# Out of Their Own Mouths/Chapter 6

VI
THE PERSECUTION OF ORGANIZED LABOR: TRADE UNIONS
In Soviet Russia the Bolshevists are using many words with a new meaning. It has been shown how they sometimes employ the word "democracy" to mean the reverse of what all civilized peoples and all the labor movements of the world have hitherto meant by the word. So also, after abolishing all the rights of labor and labor organizations and of cooperatives the Bolshevists, nevertheless, continue to apply the terms "trade unions" and "cooperatives" to the empty shells that remain.
In Soviet Russia (April 2, 1921) we read: "The trade unions have been practically transformed into organs of the Soviet Government. Membership in the trade unions is now compulsory for Russian workers." Never before has the term "trade union" been applied to a compulsory state organization. "We shall show below that even the Bolshevists themselves are divided as to whether they shall now regard all the seven million industrial, governmental and agricultural workers whom they seek to classify as the "proletariat" as being members of the trade unions or not. It is conceded that a large part of these people do not realize that they are members of trade unions and do not even pay dues. In fact, the dues seem to be paid by the Government, as we ​may see from the following Moscow wireless sent out in December, 1920, to trade union officials throughout Russia:
In compliance with the decision of the 8th Congress financial accounts must be rendered every month. The majority of Government Trade Union Soviets at present do not render any such accounts. The Central Soviet of Trade Unions begs to inform all Government Soviets of trade unions that unless they send in monthly accounts dating from October 30th in compliance with regulations, they will receive no funds. The decision of the People's Commissariat.
Also these "trade unions" do not have the right to strike or to propose a change in the form of government. They may elect their own officials if the officials elected meet the approval of the Communist Party, otherwise the officials are "appointed."
In his report to the party printed (See Krasnaya Gazeta) January 11, 1921, Zinoviev declared:
At the present moment we have 24 trade unions, counting in their ranks 6,970,000 members. But the larger portion of these members have been ascribed to the unions mechanically.
Only a minority, at the very best, half a million, are members of the party.
If we recall the fact that only 70,000 industrial workers are listed by the Communist Party itself as party members, we see that Zinoviev's estimate of communist trade unionists is indeed highas he confesses. The British Labor Delegation to Soviet Russia reports ​an entirely different number even of "mechanically ascribed" so-called "trade unionists." They say:
It was put to us that the Communist Party, numbering 600,000 members, could be likened to a small cog-wheel which turns a larger cog-wheel representing the Trade Union movement numbering 4,500,000 members. This in turn revolves the great wheel of Russia's industrial and agricultural system.
Whether the number of workers labeled "trade unionists" by the Soviet Government is 4,500,000 or 7,000,000, whether the number of party members among them is 100,000 or 500,000, it may be seen that the proportion of Communists is not higher than one-ninth, and probably very much less.
According to Zorin's official report, on June 1, 1920, out of the 29,000 railroad workers of the Petrograd district only 895 were Communists, while of 5,000 employed in the water, gas and electric works only 145 were Communists—that is three per cent in each instance.
The decisions of the Communist Party do not leave any doubt about the place of these so-called "trade unions" in the Soviet State. The party congress in April, 1920, was very explicit on the subject, as we may see from the following decisions:
The Trade Unions and the Soviet State.
The Soviet State is the widest imaginable form of Labour Organisation which is actually realising the construction of Communism, constantly attracting to this work ever-growing masses of the peasantry. On the other hand, the Soviet State represents Labour Organisation which has at its disposal all the material means of com​pulsion. In the present form of Proletarian Dictatorship, the Soviet State is the lever of the economic coup d'etat. There is, therefore, no question of opposing the organs of the Soviet Government.
