RUSSIAN TIMBER CAMPS [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR, —With
all due respect will you permit me to say that I think the theoristic, high-brow, callous tone of Mr. H. G. Metcalf's letter casts a shadow on our national honour ? Thousands of Russian Bishops, Clergy, Rabbis, Nobles and Socialists are being slowly and foully worked, frozen and starved to death by the Soviet tyrants of Moscow, and forsooth " we must not tell our young Britishers who have just left School and are beginning to read- newspapers," lest they think unkindly of the Bolsheviks. Because people are out of work in our own country and have to live on the dole, we must not even breathe the fact that 72,000 people died in the Timber-Hells of Soviet Russia in the winter of 1929-80 ; as though there were any comparison ! The success of the Five Years' Plan means, in short, the enslave- ment of the, whole .population of Russia and the flooding of the world with slave-made goods. The success of this plan will mean that every workman here will lose his job and every employer his capital, and both, together with the rest of the world, will be, dragged down to the level of the slaves of Russia, whose misery and high, mortality made the success .of the plan possible. I am sure that the real spirit of England towards these Russian horrors is shown by the splendid cartoon in last week's issue of Punch entitled " For the British Market."—I am, Sir, &c., B. J. WILDEN-HART
(Organizer and General Secretary, Anti- Soviet Persecution & Slave-Labour League). 88 Onslow Gardens, S.W.7.
[We can well understand the burning impatience aroused by the reports of what is going on in the Russian timber camps. The Anti-Slavery Society is preparing an inquiry, and is, in our opinion, the proper body to do so.—En. Spectator.]
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