RUSSIA’S WANTON AGGRESSION

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 9 January 1940, Page 4

RUSSIA’S WANTON AGGRESSION

SPAIN was already looked up-m by Lenin as* the most promising field fo r Bolshevik action from where his blessings could most conveniently be showered upon France and the rest of Western Europe, says the writer, continuing. Under Stalin’s new policy it

was here that the programme of the creation of a popular front, of strikes and disorders, civil war and the establishment of a Soviet Government seemed to insure complete success. Large numbers of revolutionary experts were dispatched from Moscow; Rosenberg went as Ambassador to Madrid; Antonov-Ovseenko as ConsulGeneral to Barcelona. Everything appeared to be going according to plan. Unfortunately for Stalin the civil war went wrong. Meanwhile poor Spain had become the battlefield where’ Soviet Russia, Italy and Germany fought out their ideological differences. Next to Stalin’s action in Spain came that in France. A two years’ rule of the Popular Front played fast and loose with the country’s economic position as well as with its finances. But the country saw through the scheme after the war scare of September, 1 938, and far from falling asunder in internecine strife the whole nation was roused in the hour of danger by a wave !of patriotism and rallied round I democracy’s high ideals. It being Iso evident that Stalin’s peace policy was absolutely insincere and nothing else than a masked gesture for leading the world into war, it seemed almost incredible to Sir William Oudendyk that responsible statesmen of Great Britain and France could have entertained the slightest hope of inducing that great Bolshevik leader to join a Peace Front. Nothing, he says, could be further from that man’s mind. His own utterances as well as those of his collaborators and the expositions of Soviet Russia’s policy were there to prove this. In his book “Ways and By -ways in Diplomacy,’’ published last August, Sir William wrote in the epilogue dated 1 sth May, a warning against any optimism about the negotiations then going on in Moscow. He quoted Mecklis, Chief of the political department of the Red Army, who on sth ! April declared once more that the invincible Soviet ship would be steered by her great captain Stalin to final combat with capitalism and to the triumph of Communism in the whole universe. Did Britain and France, he asks, rely on Stalin’s noble statement of March, 1939, that he and his Government stood for the support of nations which are victims of aggression and are fighting for the independence of their country, The Poles were victims of wanton aggression and were fighting desperately for the independence of their country. Stalin’s army marched in on 1 7th September and annexed two-thirds of it. On 25 th September the Polish officers who defended themselves in Vilna and Polish landowners were put against the wall and shot. That was Stalin’s old policy. Since the above was written there is the tragic story of Finland to be added to Russia’s wanton aggression—with further threats in other directions.