SOVIET SHAMS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXV, Issue 10299, 7 January 1927, Page 5

SOVIET SHAMS

BRITISHER FORCED TO ACT AS PROPAGANDIST HOW VISITING TRADES UNIONISTS WERE GULLED LAUGHING STOCK THROUGHOUT RUSSIA (United Press Assn.—Copyright.) LONDON, Jan. 5. The stage management of the Soviet’s sham show places is exposed in a Daily Mail interview, docur mentarily backed. With a Hartlepool sailor in the party, 70 peasant Russian families who have arrived en route to Canada, forerunners of 13,000 families-, an emotional thanksgiving service for deliverance from Hie wretchedness in Russia and invoking blessings on England and Canada, was held aboard, on arrival at' Gravesend.

The Hartlepoolite, whose name is not disclosed, to avoid victimisation, was deported by the Soviet as a British spy. ‘He was in hospital in Batoum in 1021, and married, a Russian nurse, a farmer’s daughter. The Cheka arrested him for entering the country without a permit and compelled him on threat of exile to become a propagandist conducting foreigners to model clubs and factories, falsely asserting that they were typical. The Hartlepoolite told visiting seamen that they could have similar clubs if they became revolutionaries. Hospitality was lavished, the majority of the Russian frequenters of the clubs being supers repeating the deception daily. The genuine workers who told the truth to Britons were executed.

The gulling of the British trades union delegation was a laughing stock throughout Russia. The Hartlepoolite was imprisoned for telling the British captain of the deception, but was released on the intervention of tm- British C’lnuge d’Affauvs —A and N.Z.O.A.