The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1919-04-04

mas fallen to fifteenth or twentieth
 of it's normal value. The Soviets'
 frontier or port officials are bribed
 with 25 per cent of the amounts
 smuggIed out. In November the Bol-
 sheVik supervisors at Petrograd
 caught the port officials in the act of
 allowing d certain Nj. Irinoff, stated
 to have been a former district mar
 shaI of nobility, to smuggle out l.
 O00.00O rubles in 50O-ruble notes. IT,
 inoff was beaten, thrown into the
 dock, fished out and sent to jail,
 where he died next week of exhaus-
 ton and hunger.
 The. Soviets' account of the full
 flment of the budget for the last
 haIf-year shows that only one-fifrh
 of the estimated receipts from di-
 rect taxation was actually received.
 A gloss on this is Finance Commis- sary Krestinsky's statement that the whole taX-collecting system is cor
 rupt. This is inevitable, for except
 in two provinces, OreI and Saratof, the Soviets have no regular machin-
 cry for collecting direct taxes. In
 these provinces, as the official 'Ff-
 nanzi Narodnoe Khozaistvo' beasts there is corps of remorse-
 less tax collectors, who do not
 shrink from throwing non-rayers into jail. Elsewhere any one collects Sometimes the elected members of
 the Councils of Workmen and Sol diers collect, and arbitrarily decide how much they will hand over to the Central government The balance goes into the collectors pockets.
 ''The recent Soviet expedient of 'one-tine levy on the bouTgeoisie of ten thousand million rubles' is being foiled in the same way. This levy, the aim of which was to get hold of the supposed hoards of paper money in bourgeois possession, was decreed only on October 3l last; but it was all 10 be paid before December l .. Every person with over 1,500 Tubles a month income was liable. The levy was locally apportioned; the City of Moscow was to pay 2,0OO,00O,OOO rubIes, the City of PetrOgrad 1.500. 0O0,O0O rubles. and so on in a scale down to the province of OIonetz, whose bOurgeCisie were to pay only , 15.00O.O00 rubIes. Of these sums in some districts only one-ten thous- andth part was paid up to the close of last year. but the Bolshevik tax
 inspector. Zacharsky. reports that two or three times as much as the state actually received was paid by the bourgeois victims. The tax collect
 ors pocketed tI.e rest. This result did not discourage NJ. krestinsky; he has since Cf a cable to Stockholm is cor rect) announced a new levy on the bourgeoisie of 24.00O.0 100000 rubles. Naturally Bolshevik official cor ruption is helped by the independence
 which the local Soviets have manag ed to maintain against the centraliz- 1 ing efforts of the Moscow Peoples Comn7issaries An instance is the i new form of robbery established ! through the vodka traffic. The state 1 vodka monopoly, introduced by the l late Count Witte in 1895. was sus l pended during the mobilization of i 1914 and was afterward entirely ] abolished. The numerous reports 1 sent abroad that the Moscow Soviet i government has formally re-estab ! lished the monopoly are untrue. But ] four or five local Soviets. led by that 1 of Saratoff have granted monopolies i to private individuals or firms. who l pay 20 per cent of the yield to the l Soviets' members. The Moscow gov ] ernment, according to the. 'Zhia IT,, i frowns at this abuse, but has not the 1 power to prevent it
 ''The same newspaper describes the | abuses which prevail in the grant ing of cheeks for the purchase of food and clothing. These are so hard to get at any price that a check is often more valuable in money than the food or clothing itself Soviet i bureaucrats secretly sell for 500 rubles a check to buy a suit of clothes which costs 500 or TOO rubles; a permit to buy a pound of bread sometimes costs in bribes five rubles. ! There is a special class of middle men, known for some reason as butchers (miasnikD. who, for consideration, put through all sorts of corrupt deals with the officials, One profitable branch consists in ar ranging for bourgeois citizens to re- main in their houses. despite the leg al right of expulsion possessed by the Communes of the Poor. The 'Tnias- nix arranges that an imaginary branch office of some state depart ment shall requisition the dwelling | in question; in reality. the state office occupies only one room or perhaps