RED TERRORISM IN RUSSIA

Wanganui Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 160725, 11 August 1920, Page 10

RED TERRORISM IN RUSSIA

GENEVA, June 7. The Red rule of terror is still in full force in Moscow and Petrograd, declare six hundred Swiss citizens—men and women of all sorts and conditions—who have just been repatriated from Soviet Russia. This unanimous testimony fyom such a large body of thoroughly reliable and unprejudiced witnesses appears to outweigh all the denials that have been issued lately by the Red dictators. These refugees are the last of the Swdft citizens to leave Lenin’s “Red Paradise.” The information they bring is perfectly fresh. “From sixty to one hundred persons are sentenced to death and executed daily in Petrograd now,” your correspondent was told. “Formerly the names of persons executed were published in the Red newspapers, but during the last two or three months they have been kept secret in an effort to make the world believe that the Red terror has ceased. In reality the revolutionary tribunals are working without rest and more pitilessly than ever. The slightest disparaging remark about the Soviet government is punishable by death. Myriads of spies pervade Petrograd and it is their business to listen to private (Conversations and report any one venturing to criticise, the Soviet system or its chiefs. The trials arc short and a mockery of justice. The prisoners are no longer allowed to present a defence. The Soviet judges arc all absolute grafters _ who tprn a deaf ear to-all proofs of innocence, but they do acquit all prisoners rich enough to bribe them.” Universal idleness is the most striking feature of the present situation in Soviet Russia, according to these Swiss eyewitnesses, many of whom are themselves workmen.

“Nobody works any more in Russia,” they say. ' “Although work is legally an obligation for all citizens in the Soviet republic, there is scarcely a stroke of work done by anyone. In the government offices the employees, while away their six hours a day from 10 o’clock in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, idly smoking and chatting. They consider that they have been working hard enough by even putting in an appearance at the office. Physical labour in the Industrie's has ceased altogether in munition factories, where, overseers with loaded revolvers stand over unwilling workmen. The peasants will not work and they produce only just enough on their farms for their own use. Hatred of work, bordering on insanity, is the principal cause of Russia’s ruin.” This spirit of idleness is attributed by the Swiss observers chiefly to the physical exhaustion following the years of famine and to the absence of incentive in consequence of the abolition of private property. Hundreds of thousands of deserters from the Red army are scattered throughout the country in bands of varying strength. These deserters, called the “Green army,” are protected by the peasants. Pitched battles are frequently fought between bands of the Green .array and detachments of the Red army. Detachments of the Greens hold up food trains, bound for cities and sometimes even attack and loot small provincial towns. Back in democratic and free Switzerland these six hundred refugees sum up their impressions thus: “Russia has sunk under the Bolshevist rule far beneath the cultural level of the Middle Ages and the Russian people are sick, morally, unto death.”