Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/216

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
190
OUT OF THEIR OWN MOUTHS

British report referred to this resistance under the Soviet term "counter-revolution" and concluded that the Soviet Government was supported by the Russian people. The Italians, as we have said, held that the population was passive and indifferent, while the above-named Germans, admirers of the Soviet and the Third Internationale, discovered after investigation in Russia, that the Soviet regime was a tyranny without support outside of the Bolshevist Party.

The second disillusionment of European labor came with the ultimatum of the Third Internationale (the famous 21 points) by which Lenin declared to his worshippers that they either had to accept the absolute dictatorship of Moscow or be excommunicated, and that they had to destroy the International Federation of Trades Unions as being a scab organization.

Finally, most frightful disillusionment, the Polish people were not conquered by the Soviets, in spite of all the revolutionary measures taken by radical labor throughout Europe to help the Bolshevist would-be conquerors.

All these events took a little time to have their full effect; it was not until the labor union and Socialist Party congresses of the fall and winter that European labor began to find itself—but it has answered Lenin at last! After a visit to the Caucasus J. R. MacDonald demanded that Great Britain protect the Social-Democratic Labor Government of Georgia and bring about an alliance of that country with Armenia and the Tartar Republic. As Soviet Russia, Lenin's official organ in America, rightly remarks, this alliance would be for defense against the Soviets as well as against the Turks.