RUSSIA: Litvinoff, Streck & Jesus

Before recognizing the Soviet Union, church-going Franklin Delano Roosevelt inserted, as a condition of his deal with roly-poly Foreign Minister Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, a clause insuring, so the President believed, that adequate church-going facilities for U. S. citizens in Russia would be preserved (TIME, Nov. 27, 1933). Comrade Litvinoff, having secured Soviet recognition, went home to Moscow via Rome. When he was asked by the Eternal City’s Catholic journalists whether the church clause was going to hold water he replied with his characteristic wink & shrug. Last week in Moscow, sudden and final violation of what President Roosevelt had thought would be an effective promise, occurred simultaneously with honors for Comrade Litvinoff.

Moscow correspondents have been hearing for months Kremlin rumors that the Foreign Minister had lost favor with the Dictator over the question of Spain; Comrade Litvinoff insisting on Russia’s policy of furnishing only minimum aid to Madrid, Comrade Stalin reputedly chafing at the diplomatic necessity for caution. By last week the increasing Soviet “minimum aid” had become sufficient to enable Madrid to make a strong stand against the Whites (see p. 23).

Enough Russian war equipment had at last been smuggled by sea to the Spanish radicals for Dictator Stalin and his Foreign Minister to take off the mask of their “quarrel.” They appeared together atop Lenin’s Tomb in the Red Square, and all Russia knows that the few men permitted to stand there with J. Stalin during a popular review are always his prime favorites of the moment. Next, the highest Soviet decoration, the Order of Lenin, was last week pinned on the barrel-chest of Comrade Litvinoff by Stalin’s frontman, twinkly-eyed old Russian President Mikhail Kalinin.

Simultaneously the U. S. Embassy in Moscow was preparing for one of the few big “diplomatic weddings” and receptions since the Great Powers entered into diplomatic relations with the Bolsheviks. The bridegroom, Embassy Disbursing Officer George Minor, had gone to Finland to fetch the bride, Miss Mildred Wright of Charleston, W. Va. who thought it would be romantic to be married in Moscow. There is in Moscow no church with a U. S. pastor, but Bridegroom Minor had retained the services of Moscow’s one Protestant clergyman, Reverend A. Streck. Herr Streck’s parents were German, but he is a Soviet citizen, and has functioned in his little Lutheran church in Moscow quietly. Because most Protestant diplomats attend his services, Herr Streck became known unofficially as the “Diplomatic Pastor.” He was all set to officiate, and the U. S. Embassy servants were set for the most lavish party since U. S. Ambassador Bullitt was transferred from Moscow to Paris (TIME, Sept. 7), when in the dead of night last week Parson Streck “disappeared.”

In Moscow to disappear is usually to have been picked up by Stalin’s secret police who are uncommunicative about their prisoners. Good Soviet sources told correspondents that Herr Streck was in jail, but why they would not tell, and his jailing was not officially confirmed. In vain the German Embassy demanded that Herr Streck be produced, and the U. S. Embassy was able to hold its wedding only when another Soviet-German pastor, Herr Michel, whose Lutheran church is in Leningrad, rushed 500 miles to Moscow where genial U. S. Charge d’Affaires Loy W. Henderson gave the bride away. Intention to found a U. S. church in the Red Capital was definitely abandoned last year after Dr. Walter William Van Kirk of the American Section of the Universal Christian Council went to Moscow and discovered to what lengths Soviet bureaucracy was prepared to go to thwart him. It was estimated unofficially that $100,000 would have to be paid in taxes on the structure and equipment of a church costing $4,000.

Meanwhile last week the general subject of Soviet church-going was angrily aired at a Communist gathering in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow. Speakers cited Soviet statistics to prove that still regular churchgoers in Russia today are: 12% of young peasant women and 1% of young peasant men; 26% of middle-aged peasant women and 3% of their men; 48% of elderly peasant women and 14% of their men. Because of the time these people “waste” in church, declared Communist zealots at Yaroslavl, the Soviet harvest for 1936 was 35% less than it would have been if they had worked during the time they prayed.

So clever are Orthodox priests becoming in their struggle to survive under Soviet conditions that, according to the baffled Communists, many holy men now preach in Russia in the following vein, which was quoted by comrades as a typical example: “Jesus was of proletarian origin, the son of Joseph the carpenter and of a toiling woman. It is necessary to explain that Jesus Christ was the great Socialist and Communist predecessor of the Communist Party.”