Page:Scott Nearing - World Labor Unity (1926).pdf/27

 freedom the Russian workers were compelled to destroy landlordism and capitalism.

Consequently, throughout the world, landlords and capitalists have done everything in their power to defame and cripple the Soviet Republic. Since landlords and capitalists are in control of the press, the schools, and the other channels of public opinion throughout the world, they have been able to tell the masses of workers daily lies about the Soviet Republic.

The burden of these lying stories was that the Soviet workers were starving and enslaved, that their women and children were nationalized, that the whole experiment was a savage plot of a few butchers to destroy civilization, and that it would fail anyway in a short time. But years passed, and in spite of ostracism and opposition, the Soviet government did not fail, but grew stronger and stronger. Then the workers in other countries began to stir themselves. They had been relying for the facts about Russia upon their economic masters, or else upon Communist propagandists. They would see for themselves.

During the past two years, from all parts of the world, delegations of workers have travelled through the Soviet Union. The elaborate and circumstantial report of the British Delegation of 1924 has probably done more than any single document to open the eyes of the European workers on the situation existing in Russia. During 1925 a delegation of about 200 workers went to Russia from Sweden. A delegation of British working women visited Russia in May, 1925, and a month later 60 German delegates, elected from the shops in many cases, visited the Soviet Union. At least 40 of these Germans were Social Democrats, and therefore politically opposed to the Communist Movement. Other delegations went from Belgium, France, Austria, Norway, and Australia.

These delegations, returning home, have revolutionized the attitude in their own countries toward Russia. The British women issued a careful report, amazingly favorable to the Soviet Union, in those fields of woman and child protection which the delegation went to study. The other delegations have issued official statements, which, in every case, have been favorable to the Soviet regime.

Meanwhile the developments in China and Morocco, the unemployment in Britain, the continued stagnation in world trade, the cutting of wages, and the war of the masters on the Labor Movement have acted as additional stimuli to the workers. Their own impotence and dis-unity in the face of the growing solidarity of the capitalists are forcing the issue upon the masses.