The Daily Worker Newspaper, March 7, 1925, Page 12

oe = RUSSIA. LENINGRAD.— The Society of Friends of the Red Air Fleet of the U. 8. S. R. has presented the Red Air Fleet with«a second “Lenin Esqua- drille.” The esquadrille is composed of 18 aeroplanes, given by the central committee of the Railroad Workers’ Union, the central committee of the Union of Soviet Employees, the So- ciety of the Frends of Red Aviation of the Khirghiz, the same society of Tula, ete. POLAND. ‘i WARSAW.—The Communist frac- tion in the Polish Diet introduced an interpellation regarding the closing down of the Bielostock trade unions by the police. The police have closed down almost all the unions of this city, sealing the premises occupied by them. Great mass meetings of workers ‘have been held in Premysl and Steb- nik (Eastern Galicia) to demand the freeing of the Polish Communist De- puty, Comrade Lanczucsky. Adolphe Lanter, editor of the Lem- berg “Tribuna Prolotnitcha,” the or- gan of the union of the city and N a boys’ school in California I was reading to a large class in Modern History the story of what young peo- ple are doing—are living in far away Russia, land of the hated Bolsheviks. To my.surprise, even the most frivo- lous members of that class listened to this reading with intense interest, so gripping was its revelation of a hu- man social life. utterly unknown to ‘their experience. g The book was “The Romance of New Russia” by Magdeleine Marx, published by Thomas Seltzer, New York City. It was the story of one typical girl of Russia—one of hun- dreds of thousands fike her in that country—and of a school of boys and girls—that I was reading: parts of two chapters in this book. This typical girl of New Russia, “Lena,” at 20 is one of “an endless stream of youth pouring into Moscow, eager for study, without the remotest chance of find- ing quarters, but confident of run- ning across some stranger—this could happen only in Russia—who would be only too glad to share his crust and the cold attic where one stum- bled over sleepers when one came home at night.” AS Lena a Communist . . Child of a mechanical age, the daughter of revolutionaries, twin sis- ter to the proletarian, enrolled from birth in a mad army, in a chaotic world, Communism was not a mere doctrine to her, a parcel of ideas. It was unscathed spirit of her twenty years, her unerring instinct for nobil- ity and justice, something that eman- ated from all her studies; it was noth. ing less than the world itself, spread out before her like a huge arena; it was the pitiless urge of her blood.” Mme. Marx had seen the older Com- munist women of Russia: Kollontai, Krupskaya, Lebedeva, Gasparova and others—the mothers, the servants, the priestesses of the revolution—its saints and martyrs. And she well says that “every sacrificial and un- selfish instinct that is implanted in human nature caused these older “ women to become revolutionists.” UT “when you are with Lena, you have a sense of well-being, an assurance that all the flood-gates of joy are wide open. The older women have sacrificed everything to the re- volution; Lena has RECEIVED every- thing from it.” The striking contrast between the civilization of the new Russia and country proletariat of Poland, has been sentenced to seven months in prison, and forbidden to return to belong to. The executive committees of the two internationals shall decide in conference on the method of call- Lemberg for five years after that. The} ing, and the composition of a world paper which he was arrested for pub- congress, lishing was appearing légally, GERMANY. BERLIN.—The campaign being car- ried on by the German Communists for trade union unity is proving ex- tremely effective. The first definite break with the anti-unity policy of the reformist union leaders has been made by the Berlin section of the German Metal Workers’ Federation, the most important section of the strongest federation in Germany, which unanimously adopted the fol- lowing resolution introduced by the Communists at a general session of the union: “The session instructs the local committee to request the executive committee to take steps towards the establishment of a Trade Union Inter- national and to agitate for all the trade unions of the world taking their stand on the ground of the class struggle, and for their reunion*in one Trade Union International, whether or not’ they belong to an internation- al at present, and which ever one they | “The Romance of New Russia” =e that of the whole fabric of bourgeois social life anywhere is well put in these two paragraphs: “In the daughters of the bourgeois world, in whom intellectual activity and familiarity with books develop nothing but the analytical spirit, in- telligence is poison, knowledge is a misfortune, Keen as their brains are, all they use their mentality for is to bolster up a sterile pride in never being taken in. ‘What’s the use?’ they cry. Logically, there is nothing for them but to commit suicide. . HEREAS Lena is all for life. W What has she to do with bitter skepticism, with despair, with the view that humanity is groping at night in an impasse? With her every- thing is resolved into action. Nothing comes to the surface upon which she does not act,” Lena—indeed, an uncounted num- ber of the youth of new Russia—is living and acting within the most stimulating, invigorating, vital at- mosphere a human being can know— in a world of which the whole fabric of church and state thus far hag not even dreamed. “She does not know, nor so much as suspect, that one can “| get satisfaction out of owning dresses, furniture, a house, precious objects; or experience pleasure in adorning oneself with jewels; or use ‘one’s strength for one’s personal career, or accept an idea for what it can bring one.” In a word, Lena is having her life in a civilization that is right now consciously in process of building— building. toward ideals which others have been content to dream about or merely to mouth, but which the new Russia is proceeding to translate into every day reality. Little wonder that Anna Louise Strong felt an irresist- ible urge to return to Russia in spite of illness and privation, that even the exotic Claire Sheridan, in spite of herself, had the feeling that such an atmosphere as this of Russia is supremely the one in which children should be educated, that Mme. Marx herself felt that the lot of her own child in France is pitiful compared with that of hundreds of thousands of even orphan children in new Russia. 'HE school Mme. Marx deseribes— one of thousands of the same sort established by the new regime in Russia—can be matched nowhere else in the world. There the children consciously create their school. It is their life together. It is the rare a os Saxon Peasant Congrese. BERLIN.