By exceptional industry a workman may increase Ins wages 175 per cent. . Sometimes .the premium is paid in bread. The coercion of the workers is defended by Commissary Krasin—-

who was - brought in from Germany —on the ground that “if we have a right to send loyal citizens to be killed in defence of the revolution, we certainly have the same rigid in the same cause to 'kill disloyal shirkers.'l The profits of nationalisation, according to the same authority, have been non-existent. In return for £150,300,000 worth of goods exchanged only £5,40-1,000 was received by the State.