Politics may be said to be the most concentrated expression of the generalisation and completion of economics. Therefore, any antagonism of the economic organisation of the working-class known as the Trade Unions towards its political organisation—i.e., the Soviets—is an absurdity and is deviating from Marxism towards bourgeois ideas and particularly towards bourgeois Trade Union prejudices. This kind of antagonism is still more harmful and absurd during the epoch of Proletarian Dictatorship when all the struggle of the proletariat and the whole of its political and economical activity should more than ever be concentrated, united and directed by one single will and bound by an iron unity.
The Trade Unions and the Communist Party.
The Communist Party is the leading organisation of the working-class, the guide of the Proletarian Movement and of the struggle for the establishment of the Communist system.
It is therefore necessary that every Trade Union should possess a strictly disciplined organised fraction of the Communist Party. Every fraction of the Party represents a section of the local organisation which is under the control of the Party Committee, whilst fractions of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions are under the control of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party.
Under such a regulation it was natural that even the hollow shells of "trade unions" should almost cease to exist, and it seems that an accusation to this effect was actually made by Trotzky at a meeting reported in ​Izvestia January 1, 1921, as we may see from the following remarks by Zinoviev:
Many people say that the Professional Unions just at present are suffering a grave crisis, and even that our Unions are on the brink of ruin. Comrade Trotzky began with this point. No one can say that our Unions are in a satisfying shape. On the contrary the apparatus of the Unions is very weak, and will remain weak as long as their financial support is as small as at present.
And is it true in fact, what comrade Trotzky said: "Where are the Professional Unions, they are doing nothing, they have no foundation." The Professional Unions are weak owing to the civil war and to lack of attention, but is it really true, that they do not exist?"
For such "trade unions" to strike is not only against the law; it is regarded as treason or desertion, and it may be punished as such. For example, the Moscow Soviet, as reported in Izvestia of July 2, 1918, resolved:
As from now, the organised forces of the proletariat, the trades unions (professional associations) will be under the management of the Council of National Economy, which will organise the management and production of industrial enterprises. Under these new methods of management, the workers will see to discipline and the increase of productivity, and will end the economic disorganisation. Under these conditions every stoppage of work and all strikes will be an act of treason to the proletarian revolution.
A picture of the practical workings of this kind of "trade unionism" was given to the British Labor Delegation in Moscow by one of the officers of the Printers' Union, A. Kefali, on May 23, 1920. We quote a few ​sentences only from this extremely interesting and important speech—which the printers assert led to the imprisonment of all the chief officers of the union:
One may exhibit a sitting of the Moscow Soviet, consisting exclusively of Communists; one may show a sitting of the Russian Central Board of Trade Unions, consisting exclusively of Communists, but one cannot show a single free workmen's meeting that will have a Communist majority.
Here are thousands of Moscow printers, behind whom stand scores of thousands of Moscow and other Russian workmen who, at the epoch of the Russian Revolution, under a government that calls itself a workmen's government—a government realising its socialistic programme, a government calling Socialism to life, a government annihilating the parasitic classes—those thousands of Moscow printers, I say, and behind them scores and hundreds of thousands of Russian workmen, have all of them under this government no right to vote, no right to assemble, no right to print. As in the time of the Czar's government, the printers are forced to print, not their own thoughts, but calumnies against themselves.
Communists sometimes use menaces of arrests against the workers to oblige them to leave their posts in the board of the Union voluntarily, and in practice this often happens. Sometimes they do it otherwise; they say that if a Communist is not elected to the Board or Factory Workers' Committee, they, the Communists, will arrange things so that their workers will receive less food and other necessary things. And sometimes this produces its effect. This affirmation can be verified in a series of factories in Moscow.
When such means have no result, the Communists let the local Soviets or the Central Council of Trade Unions dissolve the Board of the Trade Unions; such was the case with the first Central Board of the Printers' Union.
It is well known that early in 1920 Trotsky made an attempt to militarise industry by transforming a few of the Red armies into labor battalions.
At first these "Labor armies" aroused much hope and were greatly advertised by the Communists as the last word in a reconstruction crusade, but they soon proved an utter failure.
