RUSSIAN TENDENCIES.

Evening Star, Issue 21219, 28 September 1932, Page 6

RUSSIAN TENDENCIES.

Thk report from Kovno that the Soviet is renewing negotiations for a pact of non-aggression with Japan, also that it is considering a similar pact with the new State of Manchukuo, is quite likely to be true. And the first part of it, if it is true, will be good news. Although a few weeks ago some observers were noting an “ outburst of war spirit ” in Russia, caused by the increasing tension of her relations with Japan, there has been more evidence that the Soviet does not want war with anyone at the present time. That would be the end of the Five-year Plan. Russia, on the whole, has taken calmly the Japanese advances in Manchuria. In January last she proposed to Tokio a nou-aggres-sive pact similar to those she has established with the Baltic States. It was Japan who caused the negotiations to hang fire. She professed to have her doubts whether such an agreement would not weaken the Kellogg Pact—a scruple hard to understand—and be misunderstood by other States with which she had no such treaties. It was that delaying on Japan’s part—probably in the hope of better terms—which seems to have alarmed the Soviet Government and provoked the campaign of “ preparedness ” which observers noted. If that alarm has now been dissipated and the pact has become a probable development one danger of the Far Eastern situation should be removed. It is of less importance, in an immediate sense, that a chief attraction of the pact to Japan was that it makes her independent of American oil, and that her feelings are not kindly to America. The Russian recognition of Manchukuo, if that eventuates —and that also has been hinted at for months —stands on another footing. It might make complications for League of Nations Powers if they wish not to recognise that State. Recent cable news from Russia affords ample reason why she should want no foreign troubles at the present stage. Food shortages, executions of peasants by firing squads for withholding food, firing of troops into starving hordes, and a widespread plot (which the officials, however, deny) for the ousting or slaying of Stalin make the gloomy tale. No British authority knows more of Russia than Sir Bernard Pares, who, as a university extension lecturer, spent constant vacations there until the war began, studying its conditions and discussing them in their own language with leaders of every party, and has known every part of it during and since the war. Many good men he found there among all parties—even in the Russian Church. From his valuable book, ‘ My Russian Memories,’ one would gather that before the Bolshevists erected statues to Lenin they should have erected them anywhere and everywhere to the inventor of the machine gun. It was with that that they established their authority—largely with machine guns sent from Britain for the help of the Russian army. “ I suppose,” he writes, “ every revolution has its favourite weapon. France had the lamp post and the guillotine, and with each of them one could at least kill only one person at a time. The Bolshevists’ weapon was the machine gun; with it one could kill numbers of people at once, as one only had to spray bullets. I remember vividly, when I was watching one used in action, thinking that now no life need he held safe.” They were a small disregarded minority at ‘the time when the Tsar abdicated and the first Provisional Government was set up. Lenin did not arrive in Russia till a month after that took place. But the machine guu gave them their mastery, and by that they keep it still.