Light on Lenin's "Earthly Paradise"
The articles printed "Z?Humanite" by Citizen Cochin and Frossard, two of the French Socialist leaders, narrating their) fret hand observations of Bolshevism during their recent visit to Russia, are proving more and more illuminating to their comrades here. In the article printed to-day, Cochin repudiates the suggestion that he ever attempted represent Bolshevist Russia as an earthly paradise.
"Our bourgeois critics know very well," he says, "that the great industrial centres of Russia are suffering from bitter property and insufficient food. The winter is terrible, and clothing scarce. They know that owing to lack of means of transport, raw materials cannot reach the factories, nor can coal. They know that the war against Poland, after many other canille is absorbing the whole industrial activity of the country and nearly the whole of the transport system of the country. They know that if the peasants are better fed than over before, they are deprived of all manufactured articles, an machines that are indispensable to' them."
Cochin, after drawing this unsympathetic picture of the results of Bolshevist rule, explains the wisery of the Russian people, as. may be expected, by asserting that "it is the French and British Governments who have created this state of things."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.