HOW YOUNG REDS ARE HARDENED.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19270, 6 January 1931, Page 5

HOW YOUNG REDS ARE HARDENED.

UNPLEASANT PICTURE OF COMMUNIST CAMP.

Every summer thousands of Young Pioneers, Communist children, leave their homes to spend several weeks in summer camps. These camps are usually managed by members of the League of Communist Youth. Here the children are to rebuild their health, get “hardened, ’ and acquire Communist habits of thinking and acting, states the Moscow correspondent of the “Observer.” Recently the “Komsomolskaia Pravda,” organ of the League of Communist Y outh, published with much indignation the story of a Pioneet camp in the Crimea, eight to ten kilometres from lalta, on the shores of the Black Sea. Some two hundred and fifty Young Pioneers, between the ages of nine and sixteen, were sent there to spend their summer. The camp was set up in the beautiful marble home of the former Colonel Ustinoff. Surrounded by cypress trees, oleanders and other subtropical plants, it commanded one of the finest views of the sea. However, life within the camp was not so idyllic. “We walked up the steps into the house,” writes E. Babushkin, in the “Komsomolskaia Pravda.” A terrible picture was before our eyes. The mirrors were tarnished. The dirt of many deprived them of the possibility of reflecting anything. The marble of the walls and ceilings was covered with thick cobwebs. Dirt, half-vershok deep, lay on the parquet floors. Excrement and rubbish were in the corners. On the beds straw mattresses, with dirty linen.” “Have you changed your linen a long time ago?” I asked one of the boys. “No, just recently, three weeks ago.” “We went into the kitchen,” continues Mr Babushkin. “An old woman, with head uncovered, without apron, was preparing food in unwashed dishes; it was covered with flies and dust. The dishes were not wiped; there were no towels. We went into another room, no less dirty. Two sick boys were lying on the beds. -This was the sick room.” Babushkin relates how the children told him of the &reat disorder in the camp. Thefts were an everyday occurrence. Children stole from each other everything, including books, money, clothes. Girls and boys were taking “moon baths” together. The campers seemed strongly tinged with anti-Semitism. They beat Marik Altman, a little Jewish boy aged seven, threw his cot into the yard, and forced him to sleep two nights out in the rain. The two managers of the, camp, when asked why there was so much dirt in the camp, replied, “Children must be hardened.” It seemed that nobody had looked into this Young Pioneers’ camp all summer. The children were absolutelv left to themselves. Their two “leaders and managers” did not even sleep in the same house with them. At the end of the summer, when the camp was breaking up, and most of the children had already left for their homes, a few Pioneers were left to attend to some last details. Suddenly a shot was heard at the camp and Marusia Teturkina, one of the campers, was killed outright. She was shot bv a member of the local branch of the

League of Communist Youth—“out of jealousy,” explained the other children The story of this camp has aroused much indication among Soviet educators. and a public trial of its leaders is under consideration.