PRESSURE ON RUSSIA.

Evening Star, Issue 21381, 7 April 1933, Page 8

PRESSURE ON RUSSIA.

There was nothing “ diplomatic ” in the language of Sir Esmond Ovoy, Britain’s Ambassador to Moscow, in his protest against the arrests of Vickers’s employees, charged with committing acts of sabotage in Russia. Tho White Paper which has been issued by the British Government shows that it was singularly plaih-spoken and downright. Not less so was the language of Sir Robert Vansittart, Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who told the Russian Ambassador that the allegations against the engineers were regarded in London as “ grotesque and hysterical, staged as a part of the hunt for scapegoats owing to the ill-success of certain industrial undertakings in Russia.” There was some ground for the shocked protest of a Labour member that this was “ about as offensive a statement as could be made to any foreign ambassador.” But then the circumlocutions of traditional diplomatic language have always been despised by those whose ambition it has been, by no rose-water methods, to inaugurate a new world order, and if the Under-Secretary’s statement expressed the truth they should be the last people to take umbrage'at plain speaking. Conventionally speaking, the British Government went a long way, also, in demanding that its subjects should he released without a trial. The necessity for that was that a Russian trial, as the object of Russian courts lias been laid down by the highest legal authorities of the Soviet, might be something not recognisable as a trial' at all in any old-fashioned country. When a Government proclaims that the object of its courts is to further State policy before anything else, and makes the staging of “ grotesque and hysterical ” trials, meant to divert the thoughts of the multitude from its own shortcomings, a regular procedure, measures for the protection of persons who may come within that system cannot take any ordinary course.

Tbo guilt of these British engineers lias been assumed in Russia from the start. When one of them, with no charge made against him, was submitted to a iirst examination of nineteen hours by three teams of examiners, and a second of seventeen hours, tho vast legal experience of Sir John Simon was not needed to support him in his contention that “any testimony obtained by those means was rubbish.” The Russian professors, charged with sabotage and international conspiracy in a previous case, seem to have confessed anything under such ordeals. It was no wonder that the Englishmen, when seen by their Ambassador in the presence of Russian officials, were dumb-stricken and cowed. Their conviction would have a further advantage for the Soyiet rulers if it forced the Metropolitan Vickers Company to abandon its work in Russia, giving them an excuse to withhold large payments understood to bo owing to it. It would not he the first British company that has failed to collect its dues from Russia, the case of the Lena Goldfields Company, awarded thirteen million pounds by a special tribunal, after its premises had been raided and its operations rudely terminated, being another in point. Thirty-five Russian prisoners, who wore arrested at tho samo time as the British - engineers, were shot without being tried. The importance which the British outlook attaches to human life may bo strange to the rulers of the Soviet Union, but tho prospect of an embargo on Russian exports, for which legal powers are now being taken with very lew objectors in the House of Commons, may cause them to reflect that the execution of these strangers on a foreign soil would not be State policy. Something bigger than • mock trials of foreigners would '=)i likely to bo required soon to make

Russians in the mass believe that, except for alien dust in the wheels, their State system is working well. The special correspondent of the Manchester ‘Guardian’ reports: —“Unless the decay in agriculture [which is purely Russian] is stopped, famine will extend throughout the country. Not 5 per cent, of Russians enjoy a standard of life that approaches that of the English unemployed on the lowest scale of relief.” And the ‘Guardian’ has hover been disposed to make the worst of Russia.