Foreign News: From A to Finis

Otto Yulevich Shmidt is a bearded Soviet academician, mathematician and Polar explorer. At the age of 56 he is also a man of remarkable longevity.

In 1926 the Soviet State Publishing House put out Volume One of a projected Big Soviet Encyclopedia. Its title page listed Shmidt as chief of a 14-man board of editors made up entirely of Old Bolsheviks; Karl Radek and Nicolai Bukharin were among them. As years passed, and volume followed volume to the presses, purge followed purge. Radek was imprisoned, Bukharin shot, and one by one the names on Volume One’s title page disappeared in Stalin’s great liquidation. By 1938, when the purge was hottest and Volume 37 appeared, Shmidt alone was left; he kept cool and smiling in the Arctic.

Cautious, but determined, he returned, assembled a new board, prudently including Prosecutor Andrei Y. Vishinsky, and kept going. Last week, 22 years and more than a score of editors after Volume One, the final volume was delivered to subscribers. Russia’s Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopediya was complete, and there on the title page, demoted from chief editor but still running, was the name of O. Yu. Shmidt.