Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/94

 68 masses of the Russian peasants. The Social Revolutionary Party has also addressed to world labor a vigorous protest outlining the refinement of physical and moral tortures introduced under Lenin through that revival of the Spanish inquisition, the Extraordinary Commission for Fighting the Counter Revolution, presided over by the world famed inquisitor and butcher, Djerzinsky.

The social revolutionists state that the wife of one of the prisoners, A. T. Kuznetzov, was flogged by the Bolshevist authorities for refusing to divulge her husband's whereabouts; that not only were the wife and daughters of Chernoff, Likhatch and the other leading social revolutionary prisoners arrested but that in some cases, their distant relatives were held as hostages; that the inquisition proposes to the wives of prisoners to enter into its services as spies, promising to free their husbands in return.

Here are the conditions of Russia's "political prisoners" and "conscientious objectors" as defined by the executive committee of Russia's largest political organization. The protest is addressed in the first instance to the Soviet authorities:

The refined cruelty of the ail-Russian and provincial Extraordinary Commissions has reached such a stage as to drive insane some of the arrested socialists-revolutionists who can not endure the regime of confinement in the city of Yaroslav, in the so-called "soviet house of detention," over the entrance of which there is flaunting a sign reading: "Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic" and above which sign there is the old Tzarist inscription: "Yaroslav Central Hard Labor Prison." There are many tried and true champions of the workers' cause among