Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/133

 Rh pletely as factors in the Government and having assigned certain theoretical and "proletarian" reasons for this policy the Communists and Bolshevists in all countries have proceeded to justify themselves by the worst campaign of vilification that has ever been directed against any great people. The Russian agriculturists or peasants are described by the Bolshevists and pro-Bolshevist "liberals," such as H. G. Wells, Brailsford, and Bertrand Russell, as if they were almost savages, preferring retrogession to progress in their own business of agriculture, illiterate, violent, repudiating all urban industry and all government. There is no foundation whatever for these malicious slanders against this great people. The Russian peasants agriculturally are more advanced than the majority of the agriculturists of southern and eastern Europe. Far from being totally illiterate a large proportion of the male population, often estimated at one-half, are literate. Their great desire, like that of other agriculturists, is for better tools, better stock, more farm machinery and better transportation facilities, and they have shown themselves willing and anxious to make heavy sacrifice for these objects. They proved their political intelligence by electing a solid delegation of intelligent progressives to all the Dumas under the Czar and to the Constitutional Assembly forcibly dissolved by the Bolshevists. Far from displaying hostility to the town population they even have adopted in a vague way in the latter's aspirations towards a moderate form of state socialism. But during the Bolshevist régime they have got nothing from the cities except Red Army detachments which have robbed them of everything loose on their little farms, killed them in large numbers and