According to advices received by Krestcross [a news agency] mass expulsions from the Communist party and the Young Communist League are taking place in Soviet Russia. This particular development is being explained by the fact that "it is difficult to remain a real communist or a member of the Young Communist organization". There is not at present any particular aim that the Communist party cares to pursue. Its line of conduct both in domestic and in foreign affairs is always changed in accordance with the views of Stalin, and Stalin's mind often changes overnight in accordance with the international situation. For that reason even the most advanced communists do not know just what real socialism or communism is, or what position to maintain, for it now happens that whatever was right today may be wrong tomorrow, and what was a law yesterday may be heresy today.

2

The old Bolsheviks, as is already known, have been pushed into the background, and their organizations have been disbanded. The orthodox communist Marxian theorists in science, art, and everyday life are looked upon at present as fakirs and frauds. To speak of the advantages enjoyed under the capitalist order as compared with [conditions under the] socialist or communist regime is taboo. To hold to the day-by-day precepts of Stalin without exercising one's own judgment is also impossible.

Pravda in its issue of March 29 informs us, for instance, of the case of the expulsion of one communist on the charge that he "does not read anything, does not think, takes no interest in anything, and simply like an automaton keeps on in the line of conduct prescribed by the party which he belongs to".

And it is no wonder that the ranks of the communists and [especially of the] young communists are thinning out. Some of the members are leaving the organizations of their own accord, some are being expelled, and others find themselves in exile. The Krestcross agency advises us that in the month of 3February alone the Petrograd bureau of party control confirmed the fact that 217 of the most active members, who occupied responsible posts in the region, had been expelled from the party. Most of the expelled members are accused of perversion [of party principles] or deviation from the line prescribed by the central executive committee. The second secretary of this committee, Mr. Andreeff by name, in a talk before students in the party organizers' school told his hearers that in the last year 233 secretaries of the local party committees had been expelled from the organization for various "party crimes" and of course had lost their jobs.

In the Young Communists' League the situation is still worse. In the last year 382 members were expelled from the local organization in the Frunzen District of Moscow (forty-seven of them were exiled). In the province of Odessa there were 528 expulsions; in the Azov-Black Sea region, 1069. Of these expelled members 217 were sent to concentration camps. Sixty-five per cent of those expelled in the last case mentioned were workingmen and [other] employees.

4

This year the purge of the Young Communist locals is being carried on with greater energy still because of the growing opposition among the younger element. In the region of Kazan, for instance, a secret organization was recently uncovered of young communists and students from the colleges and universities in that city. In the province of Orenburg a third concentration camp is being prepared for the young communists, with a capacity of two thousand inmates.

This is the reason why the party has offered to the Young Communist League a new program which was published in the issue of Pravda of March 27. Between the lines one can read the stern warning: "Back down!" All this clearly reveals and reflects the true character of the party which still dares to call itself "Communist".