SOVIET MODESTY.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 154, 1 June 1937, Page 8

SOVIET MODESTY.

LEADERS CRITICISE THEIR WORK. • CONFESS SHORTCOMINGS. Adapting themselves to the “new party line,” the heads of all Soviet Government departments and regional party committees are now criticising their own organisation frankly, states the Moscow correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. Encouraged by this, some ot their subordinates a.re also venturing oil criticism. The Commissar for Foreign Trade (M. Rosenholtz), recently confessed that his department had been the principal channel used by “Fascist agents’’ inside Russia to communicate with their headquarters abroad. One after another 53 members oi M, Rosenholtz’s staff then denounced their own “blunted political vigilance and general carelessness in relations with capitalist firms. Speaking at Kharbarovsk, Comrade Krutoff, party secretary for the lied Far East—that is supreme political chief there —gave the most striking demonstration of the new “official modesty” so far reported. Building work in that key frontier region, he said, had been expensive, bad and very slow. The harvest of 1936 was poor, and the waste of giain during the harvesting considerable. Their cattle raising was nothing to boast about, and they were still losing large numbers of young animals. The coal output had slumped sharply in the last quarter of 1936, and there had been no improvement since, although coal and oil were the key problem for the defence and munitioning oi the Ear East. For most of this Krutoff blamed the “Trotskyist wreckers.”