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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Part:         Session:         Page of 915

We then began to have explanations of what the difference was between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Within those two clothing unions you began to hear, without knowing much about it, that there were many people who were more in favor of the Bolsheviks than of the Mensheviks, although to the average American outsider it all sounded about the same, except that the Bolsheviks, so far as one could see, were apparently moving consciously and purposefully in a direction of very quick and very violent action. They were the ones who arrested the czar and his family and rushed them off to some place in east Russia. They were the ones who picked up, without saying what they were doing, lots of people who had been high in the government, even under Miliukov and Kerensky, as well as under the czar.

I know all this very slightly, but I do know that in New York, dealing only slightly with the labor unions, but being aware of what went on in the labor unions, in those two unions, and fur workers and the millinery workers, there were reverberations of this difference between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks. There were some who thought the Bolsheviks were right because they were using direct action. I remember the





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