POVERTY IN RUSSIA.

Waikato Times, Volume 100, Issue 16712, 30 January 1926, Page 19 (Supplement)

POVERTY IN RUSSIA.

HALF-STARVED CHILDREN. Airs Cecil Hanbury, wife of Mr C. Hanbury, M.P. for North Dorset, England, who recently travelled alone from the Baltic to the Black Sea, addressing a meeting organised by the Anti-Socialist and Communist Union at Ihe Queen's Hall, London, said that at Moscow she was struck more than anything else by the dreadful poverty everywhere. There was a sort of stunned) frightened look on the faces of the people, as if they wore haunted by something. On the faces, too, of the younger people there was a brulalisecl expression. Scarcely any shops were open, all the trade being done by street hawkers. In the streets at night crowds of half-starved children —the orphans of the Revolution—-were bogging and pilfering, and they slept in the gutters. Housing accommodation was shocking. People were allotted only so many square yards of room, and anyone, male or female, could be crowded in to make up the quota of a room.

The opera houses and theatres, however, were full at night of the ruling class, women wearing most wonderful furs. The scene there was what England would be like if ruled by criminals from Whitechapcl. The trains, she found, were guarded by soldiers against bandits, who made'travel a terror. People lived in daily fear of being killed. No trade unions could operate and long hours of labour and small pay were fixed by the Soviet.