Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/119

 Rh sentences only from this extremely interesting and important speech—which the printers assert led to the imprisonment of all the chief officers of the union:

One may exhibit a sitting of the Moscow Soviet, consisting exclusively of Communists; one may show a sitting of the Russian Central Board of Trade Unions, consisting exclusively of Communists, but one cannot show a single free workmen's meeting that will have a Communist majority.

Here are thousands of Moscow printers, behind whom stand scores of thousands of Moscow and other Russian workmen who, at the epoch of the Russian Revolution, under a government that calls itself a workmen's government—a government realising its socialistic programme, a government calling Socialism to life, a government annihilating the parasitic classes—those thousands of Moscow printers, I say, and behind them scores and hundreds of thousands of Russian workmen, have all of them under this government no right to vote, no right to assemble, no right to print. As in the time of the Czar's government, the printers are forced to print, not their own thoughts, but calumnies against themselves.

Communists sometimes use menaces of arrests against the workers to oblige them to leave their posts in the board of the Union voluntarily, and in practice this often happens. Sometimes they do it otherwise; they say that if a Communist is not elected to the Board or Factory Workers' Committee, they, the Communists, will arrange things so that their workers will receive less food and other necessary things. And sometimes this produces its effect. This affirmation can be verified in a series of factories in Moscow.

When such means have no result, the Communists let the local Soviets or the Central Council of Trade Unions dissolve the Board of the Trade Unions; such was the case with the first Central Board of the Printers' Union.