LATEST SOVIET PURGE

Evening Star, Issue 22805, 13 November 1937, Page 15

LATEST SOVIET PURGE

CHARGES DF SPYING AND WRECKING HUNDREDS OF ARRESTS PROMINENT HEN INCLUDED Press Association —By Telegraph—Copyrgh* LONDON, November 11. The ‘ Daily Telegraph’s ’ Moscow correspondent states: “It is understood that the Commissariat of Internal Affairs offered to furnish Berlin with evidence from arrested spies that some Germans who signed confessions implicating other German representatives here have been put across the frontier after protracted negotiations. About 400 Germans, mostly members of the Left Wing and political refugees, are at present kept as prisoners on charges of spying and wrecking. “ The latest arrests include Professor Tupoleff who was the real creator of the Red Air Force, a famous series of machines constructed by him, including the recent transpolar record makers, but his initials. A.N.T., are now being removed from the machines; M. Bubnof, the recently dismissed Commissar of Education and Fine Arts; M. Kurtz, a former president of the Volga German Republic; M. Yakovleff, a former Commissar of Agriculture who carried out M. Stalin’s policy of collectivisation; M. Chernof, who was recently dismissed from the position of Commissar of Agriculture; M. Besimianski, deputy poet laureate, who was famous for bloodthirsty verses commemorating the execution of traitors; M. Tretiakoff, the author, who was allegedly a Japanese spy for 21 years; and M. Nissen, a. trusted cameraman who made close-up talkies of M. Stalin at the Soviet Congress last November. He is allegedly a Nazi terrorist. The majority of the vast numbers recently arrested are charged with wrecking or spying on behalf of a ‘ foreign State.’ There have been 496 death sentences passed by public courts in October on similar charges.”

The correspondent says M. Marenieff, M. Datvias, and M. Karski, Soviet Ambassadors in Germany, Poland. and Turkey, have been arrested in the latest purge. It is also reported that the German Consul-General at Leningrad, Herr Sommer, has been, recalled to Berlin at the demand of the Soviet. M. Datvia’s wife, Madame Maxakova, once a well-known opera singer, and several members of his staff are also believed to be prisoners. She is charged with association with Trotskyist plotters. M. Podolski, a former counsellor at the Soviet Embassy in Warsaw and now Minister in Lithuania, is also believed to be “ in trouble.