Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/84

 58 tainly to injure the Soviet authority, but simply for personal advantage without considering the consequences. Such are speculation, crimes in office (in part), banditry, and desertion.

But as such acts do no less harm to the Soviet authority than the open counter-revolutionary manifestations, they were followed up in the same manneras the rest.

For the sake of convenience in assimilating and mastering all the (details of the) immense work performed by the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, we present it to the reader in the same category which in the main was pursued in the course of the work itself, and in the same order in which it developed, namely:

The use of the expression "rich peasant" needs comment. The peasant who is resisting the Bolshevists is called by them for the purposes of execution "rich." It is needless to say that there are no rich or well-to-do peasants in Russia after all the economic degeneration of the past ten years, and especially in view of four years of Bolshevist persecution and attack on all peasants who were well enough off to muster up any effective resistance.

The attitude to the peasantry is indicated in other Bolshevist documents as, for instance, the following