OGPU MUST GO.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 113, 16 May 1933, Page 7

OGPU MUST GO.

Grim Stranglehold on Soviet Russia. WO LIBERTY THERE. LONDON", May 10. "Before Soviet Russia can be happy and prosperous, the Ogpu (Secret Police) must go, and I believe that eventually it will disappear as a tragic, terrible, relic of a transitional phase," declares the special correspondent of the "Xews-Chronicle." who remained in Moscow after the trial of the British engineers to study the Russian riddle.

Until tho Soviet deprives this sinister | body of its peculiar powers and transforms it into civil police in accordance with modern ideas, he says, Russians will never feel secure nor will the Soviet command the world's confidence. Every man and woman arrested by tho Ogpu—which possesses the dread trinity of power, being investigator, judge and executioner —knows that whether innocent or guilty he may disappear without trace. The Ogpu makes 3000 arrests a month, compared with 7000 a month last year, which is regarded as proof of the growing stability of Stalin's regime. As a matter of fact, essential liberties are non-existent in Russia, whose revolutionaries liberated the land from one tyranny and imposed another more deadly, replacing the exploitation of man by man with exploitation of man by the State. Moreover, the suggestion that the Soviet is evolving an ideal classless State is an illusion. On the contrary, it is creating classes as fast as possible. Already 85 classes exist. The only classless elements are the outcasts, who are in an infinitely worse plight than the British bottom dog, owing to the passport system introduced to relieve the appalling congestion in Moscow, where 4,000,000 live on an average floor space of five square yards a person. It was hoped that passports indicating membership of a trades union or other recognised category would reduce the population by a million useless mouths, consisting of poor who had struggled thither in search of succour, forcing them to die in ditches or end their useless lives. "When I heard," says the correspondent, "that 'humanism,' had replaced God, I asked where was the humanism in this grim experiment. Tho people, whether commissars or factory workers, are mere robots subjected to iron discipline, and their actions are easily construed as wrecking or counter-revolution-ary if the Ogpu wishes. Hence its power over millions of homes. "All literature is mere Soviet ideology, tho newspapers are State gramophones, and the Courts echoes of the Soviet's policy. I believe that Russia some day will become an industrial State, with a standard of living comparable with the best in the world, but not on the basis of pure Communism."