MOSCOW SNUBS BERLIN

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6992, 19 August 1929, Page 12

MOSCOW SNUBS BERLIN

MAY DAY INSULTS.

Tlie Soviet Government has made the Gorman Government eat humble pie (states the Berlin correspondence of the Daily Mail). On May Day a model of the new Gorman cruiser, with comic actors on board, dressed to represent the German Chancellor (Herr Muller) and his colleagues, was one of the attractions of the Moscow procession reviewed by Voroshiloff, Commissar for the Red army. The cruiser bore the inscription: “Eight million marks for armoured cruisers; not a pfennig for feeding children; bullets for the unemployed." In his speech Voroshiloff, it was reported, spoke of the downtrodden Germany, where the President of Police, like the former Tsars of Russia, forbade the workers to demonstrate on May 1. In Leningrad a riotous crowd demonstrated against, Germany outside the Consulate. The German Government ordered its ambassador to protest to Moscow against this interference in German affairs. The reply was that the authentic text of the Commissar’s speech does not contain the passage complained of, and that the Leningrad demonstration must have been spontaneous. Ordinary Germans were not satisfied with the reply and that moderate newspaper, tho Borsen-Courier, stated that the insults to Germany were deliberately arranged. Kalenin and Rykov, it said, were against the proposed insults to Germany, but Voroshiloff said that as honorary president of the German Red Pront Pighters ’ organisation he would lose all credit with the Communists of Germany if he did not condemn the action of the Berlin Police president. He added that, whatever happened, Germany would not dare to break diplomatic relations with the Soviet during the Paris Conference. It was finally arranged that no Commissiar except Voroshiloff should appear at the May Day demonstration, as Stalin, the Soviet dictator, ordered him to attack Germany in his speech, and to make caricatures of the German Minister’s figure iu the procession. All this tho German Government knows perfectly well, of course, but is prepared to humiliato itself to retain the favour of Moscow.