BOLSHEVISM AT WORK

Evening Star, Issue 18031, 27 July 1922, Page 9

BOLSHEVISM AT WORK

[Professor Meredith Atkinson in the ‘Weekly Scotsman.’]

' Professor Meredith Atkinson, of Melbourne University, has just made an extensive tour through Russia'. Ho went to Russia at his own expense at the request of The Save the Childiren Fund. He is one of the very few —three or four at most —who have really travelled in that country without the accompaniment of Soviet stage management. Of ad the peoples left prostrate by the exhaustion of the Great War, surely the Russians, arc tho most unfortunate W 7 racked and riven by centuries of Tsarism, they yet-faced the strain of the war with the heroism of simple sou’s and tho valor of enforced ignorance. One hundred and thirty millions of peasants responded willingly to the call of their traditional oppressor to stand fast in defence of a liberty which they themselves had never enjoyed. Fate has always been relentlessly against them. For even when Nemesis brought a well-deserved quietus to the rotten regime of the Tsar, four years of civil and foreign wars continued, to drink the blood and squander the substance of this wretched and enfeebled nation. “Broken in pieces like the potter’s vessel.” That is how I saw them in a tour of some six weeks, which took me right across Red Russia, almost to the -boundaries cf Siberia and Central Asia. My tour v.as memorable for the horrors I saw in the famine area, of the Volga, and only less so for the intimacies of experience with realities of Bolhevik Russia, which I was privileged to enjoy. I saw the country in all its nakedness. Min© was no conducted tour, under the control of Soviet officials. • It is easy to ensure that one shall travel alone across the plains of death, disease, and hunger that constitute South-eastern once tho greatest grain-growing region of the world. ° But it is not my present purpose to recite a catalogue of horrors. Tho famine shall serve but as the hellish background to a picture in which drab is,tho highest color., BOLSHEVIK CRUELTY. There has been so much exaggeration and 1 deliberate lying about Bolshevism that 1 am anxious above ail things to tell the dimple truth, and draw solely upon my own experience. I went to Russia with, if anything, a prejudice in favor of the Soviet. My. own views being very radical, and my distrust of anti-Bolshevik propaganda _ very profound, I wished 'that my experience might prove favorable to the greatest of all political and economic experiments. To anticipate my conclusion, 1 must say that 1 cannot regard the Soviet as a good, efficient, or humane Government.

The first thing that struck me about the Bolsheviks was their cruelty. Strange though it may seem, I am not here referring to their atrocities, though 1 gathered plenty bit’ evidence of those. I heard first hand from the sufferers numerous stories of horrible deed'vmany committed in the supposed interests of Communism, •but many also of a wanton inhumanity that froze the heart. In these ways the offences of the Whites were often quite as horrible. The Russian has the kindness and the cruelty of character of the child. “ Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar ” is a proverb that has its peculiar appositeness to the present situation. Everybody can be cruel, of course, under, the stress of violent emotion or excitement. But the cruelty of the Bolsheviks goes further than that. It is a heedless neglect of those decencies and humanities that have become traditional in our civilised society. INHUMANITY TO WORKERS. It is said, and truly, that many capitalist Governments are also cruel—that they sweat and starve and even kill their subjects. , Bpt even those bourgeois Governments observe certain moralities that forbid the official maltreatment and heartlessness that 1 found very characteristic of the Soviet. Let me give some instances. Forced labor is customarily employed by the Russian Government on public .works, great and small., That may be justified, but everything depends upon the conditions under which the work is canned out. I passed through a place where two trucks full of workmen “mobilised” for compulsory labor had been held up for a fortnight, and the men had had no food for three days. At another place were the remains of waggons that bad caught fire, burning to death in the most horrible fashion the thirty workmen locked in them, for the same purpose.

These are two oases out of hundreds that came to the notice of myself and my colleagues. Another poor wretch we saw at a wayside station repairing a building. He was also a labor conscript, with two days/ rations. Ho had been on the job seven days, without hope of relief, and afraid to move.

The Soviet is also quite careless of its obligations to many classes of its own officials. I met scores upon scores of men —engine drivers, repairers, relief workers, and so on—who received utterly inadequate pay and rations, and often hone o.t all. It always paid us to feed those who served us.

It. is useless to invent excuses for this want of common humanity. “ Foreign intervention” will not cover everything. Elementary decency in the treatment of its subjects,is the first requisite of good government, and the Soviet fails to fulfil it.