LIFE IN RUSSIA.

Waipa Post, Volume XII, Issue 945, 22 May 1920, Page 5

LIFE IN RUSSIA.

HOW BOLSHEVISTS HEAL WITH STRIKERS.

A remarkable account of the manner in which the Bolshevists, treat strikes and strikers is given by the Berlin correspondent of the Economist, on information from the Russian Bolshevist newspaper Ekonomitcheskaya Zhizn (Economic Life). The Commissary of Labor, Schliapnikoff, declares that workmen’s factory councils have brought a decline in production and injury to plant. Therefore the councils have been abolished and the Bolshevists have set “ dictators with unlimited power of life and death over the workmen at the head of all important undertakings.”

Piece payment, the Taylor system (-of extensive production), premium payments, black lists, and money and food fines have prevailed “pot without success.” Moscow has a “regional commission for combating mass idleness” which treats absence from work by masses of employees as “ malicious sabotage,” and “ hands the culprits over to the administrative organs for confinement in forced labor concentration camps.” By exceptional industry a workman may increase his wages 175 per cent. Sometimes the premium is paid in bread. The coercion of the workers is defended by Commissary Krasin (who avas brought in from Germany) on the ground that “ if we have a right to send loyal citizens to be killed in defence of the revolution, we certainly have the same right in the same cause to kill disloyal shirkers.” The profits of nationalisation, according to the same authority, have been non-existent. In return for £150,300,000 worth of goods exchanged only £5,464,000 was received by the State.