THUNDER ON THE LEFT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 2 April 1938, Page 8

THUNDER ON THE LEFT

MOSCOW PURGES lßy Air Mail—From Our Own Correspondent I LONDON. 10th March. Two former Soviet Ambassadors to London are among the twenty-one Russian notables now going through the Moscow farce of trial for their lives on a treason charge. All these victims of an infinitely more terroristic regime than that of the Tsars are distinguished associates of the authors of Russia’s Red Revolution and have held high Soviet posts. Those who have read “Assignment in Utopia.” by the American Communist Eugene Lyons, will not be astonished if, as in previous trials, these eminent Bolsheviks make grovelling confessions of their guilt. The Spanish Inquisition’s ingenuity never achieved the refinements of Moscow’s prison third degree as administered by the Ogpu. Moreover, in Bolshevik legal code, unlike the Roman, mere conjectured intention, though never pul into action, equals criminal commission. Probably all these men will be pistolled in the back in a prison corridor by a carpet-slippered gunman. Meanwhile, in London pamphlets are being circulated, exhorting us to replace our National Government by one that will co-operate with Moscow’s WHAT LIES BEHIND? To onlookers in other lands the intriguing but baffling problem is what actually lies behind these Moscow purges. According lo well-informed' testimony the total of these recent Stalin activities is not far short of four thousand victims. Is Soviet Russia in the automatic grip of a mad Dictator in shadows and sees conspirators in every corner? Is there any substance in the almost incredible official propaganda about a far-flung web of Trotskian counter-revolutionary machination? Or have Lenin’s old associates in reality taken part in some desperate subterranean plot to rid Russia and themselves of the Man of Steel, of whom Lenin commented that he was “too brutal,” now recognised as an usurping Frankenstein monster? One fact is worth pondering. The Moscow troubles ensued on the old issue of the succession, once the first unanointed Dictator of the Revolution passed away, and left no constitutional heir. Neither Germany nor Italy have yet encountered this traditional crisis.