Only 20–24 per cent. of the soldiers actually did any work—and that in a wasteful and grossly unproductive way. The rest were occupied in supplying them and in preserving the military character of the institution.
After a short period of enthusiasm and exaltation, the experiment was recognized as a wasteful delusion, and the Polish attack made an end of it before its folly became too obvious.
Trotsky, however, did not give up the idea of applying military methods to industry. As the Acting Commissar for Transport, in the absence of Krassin, he introduced military discipline on the railways.
Commissars, revolutionary tribunals, political intelligence and supervision replaced ordinary methods of management.
Elections, even of a limited scope and under pressure, which are still tolerated in other unions, were completely abolished, all officers of the Railway Union being appointed by the Chief Commissar.
All this could be tolerated during the war, because the railways were justly considered a part of the war ​machine, but with the war over, the railwaymen began to protest against military management.
Other unions, too, raised their voice against the permanent militarization of the railways.
At the beginning of November (1920) the Conference of Trade Unions passed a resolution which recommended "the most energetic and systematic struggle against centralism, militarization, bureaucratism as well as autocratic and minute tutelage of the workers ' unions."
The conference expressed also its conviction that "it is high time for the Railway Union to abolish military methods and return to ordinary proletarian democracy within the union."
But Trotsky—the head of the union—ignored the decision of the conference. Pointing out the manifest improvement of the transport under his management, he started a campaign for the adoption of military methods all round as the basis for a new efficiency in industry.
Far from denying his action in appointing the chiefs of the railway unions, Trotzky defended it at the congress of the transport workers. His speech is quoted in the New York Call of January 14, 1921, as follows:
Now as to the question of appointees. Is it right, as the State has said, that it was necessary to change the head official of the union? Rightly or wrongly we have intervened. …
The union was not suited to the revolutionary demands of the working-class, and our faction waged a merciless internal struggle and put its own men everywhere. …
And so the working-class, in the persons of its political representatives, says: Here we interfere; we are going to narrow this period of struggle between the two groups; we economize; we diminish; we order. To deny the principle of intervention is to deny that we live in a workers' state.
Lenin accused Trotzky of lack of tact in discussing these matters in public. Lenin's own methods are more secretive. He believes that the all-powerful Communist Party, aided by the Red Terror and the Extraordinary Commission, can secure the "election" of "trade union" officials by the methods hitherto employed. What these methods are we can see from a passage already quoted:
"We must know how to apply, at need, knavery, deceit, illegal methods, hiding truth by silence, in order to penetrate the very heart of the trade unions, to remain there and to accomplish there the Communist task. (Lenin, in "Radicalism, the Infantile Malady of Communism.")
Lenin's "trade union" program, as he declared at the above meeting, is that the unions should be "per​suaded" to institute tribunals in order to increase production for the Soviet Government and punish "labor desertion." (See the previous chapter.)
Of course, the "trade union" revolt could not amount to much under the Bolshevist rule. Two factions, however, offered a very vigorous resistance and under the Soviet tyranny it is significant that they did manage, after all, to obtain a certain number of votes. This opposition is divided between the faction which proposed to restore the Soviet rule and a so-called Syndicalist faction. Neither of them suggests any concession whatever to the peasant majority of Russia, but both seem fairly strongly opposed to a continuation of the present Communist Party rule. The New Statesman correctly sums up the opposition of these factions as follows:
If we consider Trotzky's militarist-bureaucratic proposals as the extreme left, then the extreme right is taken up by the group of the "Labor Opposition," headed by Shliapnikov—chairman of the Metal Workers' Union—the strongest Russian union.
The "Labor Opposition" demands that the entire economy of the Republic should be taken over by a congress of producers, organized in producers' unions. This is a consistent syndicalist conception, based on the belief that economic matters should be left entirely to labor organizations.
Bitterly criticizing the bureaucratic tutelage over the unions by the Communist party, the "Labor Opposition" advocates complete self-government in the factories.
