THE RED ARMY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 6, 7 July 1938, Page 9

THE RED ARMY

"MORAL DECAY" SEEN

"Fascist agents" are trying to corrupt Red. Army officers and political commissars by cultivating endless drinkirig and debauchery, according to the Red General Staff organ "Red Star," says the Moscow correspondent of the "Daily Telegraph and Morning Post." This aUegation follows the dismissal of the Red Army Commissar Koltzoff, political member of the Central Council of the Air Force, for shielding a drunken officer. "Red Star" declares that it is the Soviet Government's intention to burn out all "moral decay" in the Red Army with a "red-hot iron." It accuses "Trotskyist-Bukharinite agents" of using every possible means to incapacitate military chiefs. Women spies are stated to, have been "pushed into the arms" of important army officials by these agents, who have organised all sorts of hard-drink-ing banquets to recruit the officials into "criminal gangs." "Stalin reminds us," states the newspaper,: "that the highest form of wreckirigis when our enemies try secretly and gradually to corrupt our people and our leaders, "The political commissars in charge of the Red Army units must sober up the minds of those who have sunk into the swamps of drink, opening their eyes to the insidious methods of the Fascist intelligence services and explaining that it is only one step from moral to political corruption." "Red Star" claims that drunkenness is not widespread in the Red Army* and therefore can be firmly suppressed. "In our joyful, days only those who are rotten inside can kill time with a bottle of vodka," it adds. This article forms part of a wider drive to restore the political commissars to the pre-eminent position of authority in the Red Army of which they have been deprived in past years. Aiming at establishing a true "single command," Marshal Tukhachevsky and other "traitors," who led the Red Army until- last summer, when they were executed or removed in the purge, had reduced these political commissars" to the status of something like "atheist chaplains," mere instructors in Commthiism.