Help the Imprisoned Bolshevik-Leninists

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

We must start a systematic and unremitting campaign of struggle to improve the conditions of the deported and arrested Bolshevik-Leninists. Their number now exceeds two thousand. They are confined in prison under foul conditions: no light (the shields on the windows are almost shut tight), damp rooms in which they crowd the prisoners to the extreme limit, bad food, extraordinary brutal treatment. It is even worse in the Tobolsk hard labor prison (Political-Solitary). It is the same as it was in Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead. In this prison there are only Bolshevik-Leninists. They have released the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries. They have introduced military sentries. The cells are locked. No interviews are allowed. The Mensheviks had a common dining table, a common kitchen, free interviews, etc. Our comrades are deprived of all this. Unquestionably the authorities have adopted a policy of physical extermination of the Bolshevik-Leninists. Relations have grown very tense. Any moment you can expect not only physical conflicts, hunger strikes (which have no end) but also — yes, the firing squad. Fifteen men from the prison personnel of the Tobolsk Political Solitary refused to apply repressive measures against Bolsheviks; they were replaced by guards specially sent from Moscow. The need among the families of the arrested is enormous, simply appalling. The families of prisoners and deportees who remain at liberty are literally starving. We haven’t our own labor defense organization. We must collect money abroad. We must fight for the right to have our own legal defense organization. Against these shocking practices, as against all such things, we must raise a mighty outcry. We must publicly expose the current officials of the Soviet government and the party leaders who are responsible for these crimes. Correspondence from Tomsk and Sverdlovsk tells of whole crowds driven into the hard labor prison, Narym, where they are sending Oppositionists taken from various places of deportation. Among the deported and imprisoned there are heroes of the October Revolution and the civil wardecorated with the Order of the Red Flag (Greitser, Gaevsky, Kavtaradze, Yenukidze, and many others). Among those imprisoned in a hard labor prison is Budu Mdivani, fifty-three years old, the Old Bolshevik who served time under the czar, was president of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of Georgia under Lenin, and head of the Soviet trade delegation in Paris.