Colonel Christopher Fuller and Duncan Sandys visited the Soviet Union in 1931. With knowledge of the Russian language they were able to get off the beaten track and see the true nature of the Bolshevik state.  Fuller endeavoured to publicise what they had both seen in the course of their visit in the English Review of May 1932 and the Daily Telegraph of March 31st, 1932.  He also contacted the Duchess of Atholl and arranged an interview with Sir John Simons, The British Foreign Secretary.

        Cryptic messages filter through from Moscow.

*******

Cryptic messages filter through from Moscow. Travellers who have no knowledge of the language, without which their reports are valueless, tour the towns under official guidance and return happy in the thought that they have seen Russia. Bernard Shaw is entertained at the Kremlin and bestows his saintly blessing upon the glorious experiment. We read of starving children roaming in packs, like wolves, over a famine stricken land. Accounts are, in fact, so contradictory that we are left guessing as to the true state of affairs.

By penetrating the remotest corners of the Soviet Union, I am in a position to furnish for the first time some new end remarkable information regarding conditions in that country. Travelling some 17,000 miles by aeroplane or train, by peasant cart or on foot through town and village, I lived with the workmen and peasants in their huts. Moreover, eluding the vigilence of the G.P.U., I saw for myself men slaving in forced labour camps and the unbelievable conditions of work and living of free” labour. Working my way from North to South through the big towns and out into the country through the great corn growing plain of the Steppes, over the Caucusus mountains to the Caspian, I left Europe behind me and set out into the unknown and endless waste of Siberia. It is here and here alone, far from Moscow and the Russia that one knows, that the Soviet régime may be seen in its true light and its effect on the people may be judged.

I went to Russia with an open and unbiassed mind, but the favourable impression I had formed in Moscow and Leningrad was soon shattered when I came into contact with the Communist rule shorn of all its trappings. I was walking one night with a peasant through the thick forests beyond the parched and arid and almost desert-like regions of Central Asia and not far from the borders of Mongolia. As night drew on we penetrated further into the dense woods until at midnight we happened to strike the trans-Siberian Railway. Dark pines closed in on the line blacking it from the light of the brilliant, starlit sky, whilst dense forests stretched for countless miles around. The unearthly stillness of a Siberian night was broken by the sound of an approaching train. No light shone and the monster passed with its burden of great cattle trucks blotting out the sky. High above in the top corners of each truck was a tiny window and from each window hung grey and ghostly faces of men and women, peering in silence into the darkness. My blood ran cold as truck after truck roared ponderously by with its load of human misery. At the back of the last was built a wooden platform and as the train disappeared into the night one could just make out by the light of a flickering lantern two soldiers and the glitter of their bayonets.

They were Kulaks peasant families - being taken like animals to a remote timber camp at Nareem, in the thick forest some 500 miles further East near the source of the River Ob. The trucks, 55 in number, were full to overflowing and I was told that these Ku1ak trains passed often, always at night. The facts were later corroborated by many other Russians to whom the sight has already become so common as to rouse no interest. Here was contact, so intimate that it strikes at the very depths of the heart with the utter and abominable ruthlessness of the Communist, an insight into the true character of the Soviet régime.

More pitiable a sight still is to see these poor wretches working in the camps. On pushing further East I saw two such camps near Kusnetsk, one of the large industrial centres of development of the Five Year Plan, not 300 miles from Mongolia. They lie in a small plain let into the hills on the upper reaches of the River Tom. The bigger of the two, familiarly known by the name Sibilion, covers a large area in the centre of which stands a brick factory at which the prisoners work. It is hedged in with barbed wire fences 15 feet high, whilst at every 500 yards stands a tall wooden watchtower from which sentries with rifles have a commanding view both inside and outside the enclosure. There can be no possibility of escape. Riding round the camp and leaving the horse at a distance to crawl to some vantage rise with a view of the confine, or here and there creeping under cover of the scrub right up to the fence, I could see the prisoners toiling in clusters under the eyes of armed task—masters. Sometimes they could be seen being marched about in batches of 100 or so. They move like semi-conscious beings, resigned and weary. The prisoners live in long and low wooden huts and I should estimate that there were between thirty and forty thousand in this settlement alone. Not many miles away is another enclosure similarly guarded, but where the prisoners hew stone from the side of a hill. The lowest estimate I heard of their numbers was ten thousand, but the whole cliff seemed alive and judging by the tiny figures that could be seen working like ants all over its face, I should say there were very many more.

They have the wholehearted sympathy of their more fortunate countrymen, who speak with great feeling for their hardship. It is common knowledge that camps such as this are to be found scattered in all parts of Siberia, so that it is possible to imagine the monstrous sum of human misery that is languishing in penal exile in Russia to-day. There is no need to emphasise the enormous amount of work that is being put into the production of the Five Year Plan in this way at no cost to the State, and it explains for itself the cheapness of Soviet manufactured goods.

