AMAZING RUSSIANS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 11 March 1943, Page 3

AMAZING RUSSIANS

TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THEM

USEFUL WORK BY FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

INSIDE STORY OF SOVIET DEVELOPMENT

While an amazed world looks on at the relentless offensive of the Russians over a 2.000-mile front of great depth and complexi y, Mr Walter Duranty, for 20 years the best-informed foreign correspondent in Moscow, explains in his Jatest book, ‘ The Kremlin and the People,” some of the complexities of Russian character.

As most people reading or thinking about Russia have a political bias one way or another, writes Crayton Burns, in the Melbourne “Argus,’ Mr Duranty protests with some acerbity that he has no politics except a contempt for politics. He has always been a reporter seeking to find and state the truth about current happenings. It may be added that he is a pertinacious reporter, with an honest, prehensile, and analytical mind. If it proves, as it probably will, that his book is capable of interpretation to suit the prejudices of readers of widely differing affiliations, the reason may be that each different deduction is right, for the subject is complex. People, he says, do not change quickly in their nature. Russians are always Russians, although the new Russians dislike being reminded of it. The wonderful thing about them is that they are so Russian, so alike in char- j acter, although there are 79 different major languages in the USSR and hundreds of minor dialects. They act alike and think alike. Every Russian is the same Russian, kind, cruel, hospitable, envious, suspicious, affectionate, generous; will shoot you as soon as look, and, if he happens to miss, might kiss you on both cheeks the next minute. The main purpose of the book appears to be to explain the murder and treason trials and the purge, which shook the republics to their foundations, horrified the outside world, and ; led Hitler 7 years ago into perpetrating his greatest blunder in believing that the Soviet was so corrupt and crumbling that it could be undermined by intrigue and crushed by a blitzkrieg. The murder of Kirof at Leningrad in December, 1934, he says, was a turn-ing-point in Soviet history, if not the history of Europe and the world. Perhaps it was the first shot in the RussoGerman conflict, which did not burst into open flame until June, 1941. It marked the end of the period of internal conciliation in the USSR, and drove the Kremlin in to the fantastic treason trials and The Purge, or, as the Russians call it, the Chistka, which means cleansing. Sergey Kirof was close to Stalin, although junior in years. One of the toughest of the younger Bolsheviks, he had been Stalin’s man from the start, and Stalin had made him party chief in Leningrad to counteract and destroy the influence of the opposition leaders, Zinovief, Yevdokimof, and Bakayef. He was fatally shot in his office by the worthless husband of Kirof’s young woman secretary, but there was more to it, Duranty argues, than a crime of passionel. The husband was more flattered than distressed by Kirof’s penchant for his wife, and had made use of it for his own advancement. Stalin’s burning anger was not against the murderer, btu against the OGPU, whose leaders, he was convinced, had instigated the murder. Its Leningrad leaders were immediately placed on trial for “culpable negligence 1 ” in permitting the murder, and out of the investigations and trials which followed, the Nazi collusion with the opposition to overthrow Stalin and the regime was discovered and crushed. Up to the time of Kirof’s murder ‘ Stalin had been widely attacked by personal adversaries, Russian and foreign, as a cruel and heartless man, but in point of fact he was remarkably long-suffering jn his treatment of the various oppositions, as the record shows. The Kremlin’s struggle with the Opposition began before Lenin’s death, and again and again one or other of the Opposition leaders admitted his faults, beat his breasts, and cried ‘Mea maxima cupla’ and the Kremlin (which means Stalin) forgave him. The murder of Kirof hardened Stalin’s steel into knives for his enemies’ throats.”

Duranty calculates that before the purge was over fully half a million persons were exiled from their homes in circumstances of distress and humiliation; more than 2,000 death sentences were published in Moscow and provincial papers. From 60 to 70 per cent, ot the leaders in every field of Soviet activity and endeavour were

