RUSSIA REVEALED

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 210, 18 August 1933, Page 12

RUSSIA REVEALED

THE WORLD DECEIVED "PAOPAGANDING’< THE GUL- , LIBLE, SOVIET -METHODS UNVEILED. The following are a few paragraphs token troin a powerful article ic.eiic > written for the London “Morning Post” by Mr Malcolm Muggeridge. They speak for themselves. Russia has never been governed by anything but a military dictatorship in one form or another, and the population has been used for centuries to terroristic methods. The peculiar feature ot Bolshevik rule is that it has extended the application of these methods to every one and to every department of life. This, precisely, will be the cause of its ultimate downfall. Even military dictatorships require a certain amount of popular supjwrt and a certain economic justification in the sense ot being able to provide a majority of the population with the minimum necessaries of life. The dictatorship of the proletariat fulfils neither condition. It is, apart from a. small ruling class and the Red Army, universally detested; and with all the resources of a great grain producing country at its disposal it cannot provide even the relatively inconsiderable town populations with bread. If, however, it is absurd to be angry about the Soviet regime, it is not absurd to recognise the dangers inherent in its international pretentions, or to point out the contemptible and dangerous folly of those outside Russia who accept such pretentions at their face value. No one has a greater contempt than your Bolshevik for the outlook and character of reformist-pacifist-humanitarian-revolutionaries; and no one has developed to a finer pitch t’e art of gulling them. THE DUPES. People who have spent all their lives in pouring out righteous indignation about housing conditions in English industrial towns refer gaily to the congestion in Moscow—congestion so appalling that, as a Russian explained to me once, no one, apart from the privileged few, has a moment of privacy from one year’s end to another —as camping out.” Scientists with international reputations accept with naive simplicity the validity of statistics that a Knowledge of elementary arithmetic would show to be preposterously false. Pacifists who have laboured mightily to propagate the ideals of the League of Nations watch ferocious military displays in the Red Square with tears ot appreciative emotion in their eyes, and enthusiastically applaud outbursts ot manatical bellicosity. Tender-hearted maternity experts find matter only for complacency in children so debilitated by under-nour-ishment that it will take, on a moderate estimate, three generations for the nation to recover its virility. Perhaps it has never occurired to those intellectual Communists, who enjo;-, in Bloomsbury, all the privileges and comforts of a bourgeois existence in a capitalist society, and who, after a short conducted tour, praise ecstatically, at so many guineas a thousand words, a regime that has made life intolerable, when it has not slaughtered, their like in Russia, that there are unfortunates who take what they write seriously; who, having little enough to lose, go with their families and their belongings to start life again as Soviet citizens in the classless proletarian paradise about which they have read, and for whom disillusionment is a more serious matter than the abandonment of an intellectual creed. Yet this is the case. Every year some thousands of Americans and Europeans cross the Soviet frontier: are mostly forced or persuaded to take Soviet citizenship, and then spend their time trying to recover their old nationality. They are not, it may be imagined, very amiably disposed towards the author or lecturer or politician who first put the project into their heads. The consulates in Moscow are fully occupied with such cases. I did not meet in Russia one genuinely working-class foreigner who had come to live there who did not bitterly regret having done so.