SOVIET RUSSIA

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 95, 16 January 1929, Page 13

SOVIET RUSSIA

Sir, —The very interesting letter in your Saturday’s issue on Soviet Russia by Mr. Griffin invites comment. Is it just a piece of Soviet propaganda? Or is it the considered opinion of an independent tourist? Was he quite free and unfettered, or was he a delegate from the New Zealand Communist Party? If he will enlighten your readers on these points it might give weight (or otherwise) to his argument. , . , ~ I have tried to keep in touch, with aH available writers on Russia since 191718 —both Communists like Emma Goldstein; Trotsky in “The Real Situation in Russia”; Carthill in “Rods and Axes,” etc. Mr. Griffin’s letter is in direct contradiction to all that I have read from competent writers; from all that filters through per cable. If Russia is really such a workers’ paradise why does the Soviet exercise such a rigid censorship on news from Russia? Even the Soviet organ “Pravda” is frank enough, or stupid enough, to tell quite a different story to that of Mr. Griffin. Carthill quotes some extracts from an avowed leader, of the Communist Party in England (who for obvious reasons conceals his identity). “Now no one can look' at Russia and still ' say that the red flag is there going forward to an assured victory”—“you will find bureaucracy, routine, compromise, selfish ambition, intrigue,’and the ruin of a faith.” “Thus the movement has retrograded from the Communist State of the first days to State capitalism, if not to the capitalistic state.” . To me it seems that poor Russia has exchanged the autocracy of the Tsars for a ten times worse autocracy in the shape of Stalin and Co. —I am, etc., P. Wellington, January 14.