RUSSIAN TIMBER CAMPS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20793, 9 February 1931, Page 11

RUSSIAN TIMBER CAMPS.

ESCAPED MEN'S ACCOUNTS.

TERRIBLE ALLEGATIONS.

RAVAGES OF DISEASE..

LETTER TO MR. MacDONALD.

By Telegraph—Press Association— Copyright. (Received February 8, 5.5 p.m.) LONDON, Feb. 1: Commander Carlyon Bellairs, who is Conservative member of the House of Commons for Maidstone, has sent a letter to the Prime Minister, Mr. Mac Donald, drawing his attention to the attitude of Lord Ponsonby regarding forced labour in Russia, and his statement in the House of Lords that the evidence regarding timber camps was insufficient, as it showed that only 60,000 prisoners were labouring in the forests. -Commander Bellairs forwarded nine affidavits from escaped Russian workers, including one from a former official of the Ogpu (secret police). He declares there were 662,200 prisoners in the timber camps on May 1, 1930. An' affidavit by Nicholas Malyshew, a medical assistant in the Red Army, who was sentenced to imprisonment for. three years for publishing anti-Soviet propaganda, and who spent a year in the Solovki camp, asserts that the barrack floors are merely earth, and practically a block of ice all the year round. The ceilings are leaky, the barracks are not heated, and the prisoners, who are all political offenders, sleep on bare planks unless they possess their own bedding. r There is terrible overcrowding. An epidemic of typhus fever killed tens of thousands. The work in wintertime lasts from 5 a.m. until 8 p.m. The prisoners are each forced to fell and strip 35 trees a day. There are many cases of freezing, owing to lack of clothes. Lads of 15 to 17 get. the same tasks as men. ' The hospitals are as overcrowded as the barracks. The patients lie on planks. The daily mortality is 15 per cent. Another escaped worker relates that his convoy consisted of 137 men and women, who were sent to a camp near Parantola, Murmansk. The convicts worked in grOups of three, and had to fell and trim 50 large trees a day, and more smaller ones.

A third affidavit states that out of 29,000 prisoners ab Solovetsk 19,000 died of typhus in May last .year.