National Affairs: Recognizable Russians

PYRAMID OF POWER. As Red Army divisions, marching 50 men abreast, sweep across Moscow’s vast Red Square, leaders of the Party and the State watch from a parapet of Nikolai Lenin’s glistening black and red granite tomb. When President Roosevelt made overtures last week to the Bolsheviki (a Russian word meaning “majority”) he did not write to that swart Asiatic Russian, alert Josef Stalin (see S above) because the Dictator is not head of the State, but Secretary or Leader of the Communist Party, the only party permitted to exist in Russia. Instead President Roosevelt addressed scrubby-bearded, gold-spectacled Michail Ivanovich Kalinin (K in the cut above) who has as little power as the President of France and is in effect “President of Russia,” though his proper Soviet title is President of the Standing Committee of the Union Central Executive Committee of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.

Soviet is a word meaning simply “group” and the Russian parliamentary edifice is a pyramid of groups, each of which elects members to represent it in a higher group. Since the Communist Party authoritatively pervades all the groups or Soviets, even the highest, Josef Stalin as Secretary of the Party is Boss. When important decrees are issued they are signed for the Party by Stalin and for the State by chubby but earnest and intense Premier Vyacheslav Michailovich Molotov (M in the cut). His real name is Scriabine, Lenin’s was Ulyanov and Stalin’s is Dzhugashvili (pronounced “zoo-gash-vee-lee”). Soviet leaders are proud of their violent, revolutionary records which the Tsarist police could only class as criminal. Stalin, many times a bank robber (to get funds for the Party) and assassin of Tsarist officials, is especially proud of his alias Stalin, meaning “Steel.”

Since the Soviet Union has lived in chronic fear of attack by the Capitalist Powers, one of Russia’s most popular figures is “Klim,” the Minister of the Army, Navy and Air Force, Comrade Klimentiy Efremovich Voroshilov (V). The Red Army is numerically the second strongest in the world (562,000) but Stalin takes no chances. Attached to his nationwide espionage service, the Gay-Pay-Oo, or OGPU, are 110,000 picked troops, the praetorians of the Dictatorship. Never seen on so conspicuous a spot as Lenin’s tomb is the Chief of the Gay-Pay-Oo, dyspeptic Viacheslav Rudolphovich Menzhinsky (below at left). The Gay-Pay-Oo have the right to seize anyone without a warrant, to try and condemn the prisoner without a jury.

The Soviet Foreign Minister, with whom President Roosevelt will negotiate Russian recognition in the White House, is roly-poly Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, once famed for insistently proposing at Geneva total disarmament of all nations, now grown more practical. With his English wife Ivy he lives not in the Kremlin, as do most of Stalin’s intimates, but at a distance, suggestive of the “taint” felt by Communists to adhere to anyone forced to deal directly and continuously with Capitalist governments.

TEA scalding hot in a glass with spoonfuls of grey sugar is the inalienable luxury of the Russian proletariat. Here Premier Molotov teas with workers who are resolved that Russia shall never again have a leisure class. They highly approve the keynote he strikes oftenest: “No citizen of the Soviet Union may refrain from labor!”

HEAVY INDUSTRY is the portfolio of this beak-nosed Minister or Commissar, Grigoriy Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze. Since the Soviet State is also the largest business organization in the world, Comrade Ordzhonikidze may be likened to all the tycoons of U. S. heavy industry rolled into one. His driver: Defense Minister “Klim” Vorishilov.

RAILWAYS proved to be the weakest link in the five-year plan. If Minister of Railways Andrey Andreevich Andreev were permitted to buy all the U. S. rails, locomotives and rolling stock that Russia needs, happy days would be here again for U. S. railway equipment makers. The Soviet rule of railway maintenance has thus far been patch, plug, persevere.

SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY Grigoriy Fedorovich Grinko budgets not only for the State but for the vast bulk of Soviet enterprise which the State controls. Two years ago he attributed President Hoover’s refusal to recognize Russia to “influence” exerted by U. S. bankers.

FOREIGN TRADE with Russia, both export and import, is an absolute monopoly of the State under Minister of Foreign Trade Arkadi Pavlovich Rosenglotz. Without the iron control made possible by this “closed economic system” many experts believe that the Soviet system would have long ago collapsed.

GOVERNOR OF THE STATE BANK Mosei losifovich Kalmanovich reported last week a gold reserve of 401,112,400 par gold dollars or 779,464,520 gold rubles, covering 3,356,253,240 paper rubles now circulating in Russia. Also listed as note coverage were platinum and silver valued at 13,990,490 rubles.