Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/96

 70 But it is not for the food shortage of soviet Russia that the Yaroslav hunger torture can be explained away. Were that the case, the organs of your political police would not interfere with the food assistance that we are willing to render the prisoners from the outside. At the cost of tremendous efforts and immense sacrifices the relatives of the prisoners have organized food assistance to be sent to the prison. But permission for these gifts has been hedged in by the special section of your extraordinary commission with all kinds of conditions which made it impossible during two months to send more than two relief shipments. An attempt was made to supply the prisoners with money, so as to enable them to order some products permitted in the open market, but the prison authorities accepted only a certain amount which they deemed proper to confiscate right there and then in payment of the damage caused to the prison department ostensibly by the demonstration of the prisoners at the Butyrski prison. (Although it was proved that none of these prisoners had participated in that outbreak at the Moscow prison.)

Under these circumstances all efforts to fight the hunger torture have proved futile.

Now, what is your object in this?

Do not excuse yourself by claiming ignorance. You know, you can not help knowing, what is going on, to the glory of your name, in Yaroslav. It has been discussed with the president of the council of people's commissaries, Lenin himself, with the chairman of the central executive committee, Kalinin, and with many others of you.

By the hands of your henchmen, in your communistic torture-chamber of the Yaroslav central prison, you want to finish secretly and unobserved that which the Tzarist jailers did not manage to complete: in the tortures of death by starvation you want to kill these old champions of socialism and the revolution!