Cheers for Kuzbas

According to recent press reports the Kuzbas experiment is still very much alive. "Kuzbas" is a Utopian colony located at Kamerovo, Siberia, where American radical workers migrated to carry out their syndicalist and communist theories " in perfect freedom." It was originally under the leadership of "Big Bill" Haywood, the I. W. W. chief who jumped his bail while under a 20-year jail sentence, but he was ejected by the colonists for incompetence. Following this, disillusioned members of the colony returned to America bringing back gloomy tales of the failure of Kuzbas and charging certain radical promoters of the venture in America with obtaining their money under false representations. Nine of these promoters are now under indictment for the alleged fraud.

But in spite of the unfavorable reports that have gained wide publicity in the United States, people are still leaving this country to join the Kuzbas colony. In a farewell celebration in Manhattan for 24 men and women who have just sailed for Siberia, moving pictures of Kuzbas were shown in which the colony was represented in a most favorable light. The audience, composed of East Side workers and uptown " liberals " cheered the pictures of model houses, vegetable gardens and smiling colonists, even " Big Bill " Haywood himself. Speakers denounced the newspaper exposure of Kuzbas as a " tissue of bourgeois lies."