The most hated man in all Russia is Dzherjinsky, the head of this system. He has done to death literally hundreds of thousands of men and women. He is a man without a heart or a conscience, a veritable bird of prey, whose appetite for blood is insatiable. When the Reds overran Siberia after the fall of Kolchak, they announced as they advanced into the country the abolition of the death sentence and guaranteed to all White officers who surrendered a full pardon and permission to return to their families.
This undertaking was broken almost immediately after they gained complete control of the country. Thousands of Whites were butchered throughout Siberia. The man who ordered this was Dzherjinsky. Mrs. Clare Sheridan wrote in her diary that when she said goodby to him it made her feel sad that she would never see him again!
I have talked with all sorts and conditions of people in Moscow, from the lowest to the highest, and failed to find one person, apart from those in favored positions in the employ of the Soviet, who had a good word to say for Bolshevism or Communism or any other “ism.” On the other hand, the working classes have no wish to be again under the old regime. They all want the same thing—a Government that will give them a chance to earn a decent living and will leave them alone. They are tired of decrees, weary of rationed food and Communistic control and, above all, they loathe the “Chika.”
The majority of the girls and women working in the Government offices are leading irregular lives with the Commissars who furnish them with additional food and clothing. Girls who in pre-revolutionary days, would never have prostituted themselves, even in Russia, where morality was always on a low scale, to-day are forced to sell themselves in order to keep body and soul together. Bolshevism is the foulest prostituting agency the world has ever seen.
SOVIET RULERS A GANG OF THIEVES, BOON DECLARES
By Hector Boon.
Copyright, 1921, by the Press Publishing Co. (The New York World).
I left Moscow on Saturday, the 10th of October, by the courier’s train which was carrying despatches for Joffe, the head of the Soviet Peace Mission, and arrived in Riga on the morning of Tuesday, the 13th.
There travelled with me an English officer, Capt. J. S. Campbell, late of the Gunners, who had been captured by the Reds in January when on the Pechora River, East of Archangel, on a timber survey, and who had spent a considerable time in prison both in Archangel and in Petrograd. My other travelling companions were Mr. Hopwood, the assistant manager of Kodak, who had been in Moscow for eighteen years, and his two daughters.
Both Campbell and myself will always affectionately remember the charming reception given us by Col. Tallents, the British Commissioner to the Baltic states, and the assistance which was rendered us by Mr. Louden the British Consul. While in Riga we also saw Mr. Young, the American Commissioner, to whom we gave all the latest information respecting Americans held prisoners in Moscow.