These Russians are not criminals in any sense of the word as we know it, but social offenders - men who have from their very nature as human beings stolidly refused to give up their independence and freedom to the mailed fist of impersonal Communism; they include all classes and types of people save one the priesthood. I put the question to a Communist who laughed. ‘There are no priests there,’ he said, ‘they have all been shot.’

We are too much inclined, perhaps, to look upon forced labour as something exceptional, even in Russia. All work under the present régime is, to a greater or lesser degree, forced labour. There are men and women working outside the ties of the forced labour camps who have no more command of their own will arid live under conditions no less deplorable. At Kusnetskstroy itself there are fifty thousand men working. As Frankfurt, the Communist Jew in charge, himself said to me:

“Labour here is voluntary and comes from all parts of Russia. It is difficult to obtain and we have to employ many recruiting officers who offer every inducement in order to persuade the peasants to come into the factories. Having procured these workers with such difficulty, we cannot, of course, afford to let them go again. When, in the course of the next few years, the work of construction is finished here at Kusnetskstroy, they will be drafted on in a body to set up other factories elsewhere.” I subsequently had a long conversation with the President of the United Local Trades Unions, Comrade Baranoff, who confirmed this statement in every respect, adding that the chief duty of the Trades Unions, which were controlled by the State, was to supply labour in the numbers required and render the workers amenable to their employers. A strange duty for a Trades Union! Needless to say, the inducements offered are little else than threats of expropriation or imprisonment. Once induced, or rather compelled, to enter the factories, as my informants admitted themselves, the workmen are no longer free to leave. There is no ready source of supply of labour from the surrounding country, except the peasantry. These are collected, so many from each village, from hundreds of miles around, by “recruiting officers.” so large a proportion is taken from some villages that they are left empty of able bodied men.

The housing accommodation provided for the workmen in the more distant centres of the Five Year Plan, is but a mockery. At Kusnetskstroy three trains daily, crowded beyond belief, bring in fresh workmen. In them are men only, for their wives and families are not wanted. On arrival the vast majority are left to their own devices to find shelter. There is a row of brick flats for the Communists and Engineers, but the only housing for the masses is a row of insanitary wooden huts. Some of these are divided into partitions about 10 ft. by 6, in which live the large families of the first arrivals in 1929 when work was started. The majority are totally bare, save for a long wooden table on trestles down each side on which men sleep so closely packed that they lie one on top of the other. Mud and refuse cover the floor and the constant babble of squabbling voices rises from the inside, whilst the stench of human bodies makes habitation a torture in itself. This is the only housing there is, and the others have to find what shelter they can. A few have found two poles and with a piece of cloth have built little hutches against the side of the huts, whilst even packing oases are used.            At night one may see these rows each with a body curled up inside and bare legs and arms and elbows hanging out.            I have said that these are the lucky ones; the remainder live like animals in the holes they have burrowed for themselves in the ground. The sides of the hills are alive with these underground hovels, while every yard of the valley of about two square miles is covered with some ramshackle shelter. The ground is boggy and there is no drainage. A regular water supply and even elementary sanitation are, of course, not thought of. It is impossible to procure clothing; what food is provided is not only insufficient, but almost uneatable. Under these conditions it is not surprising that the death rate is enormous. A constant procession winding its way through the valley carries corpses to the burial ground on the hills where to add insult to mortal injury the crosses are painted red.

Individual instances imposed by these conditions are worth mentioning. One peasant who was sleeping in the open because he could not face the filth and squalor of the huts had lived near Tomsk more than two hundred miles away. A “recruiting” officer had come to his village and he with many others had had no option but to come. They had not allowed him to bring his wife and children and he had not seen them for three years. He had been promised that he would be allowed to return to his village as soon as the factory in which he was working was completed, for the only inducement to work is the hope of getting away quickly. This assurance, he told me, had been given to all the workers in the settlement.

He seemed blissfully unaware that the scene of his present labours was but a prelude to an ambitious scheme of further factory development to be carried out by the sweat of his own brow. Like many thousands of his fellows he will not again see his family or his home for many years to come.

Another peasant to whom I spoke told me he had been forcibly driven in from his village sixty miles away. The suffering he had gone through had completely broken his spirit and he burst into a fit of sobbing as he unburdened his heart to me. He was a man of big frame and fine physique, but sheer lack of food had reduced him to a shadow of his former self. He wore a tattered and filthy vest hanging from his neck by a thread and a pair of trousers without seat or knees, and was barefoot. All that he had left of this world’s goods was an old horse in the last stages of starvation, its skin shrunken over the ribs. He clasped it round the neck end swore he would not let them take that too. On my asking him where he lived he led me through a maze of hovels and dug-outs to a little tent. This, his home, consisted of a few scanty pieces of sacking, sewn together with rushes, and stretched across the broken shaft of a cart propped up at each end b a forced stick. As I was walking away I glanced over my shoulder. I saw him trying to climb on to his horse, but he had not the strength. After several attempts he fell back on to the ground, and lay there sobbing.

This is typical of the thousands of Russians working in Siberia and of the mean dwellings that shelter them. It is painful to remember the suffering they endure through the cold of a Siberian winter.