Communist Debacle in Europe Presaged By Series of Bitter Internal Conflicts
Communist Debacle in Europe Presaged By Series of Bitter Internal Conflicts PRAGUE. — The Ion*- exported explosion in the Communist party of Czecho-Slo-vakia has occurred The sparks of discontet.t...
...24, after a two-year fight against him by attorneys he had opposed in his activities, on the ground that in public speeches ho had advocated I. W. W. principles...
...11, pending appeal, on the ground that the Court had improperly injected into the case the issue of seditious libel...
...Shmeral, Secretary Zapotocky, et al., managed to put through a resolution at a special meeting of party leaders in Prague urging conciliatory tactics and the calling of a special national conference to try to save the unity of the party at all costs...
...These men voire arrested in Los Angeles during a period covering six months, and tried under a blanket indictment...
...The prosecution carried the case to the State Supreme Court...
...2. OKLAHOMA.—The conviction of Arthur Berg, I. W. W., sentenced in 1923 to ten years in the State penitentiary under the criminal syndicalist law, was reversed by the Criminal Court of Appeals on Feb...
...The Ion*- exported explosion in the Communist party of Czecho-Slo-vakia has occurred The sparks of discontet.t scattered at the November convention of that party when Tovarish Manuii-sky, representing the Communist International, whipped through the election of a new Executive Committee composed of eighteen "radicals" and fourteen "moderates," under threat of no more help from Moscow, reached the mental powdei maga tines of a number of prominent Com munist leaders in February, with results calculated to reduce the third strongest party of the Communist International to a chaotic mass of warring factions...
...Shmeral, Alois Muna, Zapotocky and Josef Bubnik, would soon burst into flame...
...On Feb...
...Quarrels of French and Polish Communists At the recent national congress of the Communist party of France, while the secretary claimed a membership of some 75,000, it was *yd nutted that several valuable leaders had recently left the party, although it was naturally asserted that their departure was "good riddance of bad rubbish...
...Appeal will be taken...
...8, there was a split in the remnants of the Communist party, dissolved by the Government and later reorganized as the Independent Workers' party, the moderate elements refusing to accept the policy of the Central Com mil tee...
...Sweet Land of Liberty" Report on the Civil Liberty Situation for Month of , February, Issued by the American Civil Liberties' Union...
...Furthermore, it was averred that Bubnik had' avowed his opposition to Moscow's dictates* and was trying to have a conference of the opposition elements called...
...W. does not constitute a violation of the law...
...Despite its heavy losses since it split away from the parent .Social Democratic party some four years ago with about 400,000 members, General Secretary Zapotocky was able to claim 138,000 members at the November convention, thus keep-IngHhe Communist party of Czechoslovakia in third place, following Russia and Germany...
...4. The sentence of Carlo Treses, editor of II Martello, convicted in the F'ederal Court at New York for publishing a birth control advertisement, was commuted to four months' by President Coolidge on Feb...
...2, the court holding that mere membership in the I. VV...
...Workers' International Relief) has brought legal action against the Nepssava, the Budapest Socialist paper, in an efftit to make it print a retraction of an item warning the workers against being again fooled by slanders and dangerous phrases flowing from the funds of the Red Relief...
...6. CIVIL CASES 5. TEXAS.—An injunction suit filed by the Marine Transport j Workers' Union at Port Arthur, to restrain the police from raiding the organization's headquarters, was heard on Feb...
...0. ILLINOIS.—The State Supreme Court has reversed the'conviction of J. N. St...
...8. NEW YORK.—A meeting to protest the refusal of the Stnte Department to allow Count Karolyi, j first President of the Hungarian Republic, to speak or write on political questions while here was held by the American Civil Liberties Union on March 7. The restrictions w»re made a condition of a visa issued by the American consul in London permitting the Count to visit his sick wife in this country...
