Manawatu Daily Times Soviets in the East

Manawatu Times, Volume LV, Issue 7295, 4 August 1930, Page 6

Manawatu Daily Times Soviets in the East

Communist influence in the East is chiefly thought of in connection with revolutionary movements in China, India, Indo-China and Java. But what is perhaps not generally realised or properly appreciated is the fact that the Soviet system is already securely entrenched over a vast expanse of the East in Central Asia and the Caucasus, inhabited by 20,000,000 people, the great majority of whom belong to Asiatic races. Those Soviets which are occasionally reported as established in disturbed districts of southern and central China are still built on shifting sand. But this Soviet regime in Central Asia and the Caucasus is a going concern, based not only on force and propaganda but on definite economic achievements which tend to remould the lives of the nomads of Kazakstan, the cotton planters of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and the polyglot peoples of the Caucasus.

Among these achievements one may mention (says the Christian Science Monitor) the thousand-mile stretch of new railroad, linking up Siberia and Turkestan; the extensive irrigation works projected and, to some extent, completed in Turkestan; the new textile centre which has grown up about Gandjha, in Azerbaijan; the expanded exploitation of such sources of natural wealth as the oil wells of Baku and Grozny and the manganese mines of Chiatouri, in the Caucasus; the new aeroplane lines, facilitating travel over mountains and deserts; the gradual improvement of roads and the institution of autobus services.

To a certain extent the Soviet revolution in the Oriental regions of the former Tsarist Empire marches hand in hand with the progressive and westernising movements which during the last generation have made themselves felt throughout Asia, from Turkey to China.' The points of similarity between the Eastern Soviet Republics and the neighbouring country of Turkey include the unveiling of women and encouragement of their participation in public life, the adoption of the Latin alphabet as an aid to eliminating illiteracy, and the campaign against the former great power and influence of the mullahs, or Muhammadan priests.

At the same time there are two important differences between the Soviet East and the neighbouring Asiatic countries, in the Soviet Union there is a conscious, determined effort to realise Socialism; consequently there has been a scrapping of former property rights and systems of land tenure which scarcely could be paralleled elsewhere. Then the great part of the impetus to change in the Soviet East came from Russia, and because Russia’s x-esources are available to support projects of industrialisation, the building of new factories, electric power plants and similar undertakings, it proceeds at a more rapid pace in the Soviet Union. That this change in the economic foundation of the formerly primitive countries of the Soviet East will, in the long xtxn, profoundly modify the character and mentality of their inhabitants, hardly can be doubted.

Car owners who leave their motors on the stands at night are well advised to lock them if possible. Lately in Palmerston North, quite a number have been removed by unauthorised persona but recovered next day abandoned in. some part of the city. On Saturday evening another car disappeared and was found yesterday morning returned almost to where it had been taken from*.

"One expects a stray dog in the,'city to be on the look-out, but when a dog is working sheep or cattle it is intent on its job, and it is the duty of motorists to slow down; they should not go past them at more than 10 miles at the outside,” commented Mr. J. L. Stout, S.M., at the Levin Magistrate’s Court when delivering judgment last week in a case where a drover successfully claimed damages for loss of a dog run oven