"IF I WERE IN RUSSIA!"

Free Lance, Volume XIX, Issue 1013, 26 November 1919, Page 10

"IF I WERE IN RUSSIA!"

How the Bolsheviks Treat Strikers.

IF I were in Ireland I should be a Sinn Feirier; if I were in Russia I should be a Bolshevist; and such is the duly recorded declaration of one of the shining lights of the New Zealand Labour Extremist Party. The sacred right to strike has been eulogised by the same type of p.olitician, and in this CQnnection it will be interesting to the New Zealand worker, whose support at the polling booth is asked for by thß person who declared that if in Russia he would be a Bolshevik, to learn how the Russian ' social reformers" deal with strikers. In this connection some very interesting information is given in a. Stockholm telegram to the London " Weekly Dispatch" of recent date. Even under Bolshevik rule there are strikes, and one of these industrial upheavals recently occurred' at the-Puti-loff engineering works at Petrograd, works, like all other in Petrograd, duly " nationalised " —-after the Bolshevik fashion. The result was the arrest of several hundreds of, the strikers, and l the execution, by shooting, of sixty of the ringleaders! So much for the official Bolshevik respect for the sacredness of strikes! > ■ . .Jr

But your true Bolshevik does not stop shooting those who dare to exercise the sacred strike weapon. The Stockholm telegram goes, on to state that a woman named Bartoloff, the widow of one of those executed, , and the mother of five children, applied to the Bolshevik Commissaries—thev Red Fed bosses of Russia—" for permission to have possession of her husband's body, so as to give it Christian burial." The Commissaries "regretted that they could do nothing—-the body had been sent the day before to the Zoological Gardens." The poor widow stammered out: "But what for?" To which th© laconic reply was "to feed the animals." She rushed to the Zoo, and found that the Bolshevik official had spoken the truth: her husband's body had been devoured." Small wonder fhat the'unhappy woman's reason gave way, and that she had to be removed to an asylum." The New Zealand worker—and. potential exerciser of the " sacred right to strike" —should note w;hat happens to strikers under Bolshevik rule.