Page:Through Bolshevik Russia - Snowden - 1920.djvu/71

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The Communists
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orators will illustrate the kind of message they wished to give us and will show the misunderstanding of our mission and of the state of the Labour Movement in Great Britain of which I wrote in a previous chapter. To take the following sentences from a speech delivered by Ziperovitch, of the Trades Union Council of the Province of Petrograd:

"It is with a feeling of deep satisfaction that the Russian Trades Union Council notices that the mighty pressure of the British Revolutionary Movement has at last made the Government of Lloyd George give up the police methods (as the refusal of passports) so degrading to the British proletariat."

Was it, I wonder, the "mighty pressure of the British Revolutionary Movement" which accomplished this? Or was it due to the Prime Minister's desire to begin the movement for happier relations with Russia? Take another phrase:

"I am deeply convinced that the visit of our British comrades is a promising symbol of the great moral upheaval in that country."

Knowing as I did the ideas about the British Labour Movement they have in mind in Russia, I felt it incumbent upon me for the sake of the Russians themselves, to disabuse them of the notion that there is any evidence worthy of