...3. NEW YORK.—Captain Harry Ely of New York City, editor of The Tenant, who was given a sentence of from six months to three years on a charge of criminal libel for publishing an attack on Municipal Court Justice Caffrey, was released on $500 bail on Feb...
...To show their contempt for such orders, the leaders of the Prague meeting did not even read the Moscow letter before the vote wa* taken, but waited until after the "moderates" had won their victory before bothering with it...
...7 by Judge G. C. O'Brien in the District pourt at Beaumont and the injunction was refused...
...with Norway, Sweden and Italy, backs down, more or less gracefully, and accords the Czechoslovak Communists the right to run their own affairs...
...The Second District Court of Appeals reversed the conviction and or-dred a new trial in June, 1024...
...With Prague, Bruenn and Kladno against the Communist 100 per centers, the outlook for a clean break with Moscow is good unless Pope Zinoviev, learning something from his experience...
...The conviction of J. C. Robinson was reversed on the ground that it was not proven that he was in Los Angeles County at the time of the indictment...
...MISCELLANEOUS 7..WASHINGTON.—Elmer Smith, Centralia attorney for the I. W. W., was disbarred by the State Supreme Court on Feb...
...After Shmeral had declared that he would nSt accept re*pontlbility ftp- what might happen to the party, a resolution by Haken approving th* expulsion of Bubnik, but providing for a national conference in April, was passed A delegation was sent to Moscow to get instructions from the Executive Committee of the Communist 1 iiternatiunal as how to pro feed with the "cleansing'' of the par ty In the meantime Bubnik arid Vt aimhrunii have issued an appeal to their partisans In the Chamber of Deputies to form an Independent Communist club and it is expected that a majority of the twenty four Communist Deputies will line up with the rebels...
...In Kladno, a mining center, the mass of the party also declared for Bubnik, and the local Communist paper, Svoboda, is expected to become the central organ of the Independent Communist party likely to develop out of the row...
...Two judges dissented...
...Hopes of Swiss Communists to effect a rapprochement with the Socialists of the little Alpine Republic, in view of tht fact that the Swiss Social Democratic Party is not af filiated with the Socialist and Labor lntei national and is rather critical of that organization, received an otter setback when the Zurich So cialists flatly rejected a Communist proposal for an electoral pact for tht municipal contest of March 21 22...
...Tin) White Russian Deputies in the Seym who joined the Communist group some months ago are said to have left that group because of nationalist difficulties...
...Quarrel Expands to Provinces The row thtn spread to the provinces, to the discomfiture of the "radicals...
...Henry May, Secretary of the In ternation-1 Cooperative Alliance in London, recently resigned the chair manship of the British seetion of the Workers' International Relief...
...At several party conferences in the Ruhr resolutions have been adopted for the expulsion of llrmrirh Brand ler and Gustavo Thalheimer, whose chief crime seems to have consisted in supporting Leon Trotzky in his clash with the Russian Communist majority over tactics...
...15,107, who was found guilty of violating an injunction against the strikers at the Vulcan Detinning Company at Sfcfeator by referring to three former union members as "traitors...
...21 a Waisaw dispatrh told of an impending split in the ranks of the Polish Communists, the moderates circulating leaflets de nouncing the radicals for accepting all the dictates of Moscow and for tijing to start an armed revolution...
...Nevertheless, Dr...
...The court said among other things: "If a cotirt of equity has the power to restrain and punish members of a Labor uniqn from spcuking, writing, or publishing on the subject of a dispute between the union and the employer, then the members of the Labor union are not such persons as are within the quoted constitutional provision...
...And this was done despite the receipt of a communication from th* Prague agent of Moscow calling for drastic action against the "moderates...
...The rejection waa couched in such strong languag and reproach ed the Communists so bitterly for their work ot disruption in Zurich that it is hardly likely another at tempt will be made to bring the "united front" there...
...In Yugoslavia, some weeks before the election of Feb...
