RUSSIA: Anti-Semitism?

The brief Soviet-Japanese warfare at Changkufeng Hill, ending in a truce in August after the Red Army forces had been driven back off the crest, is still featured in Soviet papers almost daily. Articles speak rosily of “our Red Army’s glorious victory over the Japanese Fascist jackals.” Last week the Communist Party’s official organ Pravda (“Truth”) noted that the 6,500th Red Army hero of Changkufeng Hill has now been given a Soviet medal, editorialed: “Heroism has become a mass phenomenon in our country. . . . Indeed, heroism is a routine matter with us—a Soviet custom.”

Smart Joseph Stalin continues to plug Changkufeng as the best way to rouse in Russian Communists an aggressive, confident, nationalist spirit—just in case Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union find themselves at war. That Dictator Stalin may attempt and may succeed in compromising with Dictator Hitler and making friends somewhat as Dictator Mussolini has done, is the startling alternative theory now being plugged by famed Russian observer Walter Duranty. According to him, antiSemitism, the card which Benito Mussolini played in Italy to win Adolf Hitler’s favor, is already being played by Joseph Stalin.

Cabled careful Mr. Duranty from Paris: “When you come down to brass tacks, there is no obstacle now to Russo-German friendship, which Bismarck advocated so strongly, save Hitler’s fanatic fury against what he calls ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’ But Hitler is not immortal and dictators can change their minds and Stalin has shot more Jews in two years of the purge than were ever killed in Germany.”