Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/215

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EUROPEAN LABOR DISILLUSIONED
189

Socialists, stated that the Russian people are passive and indifferent and quoted Lenin to the effect that fifty years would be necessary to complete the work of the revolution. The eminent German Socialist, Dittmann, one of the radical members of the German delegation, reported that Russia was entirely under the control of the Bolshevist Party with 604,000 members, and that in one month last summer 893 people were shot by order of the special revolutionary tribunals and a much larger number unreported were executed "by administrative orders." This has happened since the Bolshevists were accredited all over the world in "intellectual" and "liberal" organs with having abolished terrorism. Tom Shaw, a member of the British delegation, pointed out that the working people of Russia were in a condition of actual slavery.

Both Professor Ballod of the German delegation and the Italians, in their official report, concluded that the Bolshevists are absolutely incompetent economically. Professor Ballod states that the Soviet leaders have proven themselves "wholly incapable of effecting an economic restoration in Russia" and that "bureaucracy is as bad as it was under the Czar and is on the ascendent."

The Italians, including the revolutionary Serrati, declared that the Soviet as an experiment had proved itself a failure, though the British report held that, as an experiment, it would prove valuable to other countries (carried out it will be noted, at the expense of the Russian and not of the British people). The Italians and Germans regarded the existing resistance to the Soviet oppressors as justifiable and inevitable. The