Foreign News: 60% Blandishment

While the Tsar still sat his Throne, one Ivan Ivanovich and some 6,000 other Russians yielded to the blandishments of U. S. insurance agents, took out policies with the Equitable Life Assurance Society. They particularly liked the clause protecting claims “with all the property of the Equitable wherever located.”

Once the Revolution burst, the new Government promptly seized $20,000,000 of Equitable assets in Russia by outright confiscation. Then one day to Ivan Ivanovich went a Bolshevik agent with further blandishments. “Comrade, your policy was of course nullified in Russia along with other capitalist contracts by a Soviet decree. You might be able to collect from the company in America. Of course as a Soviet citizen you cannot leave Russia. In these circumstances, if you will sign this paper, our Government will sue for you in New York, charging a commission of 60%,”Ivan Ivanovich grumbled but signed.

Last year Soviet lawyers won several seemingly important victories for their clients in lower New York State courts. Last week in Albany these decisions were reversed by the State Court of Appeals, obviously much struck by the brazenness of the Soviet Government in attempting to enforce contracts which its own decrees had canceled.

Declared Judge Frederick Crane, handing down his opinion on the day before he became Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals last week: “By the undisputed terms of the insurance policy these obligations, or any disputes about them, are to be determined by Russian law. … To them [the Russian policy holders] the Soviet Republic was no body of bandits, confiscating property, but an existing government, carrying out new theories of insurance. If the Russian people, under their Soviet form of government, determined to abolish all private insurance for their citizens and establish a system of social protection by the state, that was their affair, not ours.”