...Following protests by other Ruhr Communist leaders at alleged graft and all around crookedness on the part of Cqmniunists in the Rhineland, Ruth Fischer made a trip to that district and instituted a thorough "house cleaning," resulting in the expulsion of Ernst Graul and several others who stood by their charges...
...The expulsion was upheld by the Political Bureau of the party...
...Cleansing" th* Party The great importance attached to the Czechoslovak conflict by the Moscow leaders was shown at the special meeting of the Executive Committee of the Czec.ho-Slovak Communist party held February 28, when no fewer than six agents of the Communist International and its allied organizations were present arid helped defeat a resolution by Dr...
...Shmeral calling for the reinstatement of Deputy Bubnik...
...Temporary peace in the tiny Austrian Communist party has been effected through the re admission of Karl Toman...
...Clair, President of the A. F. of L. Federal Union, No...
...Among these expelled by the congress were Munatte, Rosiner and Delegarde, prominent Communists who bad dared supjmrt Trotsky's position They were accused of all sorts of high crimes and mis demeanors and bianded enemies of the pioletariat...
...It was well known that the majority of the delegates to the convention only accepted the election of a pro-Moscow Executive Committee under compulsion and it was freely prophesied that the long smoldering conflict be tween the 100-per-cent Muscovites, captained by Party President Haken...
...In Hungary the handful of Communists running the International Red Relief (another name for the...
...Neurath, Seidler, Dolezal and other rather youthful "r*volution-aires" whose chief assets were loud talk and absolute acceptance of the Moscow edicts, and the "moderates," led by such veteran Labor men as Dr...
...Tresca started his sentence of one year and one day at Atlanta prison on Jan...
...When the news of the revolt reached Moscow, Gregory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin hastened to wire.their approval of the stand of th* Political Bureau and to damn Bubnik and his partisans as traitors to the revolution...
...CRIMINAL CASES 1. CALIFORNIA.—The State Supreme Court on Feb...
...Then Franz Warmbrunn, a German Communist deputy from Bohemia, resigned from the party and sent a letter to th* press scorching the Moscow leadership in Czeco-Slovakia, while insisting upon hit faith in tha "old Communist ideal" of freeing the working class from the chain* of capitalism...
...Tbey were convicted under the criminal syndicalist law in July, 1923...
...The immediate cause of the February outburst was the expulsion by the Prague district organization of Deputy Bubnik, one of the most active and popular'Communist agitators, on charges of having helped sabotage a Communist demonstration planned as a protest against the action of the police in breaking up an anti-high cost of living parade, In the course of which several Communists were wounded...
...25 makes merry over the fact that at a meeting of a group of sreet car workers in the Austrian capital held to discuss the alleged misuse of funds by its Communist leader, there was so much violence that the "hated bourgeois police" had to lie called in to restore order and prevent" the members of this "non political" union from emulating the Kilkenny cats...
...24 affirmed the conviction of twenty-six of the twenty-seven I. W. W.'s in the case of McClennigan et al...
...In Saxony, a former Communist center, wholesale desertions by Communist city and village officials are reported...
...Reports from other parts of Eu rope show that the process of dis integration noted many month* ago in the Communist ranks is being rapidly accelerated, Germea Communist Desertions III Germany the radical Moscow group, headed by Ivan Katz, Kutli Fischer and Werner Scholem, is con tii.uing its war upon the more ra tional Communists, Katz recently going so far as to say that the veteran Clara Zetkin, "no longer en joys any confidence in Germany...
...In Bruenn (Brno), a Communist stronghold, the majority of the membership, led by Kovanda, director of the local cooperative which controls the Bruenn Communist paper, Rovnost, invaded the offices of that paper, threw out Vladimir Burian, the editor-in-chief who had been put in charge there at the behest of Moscow, and installed a new set of editors...
...Communists Call for Police The Vienna Arbeiter Zeitung of Feb...
Vol. 2 • March 1925 • No. 12
