The Bolsheviks obtained power in 1917. The following table is simply shocking:
Mortality of children up to the age of 16 years per 10,000 inhabitants in the City of Moscow:
1913 – 81
1915 – 78
1918 – 100
1919 – 372
1920 – 400
The data originates from an official Bolshevik source: Izvestia Zdravookhranenia No. 11. It was republished in an article written by Dr. Boris Sokolov, a member of the Socialist Revolutionist Party and a delegate to the first All-Russian Constituent Assembly. His article was written when he was in exile and published in Prague in the February 16, 1921 issue of Volla Rossii. A translation of that shocking article appeared in Current History in July 1921 and it is from there that I copy an extract below:
THE TRAGEDY OF CHILD LIFE UNDER BOLSHEVISM
Dr. Boris Sokolov
Current History, Vol. 14, No. 4, July 1921, pp. 664-667.
Speaking at the Pirogoff Medical Congress in August, 1920, Doctor Horn said:
I am prepared to forgive the Bolsheviki a great many things, almost everything… But one thing there is which I can not and will not forgive them, namely, those experiments, positively criminal and worthy of the most savage tribes of the African jungle, which the Bolsheviki have been making all this time with our young generation, with our children! This crime knows no parallel throughout the history of the world! They have destroyed, morally as well as physically, a whole Russian generation; they have destroyed it irretrievably, and, alas, beyond remedy!
…. At the conference on Public Education held in 1918, the Bolshevist Commissary Lilina said:
…. We must remove the children from the pernicious influence of the family. We must register the children, or, let us speak plainly, nationalize them. Thus they will from the very start remain under the beneficial influence of communist kindergartens and schools. Here they absorb the alphabet of communism. Here they will grow up to be real communists. To compel the mother to surrender her child to us, to the Soviet State, that is the practical task before us. (Reported in the official journal of the Commissariat of Public Education, Narodnoye Prosvieschenie, No. 4.)
In accordance with this “idée fixe,” the Bolshevist power set out in 1918, to inaugurate its “childhood measures.” …. Carrying out its scheme of nationalizing the children, bent on tearing them away from their families, the Soviet Government allowed very little food to be distributed on children’s ration tickets, insisting that every infant over the age of one year should be turned over to the Bolshevist nurseries…. [F]rom the report of the Soviet Inspection for February 1920… we find the following annihilating criticism of those institutions:
The thoroughgoing inspection of sixteen children’s nurseries in the City of Petrograd has revealed a criminal and disgraceful treatment of the young generation at the hands of the responsible persons…. The children [at one nursery], left to their own devices, under the supervision of inexperienced and rough-spoken nurses, with filthy clothing, pale from lack of sufficient nourishment, made a painful impression. The place itself, unventilated and poorly heated, fostered all manner of diseases and contributed to the exceedingly high rate of mortality among the children. In the course of three months the child population of that institution renewed itself to an extent of 90 per cent. In other words, nearly all of them were sent to the hospital, or, having failed even to reach hospital, they perished while still at the nursery.
Dr. Sokolov’s article goes on to provide reports from other nurseries that show an equally disgraceful picture of the way the Bolsheviks had treated young children. Thankfully, in the UK in 2010, the Socialist Workers Party is tiny. One wonders how high infant mortality would get to if they ever obtained power.
