SOVIET RUSSIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 18954, 30 August 1923, Page 7

SOVIET RUSSIA

CONDITIONS IN UKRAINE. HORRIBLE INJUSTICES. THE OFFENDERS SENTENCED. 1 eoss Association —By Telegraph—Copyright LONDON, August 28. The Morning Post’s Helsingfors correspondent says:— “The Pravada publishes a horrifying account of the trial of a group of Bolshevist officials at Pavlograd (in the Ukraine), who were convicted of a long series of, abominable crimes against the population under their charge, including murders and executions without trial, and robberies. In one case Nikitenke, president of the Soviet Executive Committee at Slavianka, and three' militiamen abducted a schoolmistress. They then carried her through the village naked after she had been tarred. When Nikitenko heard that the woman intended to denounce the outrage he had her arrested and strangled. The defence was that the existence- of civil war left the officials no time to study law books; but the , court refused to accept this plea. Nikitenko and five others were sentenced to death, and 20 militiamen were imprisoned.—A. and N-Z. Cable. VAGABONDAGE PREVALENT POVERTY LEADS TO CRIME. LONDON. August 28. According to the latest official Soviet census, there are more than 1,500,000 waifs and strays in the Ukraine, only 14 per cent, of whom receive attention from the relief organisations, the remainder being left to their own devices. Nearly 30,000 crimes were committed by waifs under 13 years of age registered in the Ukraine during the last six months. One hundre'd and fifteen thousand waifs and strays were registered in Odessa and Nikolaiev. The majority of the vagabonds gain a livelihood by begging and thieving. They also commit graver crimes, such as murdering and plundering. Epidemics are raging among the children in the bigger Ukraine towns. The police frequently discover bodies of persons who nave died of starvation or disease.—The Time*. THE RUSSIAN HARVEST. LITTLE COMMUNISM IN AGRARIAN DISTRICTS. LONDON, August 15. Colonel Haskell, head of the American relief mission to Russia, who is on his way back to the United States, says the 1923 harvest was a bumper one. Russia, he declares, has a great future before her. The. people are awakening to the need of individualism. There is not much communism in the agrarian districts of Russia at present. THE STATE OF RUSSIA. A series of articles was recently contributed to the London Times by a special correspondent, lately returned from Moscow. The principal impression made on one by the Bolshevist Government to-day is not so much wickedness as hopeless muddle, he wrote in a concluding survey. It is this helplessness and this administrative incompetence which make the Bolshevists still retain the terror. There are two irreconcilable systems of government now face to face in Europe, and the Bolshevist system, though changing very gradually, is excessively alarmed by eacn change which is forced on it by external or internal pressure, not so much because the Bolshevist leaders fear this change in itself as because they fear it will give a handle to their enemies, weaken the fanaticism of their followers, and thus lead to their own destruction in circumstances of terror similar to those which accom- 1 panied the destruction of the Russian middle classes in 1918 and .1919. Meanwhile, the Soviet Government has changed so much that it is certainly not Communist ; it would be hard hideed to describe what it is. The nearest approach to a comprehensive description that I can get is—an oligarchy of half a dozen men whose power is based- on a well-organised political party of about 200,000 inspired by enthusiasm for a Communist system which lias been abandoned, but holding on to power because they are afraid to let go. As a Chinese proverb says: “He who rides on a tiger can never dismount.” One cannot help coming to the conclusion that Bolshevism is less dangerous on account of those principles which it loudly trumpets to the world than on account of those which are latent in it, and which it even tries to camouflage, but which are bound, nevertheless, to develop in proportion as Bolshevism itself develops. Latent is that terrible curse of the ancient world, a curse which Christianity abolished onlv very gradually and with the utmost difficulty—namely, industrial servitude, as complete as that which prevailed pnder the Roman Emperors, and more difficult to get rid of because the slaveowner is a fascinating abstraction called ‘‘the Workers’ Revolution,” ‘‘the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” and “the Government of the Poor and the Oppressed. Their system tends logically to the destruction of weakly children or helpless old persons who can never be serviceable to that Moloch State which the Reds have conceived. - . When one studies the learned theories set forth by the Communist philosophers, one fails to see how they can regard themselves or other meii as anything better than machines without a soul or a God, or a. hereafter, pieces of mechanism that should, if incurably inefficient, be sent to the lethal chamber.