Ogpu’s Grim Rule

Horowhenua Chronicle, 19 May 1933, Page 8

Ogpu’s Grim Rule

DREAD TRINITY OF POWER TRAGEDY OP RUSSIA LONDON, May 9. ‘ ‘ Before Russia can be happy and 'prosjierous, the Ogpu. (secret police) must go, and I believe that eventually it will disappear as a tragic, terrible relic of a transitional phase, ’ ’ declares a special correspondent of the NewsChronicle, who remained in Moscow after the recent trial of the British engineers, to study the Russian riddle. Until the Soviet deprives this sinister body of its peculiar powers and transforms it into civil police in accordance with modern ideas, says the writer, Russians will never feel secure nor win the Soviet command the world’s confidence. Every man and woman arrested by the Ogpu—which possesses the dread trinity of power, being investigator, judge and executioner —knows that \vhether innocent or guilty he may disappear without trace. The Ogpu makes 3000 arrests a month, compared with 7000 a month last year, .which* is regarded as proof of Hie growing stability of Stalin’s regime. Soviets s Creation of Classes'. As a matter of fact, essential liberties are non-existent in Russia, whose revolutionaries liberated the land from one tyranny and' imposed another more deadly, (replacing the exploitation ox man by man with the exploitation of man by the State. Moreover, the suggestion that the Soviet is evolving an ideal classless State is an illusion. On the contrary, it is creating classes as fast as possible. Already 85 classes exist. The only classless elements are the outcasts, who are in an infinitely worse plight than the British “bottom dog, ’’ owing to the passport system introduced to relieve the appalling congestion in Moscow, where 4,000,000 people live on an average floor space-- of five square yards a person. People Now Merely Robots. It was hoped that passports indicating membership of a trades union or other recognised category would reduce the population by 1,000,000 useless mouths, consisting of poor who had 1 struggled thither in search of succour, forcing them to die in ditches or end their useless lives. “When I heard,” says the correspondant, ‘ ‘ that ‘ humanism ’ h{id replaced God, I asked where was the humanism - in this grim experiment/ The people, whether, commissars or factory workers, are mere robots subjected to iron discipline, and their actions are easily construed as wrecking or coun-ter-revolutionary if the Ogpu wishes. Hence its power over millions of homes. “All literature is mere Soviet ideoiogy, the newspapers are State gramophones, and the Courts echoes of the Soviet’s policy.- I believe that Russia some day will become an industrial State, with a standard of living comparable with the, best in the world, but not on the basis of pure Communism.”