Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/93

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THE REIGN OF TERROR
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them, are the members of the central Ukrainian committees of the social-democratic party—comrades I. Bar (former editor of the internationalist journal, "Golos," in Paris during the war) , Zorohovitch, Shtern, A. Roubtzoff (a well-known leader of the trade union movement amongst the metal workers), Schoulpin (leader of the Miners' trade union), and a member of the Kharkoff party committee, Boris Malkin. Ten other comrades were sentenced at the same time, also without any trial, to forced labor in the concentration camps, until "the end of the civil war" (i.e., indefinitely). Among them are the well-known social-democratic leader and trade unionist, Astroff, the trade unionist, Korobkoff from Odessa, members of the Kieff party committee, Tchijevsky and Kouchin-Oransky (the latter, a well-known socialist author, had voluntarily joined the ranks of the "Red" army as an officer at the beginning of the Polish war), and the distinguished leaders of the Kharkoff shop assistants' union of Babin and Grossman.

Most of the above mentioned comrades were arrested in Kharkoff on August 19, during the provincial conference of the Russian social-democratic labor party.

Several social-democrats, leaders of the trade union movement in Kremenchug, were also exiled to Georgia. The boards elected by the Kremenchug trade unions have been dissolved and replaced by persons appointed by local organizations of the communist party.

By such measures H. T. Rakovsky, who plays the hideous part of a menshevist renegade, hopes to destroy the influence of the well-organized social-democrats upon the Ukrainian working classes.

The fate of the other popular party (the Social-Revolutionists) has been even more horrible—for they composed the majority of the constitutional assembly which the Bolshevists dispersed by bayonets and are the sole party which can make any legitimate claim to represent the