RUSSIA: Fascist Termites

Russia’s current tidal wave of treason charges, summary arrests and sudden death to even big Bolsheviks (TIME, Aug. 24 et seq.), surged up last week for the first time high enough to overwhelm even a president of a constituent republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In their Moscow offices crack foreign correspondents discovered that much of the week’s most important news was being printed only in local Russian newsorgans in the regions where it occurred, sometimes even there in obscurest sheets. Thus at Minsk, capital of the White Russian* Soviet Socialist Republic, the important local newsorgan is the Star, but only in a Minsk paper called the Worker could one read last week the BIG STORY of how a three-day session of the White Russian Communist Party, devoted to frenzied charges and countercharges, had been capped by the sudden death of the White Russian President, Comrade Alexander Grigorevich Chervyakov. The Worker described President Chervyakov’s demise as “suicide for personal family reasons,” but it led up to this by describing how President Chervyakov had been publicly reviled for “letting Fascist termites devour the Party house in Minsk.” Apparently the reason why the Worker was able to scoop this story was that Editor Lentser of the rival Star had been thrown into jail as a “Fascist termite.”

Feverishly fingering through the Minsk Worker in Moscow, correspondents learned that in White Russia 998 ranking Communist Party members had been expelled as “hostile elements” and 31 more for “spreading Trotsky propaganda.” The Worker printed names of 141 persons classed in Minsk officially as “enemies of the people”—this stock phrase meaning in Russia today either that they are already in jail or that police are after them.

Definitely in jail were White Russia’s Commissars (local cabinet ministers) for Agriculture and Education—the former accused of “such treasonable acts as ordering wheat planted in apple orchards”—along with that most distinguished Bolshevik, Comrade Moisel Kalmanovich. He until two months ago was Commissar for State Grain and Livestock Farms for the entire Soviet Union, has now been jailed on charges that he ordered Soviet scientists to castrate breeding bulls and inoculate cattle with cholera germs. Finally White Russia’s recently executed Red Army commander, General Ieronim Petrovich Uborevich, was described last week as having been “little short of a fiend incarnate,” while the railways, textile mills and collective farms of White Russia were reported “infested with Fascist spies and wreckers.”

After 53% of the Minsk Communist Party leaders had been expelled, new Party Secretary Sharangovich arose and bellowed at the trembling 47% who remained: “I must add, comrades, that this espionage and wrecking go much deeper! They have been chiefly conducted by some of our most honored people.” Secretary Sharangovich then read off sheafs of statistics which sounded strange, coming as they did from a Soviet Republic virtually honeycombed with Fascist termites and therefore presumably in bad shape. According to Sharangovich, the gross income of White Russia is now 22 times greater than in Tsarist times, its Soviet farms are 94% collectivized and last year White Russia fulfilled its industrial quota under the Five-Year Plan by 107%. Observed one dispatch passed by the Moscow censor: “Sharangovich gave figures difficult to reconcile with allegations of such wholesale wrecking.”

Stalin to Funeral, Stalin to Lunch. To know which Big Reds are least apt to be arrested next, Russians have learned to keep lynx-eyed watch as to who stands near Joseph Stalin on his rare appearances in public. Last week the late, great Lenin’s sister, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, had just died and across the Red Square with Pallbearer Stalin trudged Premier Molotov (at the Dictator’s side) and Defense Commissar Voroshilov (just behind Stalin). Commissar for Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezov, whose secret agents continue to catch so many traitors, stood with the puffy Widow Lenin, watching.

Plodding Stalin, solid-looking as a Russian bear, showed no trace of worry. He even played genial luncheon host in the Kremlin Palace last week to the youthful Foreign Minister of Latvia, Vilhelms Munters, the first foreign statesman Stalin has feted since he was kind to youthful British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden (TIME, April 18, 1935). According to Riga dispatches, Foreign Minister Munters, when he returns from Moscow, will report to a conference of the foreign ministers of all the Baltic states on June 28 in Kaunas, Lithuania. They are supposed, according to Latvian editors, to be so worried over events in Russia that Mr. Munters has “gone to investigate.”

