Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/221

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EUROPEAN LABOR DISILLUSIONED
195

Federation of Trades Unions wishes to be as friendly to the Russian Bolshevists as the latter will allow, the indictment that follows has all the more weight. The International Bureau Executive continues:

Up to the present we have received nothing from those who claim the right to speak in the name of the Russian people but curses, libels and lies, which have been spread without the shadow of proof. And is it possible for us to fail to state that we find it difficult to believe in your good will towards the proletariat? Is it not a principle of your party to subordinate the freedom of labor unions to political considerations? You suggest that we should hold conferences together, but up to the present you have not shown that you have learned how to consort with decent people. The proof of this is found in your lies and in the fact that you cannot write a letter without filling it with insults—and you haven't even enough cleverness to introduce variety in your attacks. Your dictionary of curse words, gentlemen, is as monotonous as the starvation and the news of massacres in your country.

For three years you have been destroying the freedom of the labor movement in Russia with fire and sword. And you have done this so thoroughly and radically that the "White Terror" of the bourgeois Government of Hungary is but a weak reflection of your "Red Terror."

The Executive of the Trade Union Internationale then turns its attention to the ignorance displayed by the Bolshevists in all their discussions of the labor situation of other countries and especially of the labor unions. It points out that the International Trades Union Federation has twenty-four million members and estimates on the basis of Zinoviev's own statement that the new Red Labor Union Internationale has less than a million mem-