Page:Grigory Zinoviev - Army and People (1920).pdf/7

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the peasantry and indeed of the working city population; it meant that men were traded like cattle, that a small minority of landlords could order irresponsibly the fate of millions. And once Russia suffered such a state of things at home, put up with it, did not rise against it, her army of course could be turned in any direction, like a horse with blinders on its eyes. Such an army was hurled against the revolution in Hungary. Then, not fifteen years later, the Russian Army had again to play the part of international gendarme or international hangman; I mean in the repression of the Polish insurrection.

Comrades, at this moment the Polish bourgeoisie is waging war against our country, and we very naturally hate it for that. But we cannot forget that in the course of many scores of years, the Russian Tsar and the Russian landlords oppressed Poland and a whole string of forcibly annexed border lands. And so when, in the thirties, then in the sixties of the past century. risings began in Poland in which nearly the whole people took part, including the women, a number of Army Corps were sent off to Poland, commanded by exceptionally reactionary generals, in order to annihilate the Poles with fire and sword, and drown the liberating movement of that period in the blood of the Polish people. The Russian Army—the enslaved Russian Army—went without a protest,