Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/130



Now that Soviet Russia has been cut off from Poland and other industrial districts fully 90 per cent of the population is agricultural. The oppression of the agricultural population by the Communists and the Red Army has been even more frightful than the persecution of labor and its political and economic organizations. The Bolshevists have acted towards the agriculturist majority in Russia as towards a conquered people, and expressions acknowledging this relation are frequent throughout Bolshevist official publications. For example, in Losovsky's official pamphlet on the new Red Trade Union Internationale (the so-called International Council of Trade and Industrial Unions) he refers to the establishment of the Bolshevist rule as "the subjection of the peasants and petty bourgeoisie by the proletariat." In a speech quoted in Soviet Russia in 1920 Lenin says:

The petty bourgeois class in Russia was undoubtedly in the majority. The peasantry remained in their production as property owners and are creating new capitalistic relations. These are the fundamental traits of our economic situation, and hence originates the unwise talk of equality, freedom and democracy by those who do not understand the actual situation.