—At a congress of the poor peasantry of Saxony recently held at Koenigswald, the Communists gained a signal victory, despite the strenuous efforts of representatives of the German nationalist party to swing the delegates round to their side. The chief points under con- sideration were the bad harvest and the heavy taxation to which the pea- sants are being subjected. After the German nationalists had spoken at length, a member of the Commun- ist reichstag fraction explained to the congress the sort of agrarian policy that the German-nationalists are real- ly pursuing in the reichstag. There- upon a resolution drawn up in ac- cordance with the line of the Com- munist Party in relation to the poor peasantry was adopted unanimously by the 700 delegates. NORWAY. OSLO.— During the interpellation of Comrade Stestag, leader of the Communist fraction in the Storthing, INTERNATIONAL NOTES regarding measures to be taken in order to halt the present rapid growth of unemployment in Norway, a great demonstration of ' unemployed took place before the parliament _ build- ing. The crowd massed before the building grew to such proportions that the session was forced to receive a delegation, headed by the Commun- ist Mausset. After leaving the session, Mausset addressed the waiting crowd of un- employed, reporting the evasive an- swer of the president of the storthing and showing the necessity of the seizure of power by the proletariat, In the course of his flery speech he proposed that greetings should be sent to the victims of bourgeois jus- tice in the general strike in Trond- heim, and ended with a call to the workers to establish a “Soviet Nor- way.” The police intervened to put a stop to the meeting. Prison for Two Communists. OSLO.—The Communists Durendal and Hergardsen have been sentenced to a year in prison and-ten years’ loss of civil rights for a clash with: strike- breakers during the strike, in, Trond- heim last year. A mass meeting was held in the city to protest against the sentence. ae PP ANY SEBS fortune of these children—hundreds of thousands of them orphaned by the capitalistic world war—to live in a country which regards its children as its dearest treasure. “As between fathers and children, the code choos- es the children and takes their part. Books are written for them; for them the whole country works, sacrifices, builds. For their sake everything has been torn down and is now being re- constructed. . govern oneself, to work, to be rasponsible—these, for other children, are only words; flabby words, without meaning, that collapse the moment they are said. But this nation of children LIVES the words. For them, they are not mere words: they are the strength of their mus- cles, the warm spirit that stirs their limbs. “Their opportunity above all is that they are beginning life in a Country where the nature of every existing institution is being called in question. It is not only the social regime that has changed; it is not only in the political order that buildings and be- ginnings are going on; change char- acterizes every element in society. All barriers have gone down, not only between society and the indivi- dual, but wherever barriers were, wherever life was divided into com- partments, and thought was kept back from being free and human life was held back from its limitless dest- iny.” U twenty chapters does this consummate writer hold the mirror up to nature in the new Rus- sia, and the result is a book which any man or woman with red blood lays down, after reading, with a sense of joy, a feeling that human society has possibilities of which most of the books we read give us no inkling, W. T. Brown, “GREED”—AN AMERICAN FILM WORTHY OF SOVIET RUSSIA One of the opening sub-titles quotes Frank Norris, the author, as saying: “I never truckled; I never took off my hat to fashion and held it out for pennies. By God, I told them the truth. They liked it or they didn’ like it. What had that to do with me? I told them the truth.” Strange as it may seem in an- Am- erican film reputed to have cost two million dollars and two years in the making, this fanatic declaration of faith has been carried out thru thig gripping, stark film worthy of the sponsorship of the Moscow Art Thea. ter itself. SS nsneenssesnnsns| Upton Sinclair, in his latest book, “Mammonart,” writes of this story: “The theme Of McTeague” (upon which “Greed” is based) “is avarice, and we see a dentist’s office with a big gold tooth for a sign, and all thru the tragic story we run upon the mo- tif of gold in everything from sunsets to decorations.” The director of this remarkable film, Eric von Stroheim, caught the same note from “McTeague” and faithfully recorded it even to the ex- tent of a subtle use of color photog- raphy that emphasizes only the gold and brass and leaves the rest of the picture in tremendously suitable black and white and gray. Only twice do other colors than gold. get their deserts—once in the greedy, green eyes of the cat as she contemplates a dinner of canary, and again in the finale where a bag of gold coin is spattered over with jackass blood -in the sink of Death Valley, as two handcuffed men, hunter and hiutited, both victims of the bag of shining yel- low metal, settle down to their ap- proaching death, The capitalist press has either op enly roasted it, or more subtly damn- ed it with faint praise on its “artistic and intelligent altho sad and sordid qualities.” The latter is the more ef- fective method of fighting a good pic- ture, since many newspaper readers have a habit of judging newspaper op- inions by opposites. Thus the dub- bing as “sentimental” the film “Tongues .of Flame” in which Tommy Meighan gave the Indian a square deal for the first time in reel life, quickly drove him back to a safe and sane strikebreaker role in “Coming Through.” We shall see what “Greed” is going to’ do to von Stro- heim’s next picture. ‘ Many of the reviewers of “Greed” ave hit upon one very true general- ization—“You are either going to like it tremendously, or you will hate it.” That’s the kind of a film it is. It tells the truth. About real people. ‘And real situations and emotions, The final tragedy can be traced back to a strictly capitalist rendition of “sacred mother love.” McTeague’s mother works herself almost to death as a mine camp cook, and sacrifices her all, “to make something of the boy.” And that “something” is, of course, to take him out of the ranks of the workers and make a profes- sional out of him, a “non-union” dent- ist. But instead of this great “prog- ress” leading to happiness it ends in wife murder and a miserable death in the middle of Death Valley. No fake about it either, the film was shot vl the valley with temperature over 120. “Save your money and live com- fortably” says the banker. “Saye (Continued on page 7) ~