UNREST IN RUSSIA.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 22 November 1924, Page 7

UNREST IN RUSSIA.

PEASANT RISING FEARED. LEADER’S STRONG OUTBURST. LONDON, Oct. 27. Serious doubts with regard to the “loyalty” of the Russian peasantry are now beginning to be openly expressed by the Soviet leaders, according to the correspondent of the Times at Riga. He draws particular attention to a speech delivered by Stalin to a specially-summoned congress of “Communist secretaries for propagating rural Communism,” which is now sitting in Moscow. Stalin, who is reputed to dominate the Soviet internal policy, just. as Zinovieff dominates its foreign policy, severely reproached these agitation organisers with seven years’ complete failure, rvhich, instead of permeating the countryside’with Communism, had aroused tile- peasantry’s bitter hatred of the ruling authorities. This jeopardised the Soviet Government’s very existence, and, unless it was radically changed, might produce general peasant rising throughout Russia. “Your method is over-clumsy,” Stalin declared. The official assurances that the Georgian rising was merely a counterrevolutionary plot by former nobles and intellectuals, who were not enjoying their associations with the masses, were contradicted by Stalin. He stated that the insurrection included the peasant masses in different parts of Georgia. Stalin bitterly twitted the Communist workers that the peasant’s disaffection was greatest just in those parts of Georgia which had most Communist agitators, yet the latter, had unsuspectingly allowed the conspiracy to develop under their very noses; and similar things are threatened throughout the w T hole of Russia.

“If,” Stalin added, “the Communists do not change their tactics, they will not succeed in winning over the peasantry. The latter’s growing political .activity will proceed independant of the Soviet,. and will find mass expression, such as it found in the Georgian insurrection.” Other speakers expressed similar opinions. ,