strike*. Even if they did there is nothing to gain by it, for the government would simply stop their wages, discharge a good many, and probably cancel their bread cards.”
As recently as in the fall of 1919 conditions in the factories were reported to be intolerable. The Soviet officials have gone far beyond that part of the program of Karl Marx in his “Communist Manifesto,” which prescribes “Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.” The Soviet government’s Code of Labor Laws, translated into English and published in New York in Soviet Russia, the organ of the Russian Soviet Bureau, in its issue of February 21, 1920, imposes compulsory labor upon every one, male or female, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, unless physically disqualified, and enforces iron discipline of the most tyrannical nature.
Moreover, the New York World of Friday, April 9, 1920, published an article entitled “Mobilize Russian Labor,” in which it was stated that Trotzky, addressing the ninth convention of the Communist Party at Moscow on March 27, 1920, directed his address chiefly to defining the relation between the mobilization of industry to the industrial rehabilitation of Russia, and stated:
“Mobilization is more necessary now than it was formerly, because we have to deal with the peasant population and masses of unskilled labor which cannot be utilized to the fullest extent by any other means than military discipline. Trades unions are capable of organizing great masses of qualified workers, but 30 per cent of the people cannot be reached by this means.”
An elaborate system among the workmen had been gradually established and at present the communist spy reporting directly to the Soviets has almost mediaeval powers of executing a man merely for the reason that he is