Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, DEC. 11, 1930. A SOVIET BURLESQUE.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LI, Issue 10, 11 December 1930, Page 6

Manawatu Evening Standard. THURSDAY, DEC. 11, 1930. A SOVIET BURLESQUE.

The trial of the Russian professors and engineers for plotting' against the safety of Soviet Russia has ended as generally expected. The death sentence was the inevitable outcome for some, but that it would be carried out was quite beyond the bounds of possibility, for the proceedings constituted one of the greatest farces in the history of the world’s criminal courts. Almost before the ink was dry on the Judges’ decree the deatii sentences had been commuted to ten years* imprisonment for four of the accused, while the period of detention imposed on the others was reduced to eig'ht years. The Soviet authorities explain as the reason for their clemency the fact that the testimony of the accused has “disarmed the counter-revolutionary organisation acting as the agent for the interventionist circles ruling in bourgeois Erance,” and the Soviet “cannot be guided by a mere desire for revenge, particularly in relation to confessed and repentant criminals who have been rendered harmless.” When the infamous massacre of the intelligentsia in Russia, which shocked the whole world, is recalled, and the religious persecution of a few months back is remembered, one might hope, in view of the Soviet declaration, that the cruel savage blood lust of the Bolshevik dictators and of their ever present secret police is at an end. There can, however, be no guarantee of this. The accused persons were no more than clay in the hands of the Soviet potters, being moulded to their special desires to explain to the peasantry the failure of the Eive Year Plan. It was quite easy to select Britain and Erance as the two centres wherein plots could be manufactured, because the latter has given an asylum to Russians who were dispossessed of their property at the Revolution, while many in Britain to-day still look upon the Bolsheviks, who repudiated payment of the Czarist debts, as an outlawed people. There were so many obvious flaws in the proceedings—people were named who either did not exist or who were dead, and the proceedings were so akin to the staging of a moving picture comedy—that there was little doubt in England and Erance as to the genuineness of the trial. In the eyes of the world the Soviet stands convicted as a fraud, but carefully tutored by propaganda its people will, in the dire extremes of hunger and poverty i o which their dictators have brought them, blame the capitalists of the “bourgeois” countries for their misfortunes. So ends the biggest burlesque on justice staged in our time, as the London Daily Express puts it. Soviet anger, however, has

also been, directed at tbe United States, where a Congressional Commission recently investigated Bolshevik activities, the “red newspapers being full of red-hot comments on what they call the ‘anti-Soviet campaign’,” as one writer puts it. Russian newspapers have declared that America is to be punished for its campaign by the transfer of Soviet purchases to Germany, England, or Sweden. There seems little doubt but that the Russian dictators are afraid of the consequences arising from the economic condition to which they have reduced their country, and by directing their propaganda against foreign Governments they seek to transfer the responsibility for the ill-effects of their policy.