SOVIET TERRORISM

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 July 1929, Page 10

SOVIET TERRORISM

“PURGING” THE UNIVERSITIES. MOSCOW, June 1. Russian Universities are again being purged. This week the heresy hunt is on in the Moscow Faculty of Medicine. Its first consequence has been the resignation of the famous Professor Dimitri Pletnief, Russia s great heart specialist, who has long held the Chair of Internal Diseases. Professor Pletnief refuses to appeal against the decision of the hobbledehoys he has to lecture to, that he is an unsuitable person for forming the medical minds of Marxian physicians and Leniist surgeons. His indictment by the Student-Court (a new way found for purging science without direct intervention of the Bolshevik Government machine) is most enlightening: Professor Pletnief, it declares, “the most popular doctor in Moscow,” makes a big income by private practice. * “Some of his (doubtless aspiring) colleagues point out that although he has held the Chair for many years he has not yet created any new school of medical thought (sic), but none the less cleverly contrives to inspire others with the idea of his enormous learnFurthermore —and worse —although he has shown no overt enmity against the Soviet regime he does not seem to wish to participate in “social work.” It should be understood that “social work” in current jargon does not mean philanthropy, but political meetings. According to all recently published reports, students of Moscow University shine in social work, but still leave much to be desired in cerebral work.

“COMB-OUT” COMMISSION. Among other professors whose names were sent up by the Medical Students’ Commission to the “CombOut” Commission were: Professor Garoushkin, holder of the Chair of Psychiatry. The students, we are informed, have suggested that he is “double-faced.” Of course, he has made all necessary declarations of loyalty, but they are particularly indignant that he never attacks the Soviet regime with his visor open, merely making covert jokes about it in his lectures.

As they have been officially informed that Professor Garoushkin is a great specialist who cannot for the moment be replaced, the Students’ Commission has decided to put up with him on condition that he is politically quarantined. Then here is Fomin, Professor of Histology, who so far forgets himself as to use Biblical quotations. He must go. Also Archangelski, Professor of Gynecology, who even uses God’s name in lecturing. (Probably only expletively, but that does not excuse him). So he is described as a “Gynecologist with a Crucifix.” As to Professor Sakaroff —who holds the Chair of General Pathology—he refuses to make scientific • affirmations, and “avoids clearly formulating his scientific opinions, thus breaking the students’ faith in scientific knowledge and in any scientific theory.” The students think he is not as suitable a person to educate them as the dialetically minded (i.e., Marxian) doctors’ proletariat needs. Altogether there are 1,100 professors and lecturers who may be cooked on this “fundamentalist” grid. One is Professor Chaianof, well known to Oxford and Cambridge Agrarian economists. It is not surprising that the students have decided to take the initiative in this business. They have already been thoroughly combed out themselves.

Moreover, roughly 54 per cent, of last year’s matriculations to Moscow University were members of the Bolshevik Party or Communist Youth Organisation, and only one single student was admitted who was not either Communist or the son of a Soviet official.

SOCIALISING THE DRAMA. The Soviet authorities have decided to the famous Moscow Arts Theatre, which hitherto has managed to put up an almost single-handed fight against the controlling and deadening influence of the Bolshevists in the artistic world of the city. The theatre has been “found wanting” by a mixed commission of the Bolshevist art officials and representatives of the peculiarly Red ward of Moscow in which its three playhouses happen to lie. The Arts Theatre, of course, was nationalised—confiscated —more than ten years ago along with other private property, but that is no longer enough. Soviet Russia has now definitely left mere economic nationalisation behind, and in future every form of artistic activity is definitely to be made to express the ideals and disseminate the propaganda of the ruling party.

For thirty years the Arts Theatre has been run by its founder, Maecenas Constantin Stanislawski, and while he has put on recently a number of tactfully eulogistic plays concerning the new regime, the fact remains that the whole atmosphere of the theatre and the character of its plays have been entirely removed from the outlook of conventional Bolshevism.

Accordingly the commission of inquiry has decreeed that “as a guarantee of correct political leadership,” a new Communist manager shall be appointed, nominally as a co-manager with Stanislawski and Nemirowitch-Dan-chenko, who together have managed .the Arts Theatre without a hitch, all these years. The committee also invites the State Department of Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection to dischaige such actors as it considers “foreign to the Soviet regime,” replacing them by trusted Bolshevist members. The present management is condemned for not allowing political posters to be hung in the foyer where only the portraits of great dramatists, great actors and the theatre’s symbol of a seagull, commemorating its first triumph with Tchekhov’s play of that title, have been hitherto exhibited.

Two other main charges are made against the Arts Theatre—first, that it has been the only theatre which has not had any “plan” in its productional work. Anybody knowing contemporary Russia, which has plans covering every contingency, however remote of however trivial, will understand the gravity of that charge. Secondly, the committee orders the immediate liquidation of-a charity fund-maintain-ed by renting the managers’ private boxes. Out of this fund' "the Arts Theatrb company has kept a few sick actors in sanatoria, paid a pension to the invalid sister of a dead cleaner of the house, and, worst of all, paid a small pension to the destitute widow of Sava Moros, Russia’s radical-mind-ed textile magnate who heavily endowed the Arts Theatre in its early days. This “unnecessary philanthropy” lav-

ished on private persons is described as “nothing less than a waste of State means.” . This is only part of the tightening of the screws in matters artistic and scientific, which, in the words of one observer,- “are a -necessary accompaniment in Moscow of any tightening of belts.” Following the election, on the demand of the governing party, of a large number of Bolshevists to the Russian Academy of Science, it has now been decided to submit all future candidates to that Academy—distinguished scholars to a man—to a preliminary examination in the rudiments of Marxism.

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