Another faction, headed by Ossinsky and Sapronov, calls itself the group of "Democratic Centralism." This group is one with the "Labor Opposition" in demanding democratic reforms and active participation of the ​unions in the management of industry, but is dead against the syndicalist conception of the Metal Workers' Union. Their chief demand is for the re-establishment of the Soviet Constitution.
The official Lenin resolution received 336 votes at the conference, Trotzky's resolution 50, and that of the Labor Opposition 18.
What was the result of this conference? Far from bringing any relaxation of the Communist dictatorship it resulted in putting at the head of the railroads the one man in Russia who is noted as more violent than Trotzky himself, namely, Lenin's right arm, Djerjinsky, chief of the frightful Extraordinary Commission. Such is labor reform and "democratization" in Soviet Russia! As we read in a dispatch of April 19, 1920:
President Djerjinsky of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission of the People's Commissary of the Interior, who is also Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission for the Improvement of Conditions of Life of the Workers, Chairman of the Extraordinary Commission for the Care of Children and of several other extraordinary commissions, has been appointed People's Commissary of Transport and Communications. The present Commissary, M. Emshanoff, becomes Under Secretary.
The decree of the Central Executive Committee explicitly announces that Djerjinsky will maintain all his other positions, thus becoming still more powerful. During the recent animated discussion of the position of the trade unions, Trotzky was severely criticized for introducing military methods into the management of the railways. Trotzky was obliged to retire as Commissary of Transport and Emshanoff returned to the normal methods of management only to give way in a ​few weeks to Djerjinsky, who will introduce on the railways the methods of the Extraordinary Commission.
No better illustration of the Bolshevist policy towards labor unions could be offered than the picture given in the appeal to the labor world sent out towards the end of 1920 by the Moscow Printers' Union. We reproduce it here in full, with the exception of a few irrelevant sentences:
Appeal of Moscow Printers' Union
The Printers' Union of Moscow is the last trade union organization that has remained faithful to the principles of the independence of the trade unions and their separate existence as a class organization.
The Moscow Printers' Union defends these principles because a trade union organization can neither subject itself to nor permit itself to be absorbed by the organs of the government under the conditions now existing when private property is not abolished, when the state is the largest if not the only entrepreneur, when the purchase and sale of labor power is completely conserved—in a word, when labor's independent and free organs of defense and protection from the pressure of the other classes are indispensable.
In the domain of labor policy the practice of the Soviet government during the three years of its existence presents a striking example of this idea.
The Moscow Printers' Union believes that it is absolutely necessary to carry on a campaign of discussion amongst the proletariat against the political, economic, and administrative monstrosities practiced by the party in power.
For taking this position, for conducting this battle of principles, the Communists hate the printers in a manner surpassing even their hatred for the bourgeoisie and the landlords, at present non-existent in Russia.
​The Communists extend one hand to such counter-revolutionary leaders as Broussiloff and Goutor, the Czar's chief generals, and with the other hand, loaded with all sorts of extraordinary laws against the socialists, they oppress with all their power a group of proletarians whose sole crime is that they have had the hardihood to refuse to accept the Communist maxims, presented to them ready-made by the party in power.
The fearlessness of this group, of proletarians reached an insupportable point for the masters of the situation when the representatives of the English workers came to Russia. On this occasion the printers organized a meeting in which hymns of praise in honor of the Communist party were not heard but where, on the other hand, the truth respecting actual conditions in Soviet Russia was openly proclaimed.
The Communists, outraged by this meeting, immediately began to persecute the printers. They shrank from no lie and no calumny in the attainment of their purpose, which was to manufacture a false public opinion preparatory to the vigorous punishment they had determined to inflict on the Printers' Union.
It was not difficult for the Communists to administer this punishment, for the printers, like all the other Russian workers, are deprived of the possibility of printing everything that displeases the Communists. For having printed the resolution adopted by the mass meeting in honor of the English comrades, Comrade Zavcharoff was arrested. The Printers' Union was interdicted from printing the stenographic report of the meeting. The independent unions were also deprived of their own papers.
