RUSSIAN “REDS” AND WEMBLEY.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19283, 22 September 1924, Page 8

RUSSIAN “REDS” AND WEMBLEY.

IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND

"BEAUTIES” OP THE WORKER’S LIFE.

(From Oor Own Correspondent.) LONDON, August 16. Tire group of 25 Communist students of various Soviet universities and technical colleges, who recently visited this country as guests of the British "Workers’ Travel Association, ’’ and were feted by British Communists, have thought fit, on their return to Moscow, to repay the hospitality they received in England by a violent outburst of abuse against this country and its people (says the Morning Post). Recording Ins impressions of England in tho Moscow Pravda, of August 6, one of the party, speaking on behalf of himself and bis comrades, first of all attacks his British hosts, the “Workers' Travel Association,’ for its “lack of tact * in giving the dinner of welcome in Honour of the young Russian Communists in a restaurant with such an “inappropriate name a® tho ‘Cafe Royal,’ ” and for “forcing us to sit prim and proper, like sticks at a table where we had to face the ordeal ot eight or ten different kinds of knives and forks, not knowing what they were for and how tc use them." The impressions of tho Russian Communist visitors at Wembley are summed up in the Pravada as follows; “Fine, well-built pavilions, filled with objects of luxury stolen by the British Imperialists from the colonists ; all sorts of amusements calculated to give tho dulled senses of the overfed bourgeoisie a thrill for a few seconds —aud you have the much-advertised British Empire Exhibition is one sentence.” On the whole, tho writer in the Pravda arrived at tho conclusion that the Soviet Agricultural Exhibition held m Moscow last autumn "although less pretentious, less calculated for effect and not ncomoanied by the shrieking display of advertisements, which characterises Wemblev,” was much more satisfactory. The conditions in which British workers live are also, in the opinion of the Young Communists, much worse than in Soviet Russia. “The houses of the British workers are dirtv, all black with smoke, with tiny backyards, in which dirty rags are always banging, being evidently the underclothing of their inhabitants. Broken windows, ragged, dirty children, and uncouth women —no, I am afraid my pen is not strong enough to descv'be nil the ‘beauties’ of the life of the British worker; one must see it oneself to realise all its horrors,”