In leading Moscow papers the Latvian Foreign Minister could read last week startling accusations and threats to such outstanding Bolsheviks as famed Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk, for years an especial favorite of Dictator Stalin who few months ago appointed him Commissar for Heavy Industry in succession to Stalin’s late “Dear Friend Grigoriy” Ordzhonikidze (TIME, March 8). Comrade Mezhlauk has always figured in Soviet prints as the original Bolshevik live-wire of “American tempo,” the super-efficiency man of the Five-Year Plans. Suddenly the official Stalin press started blaming Mezhlauk last week for a shortage of spare parts said to be so acute that half the motor vehicles in Russia are immobilized. He was flayed because 48% of the Soviet’s newest type of automobiles roll off the assembly line “entirely inoperative” and have to be sent back to be re-manufactured.* Finally Mezhlauk had flung in his face the fact that last May some 1,200 workers at the largest motor car plant in Russia, the famed Gorky Works, downed their tools and left the plant. These workers were described as “truants” last week, and the official Stalin press charged that at Gorky it is not unusual for groups of proletarians to fail to show up when it is time for work.

“It is time for Commissar Mezhlauk to introduce Bolshevist discipline into automobile and tractor plants and auxiliary enterprises,” thundered Pravda (Truth) on the very day Dictator Stalin was feting the young statesman from Riga who had come to find out what the Moscow mess was all about.

Meanwhile in Siberia 28 Communists convicted of sabotaging the strategic Amur Railway had been lined up and shot. This occurred on June 4 but the story reached Moscow only last week when copies of the Khabarovsk Pacific Ocean Star arrived. A total of 94 executions reported as taking place in the Soviet Far East in its local newsorgans was added up by correspondents with the notation that this lethal news had not yet appeared in Moscow papers. Obviously internal Soviet censorship was playing down perhaps the biggest, certainly the bloodiest, story since the Revolution of 1917. Queerest charges of the week were those hurled by Stalin’s official press at employes of Soyuzphoto, the Soviet Union’s official news picture trust. Obviously the cameramen of Soyuzphoto have had no choice but to take pictures in past years of the many Soviet heroes who have now been arrested, besmirched, shot. Last week Gudok (“The Hooter”), official newsorgan of the State railways, furiously declared: “Undoubtedly enemies of the Soviet Union are busy in Soyuzphoto. There is no other way to explain its insistent efforts to popularize enemies of the Soviet Union—lackeys of Fascism! In its albums of photographs Soyuzphoto has included scores of pictures of the great, dirty enemies of the Soviet Union.”

Such a great, dirty enemy suddenly turned out to be the hitherto highly honored President of the Soviet Far East Territory, Comrade G. M. Krutov, abruptly “relieved of his duties” last week and expelled from the executive committee of the Far East Communist Party without explanation. Up & down Russia uneasiness spread as it was reported that a quarter of a million members of the Communist Party had been ousted from its ranks under suspicion of treachery or Trotskyism. From Soviet industrial districts reports began to arrive that highly placed Russian engineers and executives were scrambling to resign their posts last week before they could be accused of wrecking, sabotage or treason. As described in the official Moscow press, typical letters of this sort read: “I ask to be relieved of my duties because, under present conditions, I do not consider myself sufficiently prepared politically. I have not yet learned Bolshevism.”

Along with these distressing symptoms, Stalin lieutenants pointed with pride to the “spontaneous demonstration” of 30,000 persons who sent to the Kremlin pleas that the Government should at once launch a new Soviet loan for rearmament. Among the spontaneous 30,000, according to official Moscow announcements, were “the personnel of the Arctic meteorological stations” and “the pupils of the Borisogleb School for the Deaf & Dumb.”

Dryly commented the New York Times’s Harold Denny from Moscow: “The campaign to root out ‘Trotskyist wreckers’ from every phase of Soviet life . . . is assuming the proportions and characteristics of a Salem witch hunt.” Editorially the Times made a quipping reference to “Stalin’s new five-year plan to eradicate the entire population of Russia.”

* “White Russians” are Tsarist sympathizers, mostly refugees from the Soviet Union. White Russia is a Soviet Republic 49,000 sq. mi. in area with a population of 5,500,000. In about the 3rd Century A.D. the Slavs in this part of the world were distinguished from other Slavs by their unusual costume—white smock, white leggings and white homespun coat. This led to their being called White Russians—not to be confused with “White Russians.”

* Exhibited at the Soviet Pavilion in the Paris Exposition is one of these cars which looks like an 8-cylinder, 7-passenger Buick sedan.