“purged,” and of these at least onethird were shot. Of the Council of Commissars, numbering 21 at the end of 1936, there now remain 5; one died, the rest were shot or disappeared. Besides the 8 generals executed in June, 1937, there were their 8 judges in the military tribunal which sentenced them. Only Ulrich, the chairman, and Budenny survive, and only Gorbachef, Commander of the Cossacks, died in bed. Of the Central Committee of the Communist party numbering 71 at the beginning of 1934, 21 remained active, 3 died naturally, Kirof was assassinated, 5 quietly disappeared, 31 were arrested, one committed suicide, and 9 were shot. The party as a whole numbered 2,000,000 and 1,200.000 candidates in 1933, a total of 3,200,000 men and women In December, 1937, there were fewer than 1,500,000 members and candidates altogether. Most of those who went were expelled, and a large proportion of these were eventually allowed to return to their homes and resume their jobs. Some observers placed the number killed as high as 30,000 or 40,000. and the exiled at a million, but Duranty suggests that those figures were exaggerated. The actual facts were bad enough. There was, he says, “a state of mass hysteria, fanned and maddened by the gnome-like Yezhof (head of the OGPU), who later perished himself in the fire which he had lighted. For 2 years terror, hatred and greed ran rife across hapless Russia in an orgy of slander and denunciation, when sons sent their fathers death and wives destroyed their husbands. The paramount factor was fear. Few adults had an unstained conscience, and Russians are fluent in speech. Each man or woman who remembered rash, foolish words, began to shiver uneasily, and decided to play safe by denouncing somebody else.

There was hatred—you had an enemy, you sent a note to the OGPU, and the enemy disappeared. The Press Department of the Foreign Office was purged from top to bottom, and we suspect that 2 censors whom we had known and liked for years were shot. We suspect others shared the same fate. At least 75 per ijent. of the higher per onnel of the Diplomatic Corps disappeared, and most of them were known to have been shot. Of the Soviet Ambassadors and Ministers abroad in 1937, only Maisky, in London, still holds his post ” According to Duranty, it was Stalin himself who stopped the purge, moti-

vated by reports from Beria, party secretary of the Caucasian Federation, that production in the factories was falling deplorably and there was confusion everywhere; and reports from Voroshilov, Commissar of Defence, that the foundations of discipline and comradeship in the Army were crumbling. Stalin displaced Yezhof with Beria, many victims were promptly reinstated to their former homes and positions. The nation reacted from horror and anguish to joy and relief. People walked with their heads in thp air again, talked and smiled, talked actually to foreigners instead of looking askance.

Duranty, who reported the largest trial, and writes with the typescript of the others before him, devotes much time emphasising that these trials were, in the main, just, according to the prevailing standards of Russian military justice. The Western world was bewildered by the anxiety of the generals and others to convict themselves, but he points out that they had already confessed their guilt and had been found guilty by the pieliminary tribunals. The purpose of the Court was merely to determine the degree of guilt and decide the punishment. The suggestion of drugs and torture he dismisses as nonsense. There was something about the whole proceedings very much like the Western ecclesiastical (trials of the Middle Ages, like the concession of Essex on the scaffold cf his (treason against Queen Elizabeth. Although backsliders against the Communist faith, the Communists were still believers. They had been brought to a conviction not only of crime, but of sin. They were all intelligent and able men, theatrical to a high degree in a theatrical asmosphere. knowing that they held the world stage for an hour, and that when the curtain went down they would face the firing squads. They were anxious to put themselves right with their consciences and before history.

As to the justice of the findings, he was forced by the evidence to 3 conclusions: “(1) Most of the conflict between the Kremlin and the generals (and politicians) had nothing to do with conspiracy or Trotsky, or the Gestapo; (2) The accused did dicker with the Germans (and some of them probably —with the Japanese); (3) They probably discussed, possibly planned, but certainly did not attempt a military coup d’etat.” He makes an exception of the doctors, against whom the charges of permitting important people like Gorky to die through negligence or unskilful treatment were fantastic and absurb4

The reaction of the mass of the people to The Purge, he says, including those exiled and restored, was that The Purge was worth what it cost. The Russians shot their fifth columnists, the French made them Cabinet Ministers. You see the results to-day at Vichy and the Red war fronts.

“You cannot understand Russia unless you talk to the people,’ *Duranty concludes, “to the little ones, the men who never got purged because they were unimportant. They do not ask for much; first bread, not bread and butter, but bread, with perhaps a piece of meat. And a wife to love, and children, because they come. And warmth against winter, because winter is cold. And clothing—oh, yes; they need that —and, of course, they want other things, too. They want education, because they are Russian, the most avid-for-education of any race on this earth. They want travel, because they are nomads. They may want—l am not sure—the right to vote by ballot, the right to worship, the right to talk as they please. Of these things I am not sure. But I know of another right which every Russian has —the right to fight and die for his own country, which all Russians love.”