SOVIET QUARRELS.

Evening Star, Issue 19714, 15 November 1927, Page 6

SOVIET QUARRELS.

It was a sad distortion of the Russian Bolshevists’ great celebration of the tenth anniversary of their regime that caused it to become, more than anything else, a public demonstration of tho divisions in their owm ranks. Fervent “comrades” from all over tho world had been invited to attend, and see the proletarian brethren dwelling in unity and love, with their feet on the bourgeois’ necks, and what they saw was a house divided against itself. Tho Stalinists proposed, and Irotsky and his fellow-mutineers disposed. Stalin was afraid of such an exposure, and did his utmost to avert it, according to reports from Russia, but his precautions wore frustrated by the bitterness of the opponents of his dominant clique. The feud between tho rulers of the Soviet and irotsky, Zinovieff, and Kamcneff, who would fain be its rulers, has lasted for three years now'. There have been disciplinings and expulsions of the obstreperous malcontents,'and temporary reconciliations with them, but tho net result has been that tho quarrel has grown wider between tho factions while tho strength and boldness of the minority have increased. In May last 'J rotsky was ordered by the Executive Committee of the Communist International “to cease disruptive, work or to leave tho Communist International and the Communist Party",” tho committee at the same time instructing the supremo party tribunal “to watch Trotsky and summarily to exclude him if he resumes his factional activity. A month later it was announced that Trotsky and Zinovieff were to bo expelled from the Central Committee of the Communist Party. This decision required the approval of a plenary joint session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Central Control Commission. Tho plenary meeting was held in August, an re fused to approve of Trotsky’s expulsion, though it reprimanded him for breaches of discipline. Stalin was compelled to revive tho matter, at the last time ho would have chosen, almost on the eve of tho great Moscow celebrations, by tho audacity of his enemy, who was accused not only of helping to organise a secret printing press for attacks on the ruling junta, but of plotting with foreign, and particularly German, “Communist renegades and the worst elements cast out of tho world s Communist parties,” iu order to establish a new party and a Fourth International. Summoned before tho Disciplinary Commission of the Communist International, Trotsky dolled the power of that tribunal, or of others which ho named, to judge him, because the membership of all of them, ho declared, had been irregularly manipulated by Stalin and his gang. Tho names “cheats,” “despots,” “usurpers, which he did not fear to direct against Communist fathers must have been names seldom heard in Russia, though often uttered in thought. During tho anniversary celebrations, when Trotsky and Kameneff attempted to address crowds in various quarters of Moscow, the disorders were so great that troops had to he called out for their suppression. The man who, along with Lenin, made the revolution, and who, but for that record and tho fear which present rulers have of him, would have been stood against a wall and shot, did not hesitate to declare that the festivities were entirely out of place, in view of the economic position of the Soviet. Many .visitors must have thought that the triumphs they professed went singularly ill with such quarrels and with bread lines. A Trotsky regime in Russia, if that should come to pass, would not he better for Europe than the present one. But tho conflict between the factions, raising fears of civil war, may give some Bolshevists something more tc think of for a while than that “ world revolution,” which seems seldom in normal seasons to be absent from their thoughts.