Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/126

 100 The Communists extend one hand to such counter-revolutionary leaders as Broussiloff and Goutor, the Czar's chief generals, and with the other hand, loaded with all sorts of extraordinary laws against the socialists, they oppress with all their power a group of proletarians whose sole crime is that they have had the hardihood to refuse to accept the Communist maxims, presented to them ready-made by the party in power.

The fearlessness of this group, of proletarians reached an insupportable point for the masters of the situation when the representatives of the English workers came to Russia. On this occasion the printers organized a meeting in which hymns of praise in honor of the Communist party were not heard but where, on the other hand, the truth respecting actual conditions in Soviet Russia was openly proclaimed.

The Communists, outraged by this meeting, immediately began to persecute the printers. They shrank from no lie and no calumny in the attainment of their purpose, which was to manufacture a false public opinion preparatory to the vigorous punishment they had determined to inflict on the Printers' Union.

It was not difficult for the Communists to administer this punishment, for the printers, like all the other Russian workers, are deprived of the possibility of printing everything that displeases the Communists. For having printed the resolution adopted by the mass meeting in honor of the English comrades, Comrade Zavcharoff was arrested. The Printers' Union was interdicted from printing the stenographic report of the meeting. The independent unions were also deprived of their own papers.

The Communists decided to punish the printers severely, especially because it was impossible for them to oppose the opinion of the workers in other industrial branches to the opinions held by the printers. The party in power would without doubt have met with defeat in a free assembly where the two points of view—that