SPEEDY ACTION

Evening Post, Issue 122, 26 May 1933, Page 7

SPEEDY ACTION

IMPOSITION OE BAN

WORLD VIEW OF TRIAL

(From "The Post's" Representative.) ' LONDON, April 20. Within nine hours and a half of the receipt by the British Government of the news of the sentences passed on the British engineers in Moscow the King had signed a proclamation prohibiting as from April 26 the importation of about 80 per cent, of the Soviet commodities that this country has been in the habit'of importing. Events are moving rapidly, and it is considered that the Soviet authorities Will never hold out against this severe blow to their trade. There is a week available to review the sentences of Mr. Thornton and Mr. Macdonald. In the meantime, tho comments of the world Press should convince those authorities that they have made a serious blunder. . ■-, According to correspondents in Berlin, the general opinion of the Press there -tallies with, that expressed in England—namely, that these recurrent trials of "wreckers" are spectacles staged to divert home opinion in Soviet Russia from the failure of Soviet industrial and economic policy. A typical comment is that of the "Hamburger IVemdenblatt," which says that the Soviet Union cannot dispense with the services of foreign advisors and cannot afford further to cover up internal difficulties with -these spectacular trials. If the, Soviet wishes to be regarded as capable of international negotiation, it must hold to State and private contracts, and behave decently to the foreign partners to them. According to the-Home correspondent of "The Times," Italian opinion of the cause and outcome of the Moscow trial may be summed up in the words of one newspaper comment:—"When affairs in Russia do not go well, imposing trials are trumped up at Moscow. If the railways do not work, if the factories do not pfoduce, if the agricultural societies do not give sufficient returns, there must be some treacherous comrade or a bourgeois who is- sabotaging. A good trial and a few more deaths added to the tragic balance-sheet of the revolution, and Communism resumes its journey." . The sentences pronounced-are, in fact, generally regarded as tantamount to a confession that the charges were ridiculous and incapable of being seriously maintained. ' NO PLACE FOB AMERICANS. •The "trial" .has been widely> and fully reported in the American Press, and much public interest has been taken in its course. The New York " Herald-Tribune-" denounces both the "trial" and the findings in a strongly-worded leading article, which deals, moreover, with the aspect of the case which is of most interest to Americans—namely, the pi'otection afforded to foreign, traders and business men in Bussia. "All the espionage charges," it says, "boil down to actions which are 'part of commercial agents' routine,' and which are 'the avowed business of most seriousminded tourists" in Bussia.' If tho resident agents of a great British engineering firm, under full diplomatic protection, can be terrorised, exhibited, and gaoled like muzhiks to make a Bed Holiday, Kussia is no place for Americans." . "His Majesty's proclamation under the Eussian Goods Act has been heard of with heartfelt approval throughout the Empire," says tho "Daily Telegraph," and the action so taken will meet with understanding and sympathy, in every country where tho course of this month's events in Moscow has been followed. Not a day, literally not an hour, was lost by the Government, when the decisions of the Eussiau Court were known, in making use of those powers with which it was armed by the Act passed nine days] ago. ' There was no equally effective | means of convincing the Soviet Government .that British feeling over the treatment of pur countrymen is a very real thing. What will be perhaps least welcome in Moscow is the possibility of Russia's Baltic neighbours taking her place in the British market as a source i of wood and timber supplies. But the whole operation of the embargo is ruinous for a Government already in a precarious financial situatiou. It may well be realised in Moscow that urgent necessity demands a retreat from tho position temporarily created; by , the two sentences of imprisonment and tho according of a favourable.reception to the petition for reprieve which is to I bo laid before the Soviet authorities." PAYING A HEAVY PEIOE. "Now that the Moscow authorities have- achieved presumably the effect they desired at home," says "The .Times," "it is time for them to give a little more attention to tho results which these extraordinary proceedings are producing outside Eussia, and to endeavour to counteract them. "And. it- is not only in Great Britain that the Soviet Government are paying a heavy price for the licence they have allowed tho Ogpu in its treatment' of foreign engineers whom they have induced.to come to''Eussia and help them in carrying out their industrial schemes. The comments of foreign newspapers show how widespread has.

been the interest taken in the case and what a bad advertisement it has been for the- whole Soviet system. The- proceedings in the Moscow Court have everywhere been recognised to bo a mockery of justice, i "Well might Mr. Monkhouse, in his courageous outburst of Saturday, declare that the whole trial was q, 'frame up,' based on the evidence of terrorised witnesses. That indeed is already the judgment of the civilised world. It is not the accused engineers who are condemned, but the whole system of 'eJass justice,' as administered by1 the Ogpu, its spies and informers, its inquisitors and its subservient Courts.1 From the arrests six weeks,ago to the sentences delivered early yesterday morning the whole proceedings have been a farce so horrible that it could only bo staged in Russia, by an oligarchy devoid of any concception of justice oT humanity and dead to any feeling of public decency, before a populaco whose credulity has been fed with fear and hati;ed by years of sedulous propaganda and whose, sense of the ridiculous even has been killed by regimentation and terrorism. Why was tho farce put on? Even Stalin must have understood the effect it was bound to have on world opinion, shattering/ at a blow the illusions which Soviet agencies," avowed and unavowed, have fostered so zealously of the real character of the 'interesting experiment' in Bussia and of the men who direct it. OGPU OBSESSION. "Probably the main object was to supply scapegoats, to divert against tho foreign manufacturers and against the foreign experts who superintended the erection and use in Bussia of tho equipment supplied the growing popular discontent over the breakdown of so many grandiose industrial schemes through Soviet mismanagement and through mishandling by clumsy and untrained workmen. There' was also the consideration that the excitemqnts of a sensational anti-foreign and. anti-capital-ist trial might provide a safety valve for dangerous feelings among a population which it is becoming every day more difficult to feed. There is some element of truth in each, of these suggestions, but a contributory explanation must be sought in the psychology of the Ogpu chiefs, whoso minds have become warped through the practice of terrorism just as the mind of the drug addict becomes warped by the drug to which he is a slave. Their whole being has become ■ pbsessed with the lust of the hunt for victims. They eatinot live unless they are perpetually tracking down 'class enemies,' bullying, browbeating, torturing, and shooting, and they are driven by their obsession to seek a perverse satisfaction in filling others with fear and horror. But for Great Britain tho problem is not how to account for tho madness which has just reached its climax in Moscow, but how to save unfortunate fellow-subjects who have been made its latest victims." "We are sorry for.Mr. Thornton and Mr. Macdonald," says tho "Morning Post," "but there is a bigger reason of Stato policy than the liberation of two innocent and injured men; it is to prevent the repetition of such wrongs to British subjects in Bussia. This present measure will affect—if we take tho years 1932 and 1931 for comparison—from.l 9to 27 per-cent, of the entire Bussian export trade. >If exceptions w.ere to be made, .and licences issued, the measure would fail of its effect; but, if it be sincerely applied' and resolutely maintained, it will, we believe, do more to improve our relations with Bussia than anything done since the Revolution."