"Aleksandr I.Solzhenitsyn. Words of Warning to the Western World " - читать интересную книгу автора

believe.. For instance, I recently published - had
reprinted - a pamphlet from the year 1918. This
was a precise record of a meeting of all
representatives of the Petrograd factories, that
being the city known in our country as the "cradle
of the Revolution."
I repeat, this was March 1918 - only four
months after the October Revolution - and all the
representatives of the Petrograd factories were
cursing the Communists, who had deceived them in
all of their promises. What is more, not only had
they abandoned Petrograd to cold and hunger,
themselves having fled from Petrograd to Moscow,
but had given orders to machine-gun the crowds
of workers in the courtyards of the factories who
were demanding the election of independent factory
committees.
Let me remind you, this was March 1918.
Scarcely anyone now can recall the crushing of
the Petrograd strikes in 1921, or the shooting of
workers in Kolpino in the same year.
Among the leadership, the Central Committee
of the Communist Party, at the beginning of the
Revolution, all were emigre intellectuals who had
returned, after the uprisings had already broken
out in Russia, in order to carry through the
Communist Revolution. One of them was a genuine
worker, a highly skilled lathe operator until the
last day of his life. This was Alexander
Shliapnikov. Who knows that name today? Precisely
because he expressed the true interests of the
workers within the Communist leadership. In the
years before the Revolution it was Shliapnikov who
ran the whole Communist Party in Russia - not
Lenin, who was an emigre. In 1921, he headed the
Workers' Opposition which was charging the
Communist leadership with betraying the workers'
interests, with crushing and oppressing the
proletariat and transforming itself into a
bureaucracy.
Shliapnikov disappeared from sight. He was
arrested somewhat later and since he firmly stood
his ground he was shot in prison and his name is
perhaps unknown to most people here today. But I
remind you: before the Revolution the head of the
Communist Party of Russia was Shliapnikov - not
Lenin.
Since that time, the working class has never
been able to stand up for its rights, and in
distinction from all the western countries our