Evening Star Newspaper, December 23, 1934, Page 68

‘J&J-‘J.’J ARXAAAAASAALMESASSASSAALALSLRXARL SRS S S R FRERE R NRRRE NN NN NN RN NE ?rrs E R 3K O 0 O Ok O o G ko R o aF G G R E O ok O o o O O o S S O S OF O o O o 3 MOSCOW, U. S. S. R., December 10, 1934. USSIA! I've seen Russia, and now I can believe in miracles, for there is no word to describe the picture of Russia today, other than miraculous. And I do not mean that the picture is mirac- ulously beautiful. In many ways it is unbelievably ugly. I stand and look at it with fascinated and astonished eyes but for nothing on earth would I personally, under the present scheme of things, endure the enslavement and tyranny which its citizens must suffer who have been saved according to the gospel of Karl Marx. The old Czarist government gained the de- testation of its subjects because of its notorious despotism. But compared to the government of today, life under the Czar was free as a Spring breeze. “The wonder of wonders is the ease and power with which this new system of super-despotism works. A handful of labor leaders consumed with communistic theory and fanatical zeal, sit on high within the Kremlin walls, their eyes fixed on a book of political and social notions, and proceed to experiment on the lives and souls of 160,000,000 human beings, with as much impersonal detachment as a bacteriologist experiments with germs. In the beginning—1917—the proletarian lead- ers who had seized control of Russia, said: “The Czar has proved himself the greatest obstacle in the way of our lifting the masses of workers out of their slough of ignorance and misery. First of all, then, if we are to improve our lot, we must exterminate the Czar, his wife, his four daughters and his young son. Perhaps a bit brutal, but you’ve got to be tough to get anywhere.” ND so the Czar and his entire family were shot. “And the aristocrats and intelligentsia must go next. They’ll never take to our ideas about exalting the factory workers and moujiks to the throne. That means about a million murders, imprisonfients, exiles, of our nobility and gentle people, of our educators, religious leaders, scientists, professors, merchants, archi- tects, diplomats—in fact, of all civilized Russian citizens.” So this million were murdered, imprisoned or exiled. “Now,” said the leaders, “we can accomplish something for the masses. Now, rid of the bourgeoisie, we will give the masses the great privilege of being made over to conform with our sacred theories. Of course, some of the stubborn ones may not like their new medicine. RUSSIA-YEA AND Enslavement and Tyranny Suffered by the Citizens Are Supposed to Save Their Souls —The New Religion. How the Children Are Being Taught. BY RICHARD HALLIBURTON NAY B K ko o But we know what’s good for them—they don’t. So we’ll lock them in. From now on, no Russian can leave Russia. If he escapes we will perse- cute his mother and father and brother and sister and send them to Siberian prisons. We will declare him, a public enemy and sentence him to be shot when he comes home. All this will teach the rebel a lesson.” So the frontier was inclosed by a steel ring of bullets and bayonets. No Russian, how- ever desperate, can run away from the social experiment. “Now we’ve got 'em,” said the leaders. “What is our first vivisection operation to be? First we will amputate the church.” A labor leader waved his hand and abolished the church. “The family must go next. Family unity is » capitalistic and bourgeois custom dangerous to communism. Our men and women must be able to love whom they please, when they please—marry and divorce on impulse. Our state will care for the children, and do it better than their parents.” So the family was abolished, too. “Money,” -they said, “is the source of all evil. Money was the support of the gentry and intelligentsia. We must destroy all private wealth and all means of accumulating it, lest these old anti-social classes come back.” Money went next. Everybody was, and still is, allowed to share the same property together. “But we must have industry and commerce to keep our people employed. We must sell our wheat and buy machinery. We haven’'t enough wheat for our own needs, but we've nothing else to export, so we must seize the peasant’s private food supplies.” ‘The supplies were seized. Five million people starved to death from 1929 to 1931. There was no mourning for them—mourning would be only sentimentality, a cardinal sin among Bolsheviks. The sacrifice had to be made for political expediency. The wheat was sold and machinery secured to make guns and tanks with which to defend the dictatorship. “There is one last and very important gap to be closed to complete our despotism,” said the leaders. “We must use every means in our power to protect our new theories and our new liberated masses from foreign capitalistic in- fluences. No information, no counter-revolu- tionary enlightenment, from the world outside must come in. Russia must be a sealed box. Only then can we be complete masters. No foreign books not of a communistic character shall cross our borders, no newspapers or magazines that might reveal the false happi* St. Basil's Cathedral, at the end of Red Square in Moscow, one of the world's strange buildings. Erected by Ivan the annble in 1564, it has been spared by the Bolsheviks and turned into an anti-religious museum, ness of other people living under the enemy's system will be tolerated. The movies, the theater, school books, must be rigorously cen- sored. Nothing must be allowed to emerge that does not glorify the working man and damn the other classes.” HAT is exactly what the Bolshevik leaders have done. After 17 years of communism not one single movie can be shown that is not political propaganda, that does not sermonize. The entire industry has become merely a stick with which to beat the capitalists. The results are so appallingly dull that even the most wild-eyed communists attend only from a sense cl duly Mescow at the moment is said to be the biggest boom town in the world, enjoying a !rmzv o[ construction. The photograph - -shows women werking at street paving. The newspapers are only echoes of the dice tatorship, mouthing proletarian slogans. Most of the non-Russian news concerns the fearful atrocities, murders, torturings being inflicted on the sacred persons of the working men in England and America by the capitalists— stortes that insult the intelligence of a 6-year- old. Strikes, race wars, unemployment, are given strident headlines. Any story about the security and prosperity of the vast majority of working men in America is avoided like a barrel of rattlesnakes. The great Soviet Library, the pride of the nation, housing 6,000,000 books, is a glaring case of this intellectual enslavement. It shelters, supposedly, the accumulated wisdom of the world. It should be the chief foundation of enlightenment and learning, without respect to creed, political party or nationality. But when I sought there a history of the life and times of Nicholas II of Russia from 1900 to 1917, the librarian was horrified. What! Czar Nicholas! That personification of capitalism— that enemy of the workers! I most certainly could not have such a boock. Why didn't I choose one of the hundreds of histories of the glorious communistic revolution instead? Even the great National Library, the last bulwark of intellectual liberty, was gagged. The same warping of education, the same blinding to all else but proletarian prejudices and principles, goes straight down to the kindergarten. I asked a 15-year-old schoolboy what they were taught in school about America and West- “We are taught the history of the communis- tic revolutionary movement in America and England,” he said. “No other history?” I asked “History is just the lives of kings and capitale ists and generals. There is nothing in it about the working classes.” “Do you learn geography in your school? Do you know where Argentina is? He had never heard of Argentina. Nor was any other foreign country more than a vague name. Such worldly knowledge as foreign geography is not allowed even to the working classes. This class is the favored class—the new aristocracy. If you toil with your hands mak- ing boilers, stoking furnaces or digging ditches, you inherit the earth in Russia. You are housed in new apartments, fed bountifully, hospitaled, schooled, amused insured, adored by the government. But if you work as a clerk in a state bank or a state bureau or if you teach school or write for the newspapers—if you belong to the white-collar class—you get the short of everything. Your children will be allowed in the national schools only when the quota for the children of the factory workers and peasants has been fulfilled. As for the children of the former nobility and aristrocracy, these heathens are not allowed within a mile of a school house. All these restrictions have made Soviet Rus= : Continued on Ninth Page. -