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Title: The Communists are Jailers Author: Mollie Steimer Date: May 1924 Language: en Topics: Bolshevism; Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism; Soviet Union Source: Retrieved on 8th November 2022 from https://archive.org/details/fighters-for-freedom
Comrades and Friends:
Lozovsky, Chicherin and Trotsky are deliberately lying when they say
that no anarchists are being held in prison, as you can see in the
attached report on the persecution of anarchists and other left
revolutionists. It is surely not in their interest to let the world know
that communist prisons are overflowing with political prisoners today
just as in the days of the tzar. So they hide the truth with impudence.
When I reached Russia at the end of 1920, I found many of my anarchist
comrades in jail. The few who were still free were so frightened that
they did not want to get together for fear that the government would
suspect a “conspirative’’ meeting. I immediately concerned myself with
the fate of those in prison and did what I could to help them. But it is
more difficult to help a political prisoner in Soviet Russia than in any
capitalist country. The communists very rarely put a political opponent
on trial. During my stay in Russia hundreds of rebellious idealists were
sent to prison, to concentration camps or to exile. Very few of them
ever had a trial. Ordinarily, the local political department sends a
package of accusatory papers to the administrative committee in Moscow,
and this committee decides the issue in the “absence”’ of the accused.
Often people are arrested and accused in secret. In such cases, the
efforts of relatives to learn where the victims are being held are
frustrated because the political department refuses to give them any
information. An eloquent example is the case of David Kogan and Ivan
Akhtirsky, two old anarchists who were active during and before the
revolution in Russia. Remaining faithful to their ideals they continued
their anarchist propaganda under the soviet “government”. These two
comrades were arrested in October, 1922. Since then, relatives and
friends have been trying to find out where they are, but in vain.
No one knows what happened to these two idealists. Are they alive? Have
they been shot? We do not know, and the omipotent officialdom refuses to
say what has happened to them. When Maria Veger — Akhtirsky’s comrade —
tried to get information about him, the chief of the St. Petersburg
political department, Maysing, answered, “Forget about him! You will see
Akhtirsky when you will be with him in person.”
A great many political prisoners are sick with scurvy, malaria,
tuberculosis because of the terrible conditions in the prisons:
dampness, dirt, lack of fresh air and nutrition. A week does not pass
without a hunger strike somewhere, or an attempt at suicide to protest
the miserable treatment to which they are subjected in the communist
jails.
The help that we can give the prisoners is to provide them with food,
clothing, tobacco and books. We need funds to carry on. I address this
appeal to all men and women with a sense of justice to help the
imprisoned revolutionaries who are suffering today in Russia’s jails.
Friends and comrades: I speak to you in the name of the idealists who
have given their lives for a cause that they sincerely believed would
liberate mankind from its unhappy existence. Give them your hand in
their hour of need. Help them morally as well as materially. Protest
against the continuing persecution of revolutionists in “‘socialist”
Russia. Don’t be deceived, and don’t let others be deceived by the
shameless lying propaganda of the Communists.
Mollie Steimer, May, 1924