The Hawera Star FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 1935. RUSSIA’S CHANGING SCENE.

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 1 March 1935, Page 6

The Hawera Star

FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 1935. RUSSIA’S CHANGING SCENE.

Delivered every evening by 5 o'clock in Hawera, Manaia, Kaupokonui, Otakeho, Oeo, Pihama, Opunake, Eltham, Ngaere, Mangatoki, Kaponga, Awatnna, Te Kiri, Mahoe, Lowgarth, Manutahi, Kakaramea, Alton, Hurleyville, Fatea, WFenuakura, Waverley, Mokoia, Whakamara, Ohangai, Meremere, Fraser Road and Ararat*-

Nothing that has occurred in Russia for years is so significant as the recent merciless drive against opposition Communists. This onslaught has brought about the execution of fourteen Communists for alleged complicity in the assassination of Sergei Kiroff and it has resulted in the sentencing- of ninety-eight others, including two of Lenin’s early disciples, to imprisonment and banishment. Neither executions nor arrests, of course, are novelties in Russia. But it is significant of profound change in social and economic thinking that the sharpest edge of Soviet terrorism should now be directed not against “counterrevolutionaries’’ in the form of well-to-do peasants or intellectuals of the older generation. but against Communists, who perhaps have held more tenaciously to the original ideals of their cause than have Stalin and his associates in power. The background for the drive against left-wing Communists is clear to anyone who has been attentive to trends in Russia the last year or two. Armed with absolute, dictatorial ppwer, Stalin has been scrapping a number of

cherished Communist ideas and methods. One sees the Soviet Union suddenly joining the League of Nations, after Communist orators during the last decade had been assuring the Russian masses that it was an instrument of “ capitalist imperialism. ” Propaganda for world revolution, one of Lenin’s fundamental objectives, has been so curbed and softened as to be almost innocuous. Russia is playing the oldfashioned diplomatic game of treaties and alliances, instead ofstanding aloof and denouncing the real or supposed machinations of all the “capitalist powers.” Inside Russia there is a strident official propaganda for material inequality. Mr Bernard Shaw may freely advocate equality of income to a mildly interested, mildly bored and altogether tolerant British public opinion. But if he should preach this doctrine in Russia at its present stage of state-capitalist, development- he would soon find himself . behind the barbed-wire barriers of one of the numerous Soviet concentration camps. The last vestiges of workers’ control are being abolished in the factories; the new governing class of high Communist officials, managers and directors of state economic enterprises is concentrating in its hands more and more power and is becoming differentiated from the masses by a higher standard, of living. The sentimental appeal of Russia to radicals in other lands is likely to decline in pretty, direct proportion to the number of Communists whom Stalin finds it necessary to shoot or exile."