BOLSHEVIK HORRORS.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 May 1921, Page 6

BOLSHEVIK HORRORS.

NEW ZEALANDER IN RUSSIA.

“THE AWFUL HORROR OF THE RED TERROR.”

TERRIBLE EXPERIENCES.

We (N.Z. Times) have been shewn a letter, written by one w'ho recently escaped from Russia. The letter was written to a New Zealander, who, being anxious about a relative working a schoolmistress in Russia, had asked, for information about conditions prevailing. The letter we reproduce below gives a glimpse of the terror and hardships of life under the Bolsheviks. Its simple lines give a realistic idea of the tyranny of Bolshevik rule and. its incidental hardships. “I am escaped* from Russia nearly a year ago, and you cannot imagine what a dreadful, hard and miserable life is there now. Poor men who remained there in the country of hunger, of coldness and of terror . . . But now the first question in Russia is not the gaining of money, but the procuring of eatables. It is not enough to gain some thousands of roubles by mouth; you must also look for the nourishment. You must get up in the very morning before the dawnbreak, and go and search for the bread. It is very difficult to find it even for money, and as now the money has lost absolutely its value, the peasants who bring the bread into the town do not accept money in payment, but ask for different objects instead, such as costumes, overcoats, shoes, etc. For instance, for one pair of shoes you can get thirty to forty pounds of flour, or for one overcoat one pound of butter. You will say that it is not so oad if can get all for the objects, but the worst of it is that you have not an infinite variety of shoes and overcoats. Then if you have three you must leave for yourself one and exchange two. But what will come after these two?

“It is not all. More terrible is the cold which enters from everywhere, in your un'heated rooms, and fills all the fibres of your body, because Odessa is now absolutely without wood; and if you find a piece you must pay enormously for it. The winter is very hard, and as you are obliged to exchange your warm clothes for bread and water —you must pay 100 roubles for a pail of water—you will understand very well how they suffer there. Even her.e in Paris after a year from Russia, I cannot recover myself from that awful and galley-slavish life. “But the most dreadful is the terror, the red terror, which paralyses your soul and body. No resistance, no word against violence, only a cold and icy horror in your soul. To see the woe, the distress, the tears, the rivers of blood round you, for this you must have the strongest nerves. Imagine that there is no night in Odessa which can pass absolutely quietly. The shooting of rifles, muskets and machine guns, the indefinite battle in the streets, between different bands. Now, in the Ukraine, there is complete anarchy, and there are as many gangs of brigands as the stars in the sky. To-day one occupies the town; tois expelled. From 1918 the town of Odessa was occupied by the troops, by Allied armies (French, English, American, Greek, Italian). Then by Polish troops, then by Wrangel’s men, and now by Bolsheviks again for the third time. And every occupation was accompanied with battles and with bombardment from the Black Sea; with shootings and bloodshed. “And now to see the arrests of poor innocent men whose guilt is only to have a shop, or to be a merchant, and to be called ‘Bourgeois’. When you see how the families are broken, how the fathers are arrested and beaten before the eyes of weeping children and wives, and killed afterwards in the cellars of tchresvitchsyka (extraordinary commissioner). When you see round you only bitter tears and misery and weeping, only days of sorrow and’ affliction, besides the hunger and cold, then even the healthiest break down. I am. myself, only twenty years of age, but I am old as if I had lived in this dreadful world for fifty years.

“Here, in France, everybody looks strangely on and asks how can a youth in bis prime of life be so weak and tired, so devoid of energy. But they can never understand, for no one can who has not been through the terrible experiences. They must go and live in that mad and foolish country which is called Russia, but is no more Russia but a Bedlam, a lunatic asylum; and must taste in their own persons the charms and beauties of the cursed Red regime. “I have narrated only one millionth part of the things that happen, but it is enough to give you an idea of the terrible conditions under which your relative is living.”