RUSSIA: Red Notes

> Soviet Justice caught up last week with eleven phonograph record speculators, the suddenly notorious “SPECTOR AND MYZNIKOV AND THEIR ACCOMPLICES,” as Moscow called them. Spector & Myznikov, well knowing that the State Music Stores have nothing like enough phonograph records to supply the wants of Moscow’s phonograph addicts, neglected to stay away from those stores as the State desires patriots to do in order that some records may always be “offered for sale” and appearances kept up.

When daring Spector & Myznikov went so far as to enter the stores singly and have relatives and friends do the same and insist on buying records, alert Stalin Secret Police were soon on the miscreants’ trail. They were accused in court last week of reselling their phonograph records privately to more timid Moscow music lovers who make their purchases in the safety of dark alleys rather than in the State Music Stores. The court sentenced Spector & Myznikov to seven years each in jail, gave their accomplice’s from six to five years each.

> Henry Ford around 1930 sold some $30,000,000 of machines to the comrade who was then Soviet State Buyer No. 1, long-jawed Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk. Since 1932 he has been Soviet State Planner No. 1, and his latest Five-Year Plan is especially behind schedule in Heavy Industry. Last week J. Stalin made the now necessarily friendly move of having Buyer-Planner Mezhlauk appointed to replace the late Grigoriy Konstantinovich Orclzhonikidze, as Commissar for Heavy Industry. Russia’s planners and Russia’s performers, inevitably, blame each other for Five-Year Plan setbacks and it is no bed of roses in which long-jawed Mezhlauk was planted.

> In recent weeks Leon Trotsky has begun taking Walter Duranty repeatedly to task as a “dilettante journalist with a more or less Left slant.” Last week Trotskyists pointed to a New York Times cable on new U. S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies in which Mr. Duranty wrote: “Unlike most diplomats here, Mr. Davies is profoundly interested in industrial development as a result of his own work before and during the World War. To Soviet officials, whose middle name nowadays is Industrialization, this proves as attractive as it is unexpected, and they have asked him to obtain from Washington his “own reports, drawn up from 1911 to 1917, on the metallurgical and coal industries of the United States, and the costs of those industries in wartime.

“Mr. Davies has now met either officially or socially all the important Soviet leaders, except Joseph Stalin, and is said to have won top marks in all directions.”

Top-marked Ambassador Davies and Daughter Emlen start this week on a quick swing in their private car around industrial centres within 600 miles of Moscow. Mrs. Davies remains in Moscow as she is “not interested. To avoid indigestion, the Ambassador has informed local Soviet authorities that they will not eat outside their car, thus saving their Russian hosts the cost of local banquets for the U. S. Ambassador. He will feed as many local bigwigs as possible, also five U. S. correspondents. Next the Davieses will hurry to Manhattan, embark on their yacht for the Coronation (see p. 19), thence cruise to Leningrad where they will maintain the yacht ready for use at all times.

> Mrs. Leon Trotsky complained by letter from Mexico to her husband’s Manhattan publishers last week that the last message she received from her son Sergei, now jailed in Russia for “Trotskyism,” was dated Dec. 12, 1934 and that she now fears the worst. According to Mrs. Trotsky, her son was at first jailed for several months, then given work in a factory where he could be accused of “committing sabotage,” then clapped back into jail for schooling by the Ogpu prior to his forthcoming trial. She evidently fears that this super-propaganda spectacle will feature Son Sergei confessing high, wide & handsomely against Father Leon Trotsky.

This week The Revolution Betrayed, newest book by Leon Trotsky,* appears with this challenge to Joseph Stalin on the jacket: “If the rulers of the Kremlin want to complain that through my writing I am aiding a future victory of the Soviet people over their reactionary bureaucracy, then I can reply yes, I am guilty of that!”

> Trotsky’s translator, Max Eastman, came out last week with The End of Socialism in Russia— a work in which he first quotes from the original decrees of the Lenin State ordering what was to be done about education in Russia and then from the Stalin State’s Decree On Academic Reform, Sept. 4, 1935.

Lenin State: “Pupils of the older classes in the secondary schools must not, dare not, consider themselves children, and govern their destiny to suit the wishes of parents and teachers. . . . Utilization of a system of marks for estimating the knowledge and conduct of the pupil is abolished.

. . . Distribution of medals and Insignia is abolished. . . . The old form of [Tsarist] discipline which corrupts the entire life of the school and the untrammeled development of the personality of the child, cannot be maintained in the Schools of Labor. The process of labor itself develops this internal discipline without which collective and rational work is unimaginable. . . . All punishment in school is forbidden. . . . All examinations—entrance, grade and graduation—are abolished. . . . The wearing of school uniforms is abolished.”

Stalin State: “Instruct a commission. . . to elaborate a draft of a ruling for every type of school. The ruling must have a categoric and absolutely obligatory character for pupils as well as for teachers. This ruling must be the fundamental document . . . which strictly establishes the regime of studies and the basis for order in the school as well as the rules of conduct of pupils inside and outside of school. . . . Introduce in all schools a uniform type of pupils’ report card on which all the principal rules for the conduct of the pupil are to be inscribed. Establish a personal record for every pupil.. . . . Every five days the chief instructor of a class will examine the memorandum, will mark cases of absence and tardiness in it, and will demand the signature of the parent under all remarks of the instructor. . . . Underlying the ruling on the conduct of the pupils is to be placed a strict and conscientious application of discipline. … In the personal record there will be entered for the entire duration of his studies the marks of the pupil for every quarter, his prizes and his punishments. … A special apparatus of Communist Youth organizers is to be installed for the surveillance of the pupil inside and outside of school. They are to watch over the morality and the state of mind of the pupils. . . . Establish a single form of dress for pupils of the primary, semi-secondary, and secondary schools, this uniform to be introduced to begin with, in 1936, in the schools of Moscow. . . .”

>Event of the week in every part of the Soviet Union was a local speech, duplicated by thousands of orators, echoing the keynote sounded at Moscow on the 19th Anniversary of the Red Army by Defense Commissar Klimentiy (“Klim”) Voroshilov. The official keynote: “The two countries which most threaten peace—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—have made no secret of their plans to attack the Soviet Union. . . . They are viciously sharpening their swords!” This was followed by what was said to be historically the first intimation that the Red Army, always described by Communist orators as “purely defensive,” now seems to have in the pigeon holes of its General Staff plans for an offensive war on foreign soil. This is such a reversal of Old Bolshevik tenets that New Bolshevik ”Klim” Voroshilov had to weasel cautiously into it thus: “Any attack on the territory of workers and peasants will be repulsed with all the strength of the armed forces of the Soviet Union through the transfer of military operations into territory attacking the enemy.”

* Doubleday, Doran—$2.50* Little, Brown—75 cents.