Gareth Jones
[bas relief by Oleh Lesiuk]
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The Western Mail, April 4th, 1933
STARVING RUSSIANS SEETHING WITH DISCONTENT
- - -
Britons Arrested seen as a “Sop”
By
Gareth Jones
Four British
engineers are now sitting in cells in that ugly grey and yellow former insurance
office which is the headquarters of the O.G.P.U., and two others, Mr. Monkhouse
and Mr. Nordwall, have bound themselves not to leave Moscow.
A few
days ago I was walking past that sinister building. On the pavement
outside marched Red Army soldiers with their bayonets fixed; within, the British
engineers, accused of wilfully damaging machines and of wrecking the Soviet
electrical industry, were being submitted to that nerve-racking form of
torture-the mental agony of endless questioning.
I had narrowly
escaped being arrested myself not long before at a small railway station in the
Ukraine, where I had entered into conversation with some peasants. These
were bewailing their hunger to me, and were gathering a crowd, all murmuring,
“There is no bread,” when a militiaman had appeared. Stop that
growling,” he had shouted to the peasants; while to me he said, “Come along;
where are your documents?”
Gruelling of Questions
A civilian (an
O.G.P.U. man) appeared from nowhere, and they both submitted me to a thorough
gruelling of questions. They discussed among themselves what they should
do with me, and finally the O.G.P.U. man decided to accompany me on the train to
the big city of Kharkoff, where at last he left me in peace. There was to
be no arrest.
The fate of the
other British subjects in Russia was a less fortunate one, and now they await
their trial. This event is more than an isolated act of violence by the
political police. It. is a symbol of the panic which has come over the Soviet
rulers.
Hunger, far
greater than in the famine days of 1921, is condemning the Russian people to
despair and making them hate the Communist Party more than ever. Even the
young communists, once passionately enthusiastic, are now resentful at the
disillusion which has come. The workers want food and fear loss of
work.
Hunt For Victims
The peasant,
having lost his cow, his land, and his bread, and being doomed to starvation
without a finger being raised to help him, is cursing the day that Lenin took
command. A sop must be provided for the wrath of the hungry mob. The
wicked foreigner must be found on whom to put the blame. Thus our British
subjects have been seized. The imprisonment of the Metro-Vickers’
specialists is a continuation of that hunt for victims which characterises the
spring of 1933 in Russia.
Last month the
Vice-Commissar for Agriculture for the whole of the Soviet Union was shot and
with him specialists and 34 workers in the agricultural sphere. Many of
them were in the Ministry of Agriculture, Moscow, and in the Ministry for State
Farms, and during a previous visit I met one of them, Mr. Wolff, an outstanding
expert on agriculture and a man respected by all who knew him.
Imagine in this
country the shooting of the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of
Agriculture because the agricultural policy of the Government had failed!
They were accused of counter-revolutionary wrecking in the machine-tractor
stations and in the State farms in the Ukraine, North Caucasia, and White
Russia.
Forced to Confess
These
agriculturists confessed themselves guilty-or rather were forced by torture to
confess themselves guilty-of the following actions:-The smashing of tractors,
the burning of tractor stations and of flat factories, the stealing of grain
reserves, the disorganisation of sowing, and the destruction of cattle.
Surely a formidable task for 35 men to carry out in a country which stretches
6,000 miles.
Just as these men
were arrested because of the tragic ruin of agriculture, so the British
engineers were arrested because the electrical plans failed. The
Bolsheviks boasted of their magnificent Dnieperstroy, which was to flood the
Ukraine with light and make the machines in a vast area throb with energy. What
happened?
A “Super Triumph”!
In spite of the
heralding of this achievement throughout the world as a super-triumph for
Socialist construction, the tramways within the very area of the Dnieperstroy
stopped because there was no electric current. The great cities of
Kharkoff and Kiev, the leading cities of the Ukraine, were often plunged for
hours on end into darkness, and men and women and children had to huddle in
blackened rooms, because it was difficult to buy candles and lamp oil. In
the theatres in Kharkoff the lights would suddenly go out, and hundreds of
people would sit there, dreading the crush and the fight in the dark for the way
out.
At the same time
as the people not many miles away from the Dnieperstroy sat in darkness,
resounding slogans of the triumph of the Soviet electrical industry were drummed
into the imagination of the world’s proletariat by impressive statistics and
by skillfully taken photographs of electric works and of workers wreathed in
smiles.
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