LABOUR CAMPS

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 July 1931, Page 12

LABOUR CAMPS

TERRIBLE RUSSIAN CONDITIONS

Following is the translation of an article entitled “An enslaved people,” which appeared on May 14 last on the fro’nt page of the “Journal de Geneve,” a daily paper published in Geneva since 1826. It was written by M. Lucien Cramer:—

The “Socialist Messenger” of April 25, 1931, the organ of the Russian section of the Second International, announces that “2,000,000 peasants and workers have been arrested by the O. G.P.U. (Russian secret police) during the last two years, and that, more than 1,000,000 of these are employed at forced labour.” According to the information furnished by a former member of the 0.G.P.U., the number up to May 1, 1930, was 662,000, of whom 570,000 were men, 74.000 women, and 18,000 young men and women. The latter figures do not. include Siberia. Having decimated the leisured classes and the intellectuals, the Moscow dictatorship to-day attacks priests, Socialists, and Zionist Jews, but above all workers. These for the most part are Kulaks, those land workers who did not think it their duty to submit to the rules of absolute collectivism, and all the workers who, with good reason, actually resisted liberty of work being abolished by the Soviet system of regimentation. The factory worker, more than the land worker, has fallen to the level of chattels which the Government disposes of at its pleasure, going even to the extent of selling this economic labour to the enterprises which arc charged with exploiting the immense forests of. Southern Rusisa. More unfortunate than the slaves of ancient Rome, who at. least were treated by their masters as instruments of labour worthy of being cared for, the victims of the Bolshevist, rule are treated as something without, value, to be squandered with a prodigality which is. testified to by statements received from persons who have escaped from the Bolshevist camps. Tn fact, a certain number of these prisoners who have been able to make their way to neighbouring countries have there furnished to magistrates, who have interrogated them, a collection of information which has permitted these officials to form an exact idea of the situation of some hundreds of thousands of slaves whom the Soviet organisations sends regularly into the icy solitudes of Southern Russia after having seized them arbitrarily at their very hearths. This information has allowed the bureau of the Entente Against Third International to compile a map showing labour camps situated partly around the White Sea, between the peninsula of Kola, Lake Onega, Archangel, and the North Dvina, and even this is very incomplete.

47 DEGREES BELOW ZERO. Condemned to work in the heart of winter in 70 degrees north latitude in the solitudes where the cold reaches 47 degrees below zero, these unfortunates, who are generally separated from their wives and children, live in barracks open to all the winds, against which they are only imperfectly protected by the tatters with which they are covered, The enormous task which is assigned to them, and which they must accomplish by working day and night, under penalty of death by starvation, exhausts them to such an extent, that tens of thousands died last winter. After having braved the cold of winter, these poor people are forced to work in water in the summer for nine hours a day loading bricks at the rate of 35,000 each into lighters. “Very few,” writes one who has escaped, “are able to bear this ordeal. Every day they used to give us quinine, but that helped little, and malaria reaped its toll.” Equally sad is the lot of those whose .work is to build roads into the forests. and another who escaped wrote: ‘Each square metre of the route is bathed with tears and blood.” An employee on an English ship visited a camp where several thousand men, women, and children worked, and ho went to the hospital. “It was the most terrible thing I have seen in my life,” he writes. “Young children, men, and women were losing the use of their limbs by a terrible disease. They were all together, sleeping on two benches, clad in clothes which were falling to pieces. They were dying of hunger, and had a terrifying appearance. I asked a doctor (who also spoke English well) why they did not take care of these people decently, and ho replied that it was impossible, because they were not. Communists.” Another writer said that one of the chief officials, Glebe Boky, had told him that into the camps were sent counterrevolutionaries and enemies of the Soviet.