Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.For a complete list, please see the end of this document.
Second Edition. PRICE TWOPENCE.
BOLSHEVISM:
A CURSE & DANGER
TO THE WORKERS.
BY
H.W. LEE
(Editor of "Justice"; Author of "The First of May: International
Labour Day"; "A Socialist View of the Unemployed Question";
"Social-Democracy and the Zollverein"; "The Triumph of the Trust
under Free Trade"; "The Great Strike Movement of 1911"; and
"Why Starve? Britain's Food in War—and in Peace.").
WITH
FOREWORD BY WILL THORNE, M.P.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY PRESS (1912), LIMITED.
(Trade Union and 48 Hours),
37, 37a and 38, Clerkenwell Green, London, E.C.
February, 1919.
FOREWORD BY WILL THORNE, M.P.
I have been asked to write a brief introduction to the pamphlet whichmy old friend and comrade H.W. Lee has written on the undercurrent ofBolshevist propaganda going on in this country, of which the recentunauthorised strike outbreaks are outward and visible signs. I do thisgladly. Our comrade Lee, through being long associated with theSocial-Democratic Federation as its Secretary, and his editorship of"Justice" during the last five years, has gained a knowledge ofInternational Socialist movements in their many phases which rendershis pamphlet both authoritative and reliable.
I hope the pamphlet will have a wide circulation in all the largeindustrial centres, because I feel convinced that the majority of therank and file of the wage-earners do not and cannot know what it isthat our Bolshevists are striving for. They have not the faintest ideain what direction some of them are being led. The Bolshevists incertain industrial centres want to impose their own authority on therank and file of the workers, using catch-words for that purpose. Ifthey succeed in this direction they will set to work to undermine thetrade union movement of this country, and upset, instead of making useof, the means we at present possess for improving our economicconditions.
Our minds go back to the Leeds "Convention," held in June, 1917. Thedelegates at that Conference declared that they were in favour ofWorkmen's and Soldiers' Councils being formed in all the largeindustrial centres of the country. Nothing whatever came of it. Butthe W.S.C.s then controlling the revolutionary undercurrent in Russiawere totally different from the Bolshevist tyranny of to-day, and manyof the delegates who formed the W.S.C.s in various parts of Russiaafter the Revolution have been imprisoned or shot because they opposedthe domination of Lenin and Trotzky.
Last Tuesday I saw two friends whom I met in Petrograd in April, 1917,and both of them absolutely confirm the statements made in the Pressabout the hundreds of men and women who have been shot without anytrial or confirmation of the charges brought against them.
An article which appears in the "Nineteenth Century" of January,written by Mr. Pierson, who was imprisoned in the [3]Fortress of St.Peter and St. Paul last October, after being arrested at the BritishEmbassy in Petrograd at the same time that Captain Cromie w