DISASTROUS SOVIET EXPERIMENTS

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 168, 13 April 1926, Page 6

DISASTROUS SOVIET EXPERIMENTS

EFFECTS OF NATIONALISATION ON RUSSIAN LIFE. The actual effects on Russian life, of the Soviet experiments in nationalisation and communism are strikingly set forth in a valuable memorandum by Dr. E. Luboff, based on up-to-date Soviet documents and entitled “lhe Soviet in 1925,” says the “Daily Mail.” Trotsky is quoted on the Russian nationalised industries as follows: —“The best of the undertakings we have nationalised; the bad ones we leased to private enterprises. The result of this is that the bad undertakings, in the hands of private business men, produce better goods.” Soviet cloth and Soviet boots were found to be “unreliable and of inferior quality.” No. others can be bought, and wages were in 1925 only £2 ss. a month, or about 10s. a week. Retail prices were 111 per cent, above prewar prices, or much higher than they are in England. The present national income m Russia is “less than a third of the prewar income.” As to the general condition of the people, this evidence of M. Preobrazhensky, the Soviet financial expert, is in marked contrast with the fairy tales told by Red British trade unionists:—“On returning fjom Europe to Sovietdom the first impressions gained are our poverty and the inequality of the standard of living. We are extremely poor; much poorer than Western Europe; our shabbiness, our poverty, bad clothing, tinpaved streets, miserable buildings—all this meets the eye first of all ou crossing the frontier. The same feeling remains while driving through the streets of Moscow.” Those who have the effrontery to tell the British miners that the remedy for their troubles is nationalisation should note that the “Soviet coal administration was compelled to dismiss some 38,000 miners in April, 1925.” Unemployment is increasing, and even the Soviet authorities could not hide that fact. Their figures admit a rise from 399,500 in March to 613,000 in July, and over a million at the ehd of 1925.