MAKING TROUBLE.

Southland Times, Issue 18811, 3 May 1920, Page 4

MAKING TROUBLE.

The Russian situation once more is occupying the attention of the cable agents, but the greater part of the world has ceased to take more than a purely academic interest in the doings of the Bolsheviks and the Counter-Revolutionaries. At latest the Poles and the Ukrainians have been making rapid progress in an offensive against the Reds, but movements of this kind in the past have flowed and ebbed with such regularity that the public has come to regard the announcements of Bolshevik defeats merely as the precursors of an antiBolshevik rout. It is a painful fact that at the time that the Allies were prepared to support military operations against Lenin and Trotsky it was impossible to persuade the Poles and the Ukrainians to give wholehearted suport to the other counter-revolu-tionary leaders. Yudenitch, Denikin and Koltchak rose and fell because they could not sustain a concerted movement against j the Red forces. They have practically disappeared from the field of action, and now, I when the Allies are anxious to try the effect j of letting the Bolshevk leaders cany on their system of compulsory labour without the stimulus of invasion, the Poles and Ukrainians are eager for the fray. The Poles, of course, have been led to anticipate a Bolshevik attack with the coming of the better weather, but all the same it is hardly i likely ’ that the British government will | look with favour upon Piisudski's campaign, j It had been decided that the best means of dealing with the Bolshevik problem was to open up trade with Russia and to watch the result of the ordinary disintegrating processes of peace upon the elaborate system of Slate Socialism, with the conscription of labour, set up by the Russian dictators. The economic experiment will find itself most seriously tested by the conditions of lieace, itnd it is a pity, therefore, that the Poles have been persuaded to take the field. The fact that one of the Rod leaders has had his name given to the former capital of the Czar may be one of the early signs of internal trouble. Trotsky may desire a similar honour, and he may demand that Moscow should become Trotskitown, now that Leningrad has appeared on the Russian maps, but there will still bo Tchitcherin to be satisfied and his name would make even a Russian municipality pause. Lenin, of course, is regarded as the shrewder man and the cooler brain. Much of the political system has been designed by him, and he enjoys the greater amount of respect. Tgateky all along has thriven on the work of combatting the armed enemies of the proletariat dictatorship, leaving hj) Lenm the constructional work in the interior. Once or twice there have been serious divergences of opinion between them, and it is probable that one of the first signs of the breakdown in the Bolshevik machine will be a quarrel between this pair. This is not likely while there remains an outside enemy to take Trotsky’s attention.