The Communists decided to punish the printers severely, especially because it was impossible for them to oppose the opinion of the workers in other industrial branches to the opinions held by the printers. The party in power would without doubt have met with defeat in a free assembly where the two points of view—that ​of the Communists and that of the opposition—were given a fair field of contest. It was for this reason that the party in power was compelled to have recourse to meetings under the auspices of dissimilar organizations which were nothing but self-styled representatives of the proletariat; real representation has not existed in Russia for a long time. At these meetings the speakers fulminated against the printers. In this manner the "General conference" of the printers of Petrograd was organized and "unanimously" adopted a withering resolution against the Muscovite printers.
The value of the "unanimity" of the organized conferences, during which, under the menace of terrible reprisals, the representatives of the proletarian opposition are deprived of the possibility of telling the truth, is well known to every Russian worker. For this reason the government journals lodged the senseless and stupid charge of fomenting strikes against the Printers' Union. The printers have struck less than any other group of workers in Russia, thanks to their firm and solid organization. The workers in many other branches of industry, on the contrary, driven by despair, have declared numerous strikes. They saw no other way to improve their conditions. These conditions drove the majority of the Muscovite printers to the same extremity, but the movement was usually arrested by the officials of the Printers' Union.
For more than a month the Communists fashioned public opinion with the aid of their monopoly. They lied and calumniated without shame. Finally during the night of June 17, they arrested all the members of the administrative committee of the Printers' Union and all other officials of the union holding important positions with the exception of those who had the time to hide themselves. On the morning of June 18 the offices of the union were occupied by a detachment of government troops, and everyone who for any reason whatsover had displeased the Communists was arrested.
​In the meantime the private lodgings of the employees of the union were searched.
This new act of violence against the working class aroused the indignation of all the printers in Moscow. They understood perfectly that the administrative council represented the executive organ of all the members of the union, especially because it was elected, contrary to the councils of all the other trade unions and the organs of the government, by universal suffrage.
Some of the workers struck and demanded the release of the imprisoned trade unionists. The masters of the situation employed against the strikers the same measures that the bouregoisie in every country would like to apply but have never dared to. The strikers were deprived of food. Under present conditions, when the workers are underfed, this was the most rigorous weapon that could be used. At the same time the government placed under arrest the alleged strike leaders. These two measures attained the end desired by the government: the strikers went back to work, and perhaps, under the pressure of similar measures, they will soon be even forced to vote resolutions condemning the men who up to the present have been their leaders. But the hatred of the Moscow printers for the authors of this shameless punishment will not be lessened thereby; on the contrary, it will increase day by day, and a small amount of free atmosphere would suffice to chase the inquisitors away from the printers.
In addressing themselves to the international labor movement, the striking printers declare that, crushed by brutal physical force, they appeal to the only force which still preserves for them a moral significance, the moral power of the international labor movement. The striking printers assert that they can demonstrate to the international labor movement that they are right and not the Communists.
The striking printers declare that the new administrative council of the Printers' Union, which has been ​superimposed upon them by force, has no influence and no authority over the great mass of the workers, whose entire sympathy and friendship, on the contrary, are with those who are in prison, the former officials of the Printers' Union of Moscow.
Perhaps the Bolshevist government will institute a prosecution similar to the Beillis prosecution so notorious under the Czarist regime, but the only possible judges at present are the Moscow printers and the international socialist movement.
A judgment rendered by the Communist party would be nothing but a judgment of an interested party, of an adversary who plays the role of a judge in a case involving his political enemies.
So much the worse for them.
But the socialist and labor international will understand!
The entire working class of Russia believes in the Moscow printers!
(Signed) The Members of the Adminis- trative Council of the Printers' Union of Mos- cow. (Elected by Univer- sal Suffrage.)