RUSSIA: Pressing and Desperate

Summons after summons continued last week to call Soviet ambassadors, ministers and members of their staffs home to Moscow from abroad. Once they reach the Soviet capital most of those recalled are no longer seen. Inquiries from friends abroad or foreign governments with whom they have been conducting negotiations receive no reply from the Soviet Foreign Office.

One day last week such a summons to return to Moscow reached the Charge d’Affaires of the Soviet Legation in Athens, M. Alexander Barmine. He caught the next train not for Moscow but for Paris, there threw himself upon the protection of the French Government and the League of the Rights of Man, French equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“I wish to make a most pressing and desperate plea,” cried Red Diplomat Barmine, “on behalf of the many recalled Soviet diplomats who are perhaps still alive in the Soviet Union, where they are the victims of ignominious, trumped-up and false accusations!”

The vanished former Soviet ambassadors or ministers to Turkey, Rumania, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were among those for whom Diplomat Barmine appealed to the League of the Rights of Man. The case of Eric Asmus, recently Soviet Minister to Finland, he thought especially poignant. The 6-year-old daughter of Red Diplomat Asmus is consumptive and had been placed in a Finnish sanatorium while Mme Asmus, a well-known Soviet architect, went to Paris to work on the Soviet Building at the International Exposition. M. Asmus was suddenly recalled to Moscow from Helsinki, disappeared. Mme Asmus was recalled direct from Paris, was not given time to see her child in Finland, and on reaching Moscow disappeared. Finally a Soviet underling appeared at the Finnish sanatorium, obtained custody of the 6-year-old child and refused to say where he was taking her. The household effects of the Minister and Mme Asmus remained in Helsinki and their friends this week could find out nothing about this vanished family.

In Paris last week Red Diplomat Barmine posted his resignation as Charge d’Affaires at Athens in a letter to Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff, drew attention to the fact that even onetime Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs Nikolai Krestinsky is a “victim.”

“I realize the danger that I run by my present action,” Barmine wrote to the League of the Rights of Man. “I have signed my death warrant and exposed myself to the bullets of professional killers. I am thinking of my friends who have remained at their posts in other European countries, in Asia and in America, and over whose heads hangs the constant menace of a similar fate and who must one day face the tragic choice either of returning home to certain death or, by their refusal, of risking a bullet from Soviet secret foreign agents.”

Meanwhile last week all Russia observed the third anniversary of the assassination of Dictator Joseph Stalin’s famed “Dear Friend Sergei” Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934 et seq.). It was this grim event which shook the Dictator’s previous conviction that his life and the lives of all members of his ruling clique were safe, thanks to the extreme vigilance of the Secret Police. It was a Communist who killed Kirov.

Joseph Stalin went personally to Leningrad, supervised the grilling of Kirov’s assassin, who was soon dead without a public trial, and ever since then the Dictator has been almost daily grilling and shooting prominent Russians, especially Communists (TIME, Oct. 18 et ante).

Among some 1,300 victims have been the President and Premier of two Union Republics, both suicides; a most illustrious Marshal of the Red Army and seven of his Generals, all shot; the onetime Chief of the Soviet Munitions Trust, shot; even the Editor of the Soviet State’s own newsorgan Izvestia, who was arrested. In Russia, where it is impossible to throw up one’s job and flee, since the greater part of the Soviet frontier is sealed with barbed wire and guarded day and night, the number of suicides among Russians of consequence is said to have touched as high as 200 per week.

Despite Soviet denials, Warsaw papers reported last week the arrival in Warsaw of six agents of the Soviet Secret Police who thoroughly combed the Soviet Embassy, departed for Moscow with six trunks full of supposed evidence against the vanished former Soviet Ambassador to Poland, Jakov K. Davtyan. An exceptional Soviet envoy who has been recalled to Moscow, then sent back to his post as no traitor to Stalin, is Soviet Ambassador to the U. S. Alexander Troyanovsky. a certified 100% Red.

This week in Paris, emboldened by the example of Alexander Barmine, Walter Krivitsky declared: “For 18 years I have been a Soviet agent. I now denounce the Stalin regime as more and more in opposition to the true interests of the Soviet Union and the proletariat!”