Foreign News: Three Red Mice

Stone walls do the Kremlin make. Not a building, as most people suppose, the Kremlin is Moscow’s citadel, a triangle of high ground bounded by walls and bastions behind which cluster massive government buildings and multi-spired church towers. Last week the 1932 caucus of the Communist Party rose after sitting secretly inside the Kremlin with awful solemnity, supposedly shaping the destinies of Russia.

Actually Comrade Josef Stalin, as Secretary of the Party, was bending and shaping the Right and Left factions to conform to his “party line.” Leaks from the Kremlin pictured Right Communists as urging “a further retreat to private trade in foodstuffs and essentials” while Left Communists urged “a further advance, based if necessary on confiscation of farm products.” In the end Comrade Stalin, whose “party line” is broad enough to touch both these extremes when he dictatorially pleases, succeeded in shushing all factions, retaining his control of Russia.

Sole result of the Congress, according to disappointed New York Timesman Walter

Duranty, was that it “brought forth three resolutions to skip like mice across the pages of the newspaper Pravda” (Truth). The three resolutions “contain nothing new. . . . The fundamental stumbling block to Soviet progress today is the food shortage of which the resolutions say nothing. The shortage is causing neither famine nor hunger but it is a universal shortage.”