RUSSIA: Reprimands & Death

According to the Kremlin, Russia last week was still full of “Enemies of the People”—Trotskyists and saboteurs hired by Fascist powers. Not less vigorous than Stalin’s denunciation of them was his continued campaign to wipe them out.

Osoaviakhim is the name of a vast Russian organization the job of which is to build up the Soviet’s military reserves by training civilians and youths of pre-military age in such things as parachuting, aviation and chemical defense. “Enemies of the People” have wormed their way even, into this holy of holies. Declared Na Strazhe, Osoaviakhim’s official organ, “Every enemy must be revealed.”

The rapping of knuckles echoed through the land. Chief political officers in the Kiev, Volga and Caucasus districts were reprimanded for “political blindness and carelessness” in failing to detect intriguers in their midst. Two unnamed spies of a “certain foreign intelligence service” were arrested. The West Siberian Geological Trust, ordered to explore for oil in the Kuznetsk Basin in 1935, discovered that a number of their employes had spent 1,300,000 rubles (about $260,000) on drilling two wells where there was obviously not a chance of finding oil. Eleven more railway wreckers, said to be working for Japan, were shot at Khabarovsk, Soviet Asia—bringing May’s bag of executed spies in the Far East up to 66. Russian-born U. S. citizens were refused visas to visit the Soviet Union seemingly for fear that some of them might be admirers of exiled Leon Trotsky.

A variation on this disinfecting theme last week was the suicide of mat-bearded Jan Gamarnik, Vice-Commissar for Defense. His death came month after the demotion of Defense Vice-Commissar Mikhail Nikolaivich Tukhachevsky (TIME, May 31). Gamarnik, 43, had been a member of the Communist Party since 1916. After the civil war he became head of all political work in the Red Army, was given the special title of “Military Commissar of the First Rank” when, in 1935, five generals were raised to the newly created rank of Marshal. After his death it was officially revealed that he was “connected with anti-Soviet elements.”