TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21493, 17 May 1933, Page 11

TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA

OGPU'S GRIM RULE DREAD TRINITY OF POWER LONDON. May 9 " Before Russi.a can be happy and prosperous, the Ogpu (secret police) must go, and I believe that eventually it will disappear as a tragic, terrible relic of a transitional phase," declares a special correspondent of the News Chronicle, who remained in Moscow after the recent trial of the British engineers, to study the Russian riddle. Until the Soviet deprives this sinister body of its peculiar powers and transforms it into civil police'in accordance with modern ideas, says the writer, Russians will never feel secure nor will the Soviet command the world's confidence.

Every man and woman arrested by tho Ogpu—which possesses the dread trinity of power, being investigator, judge and executioner—knows that whether innocent or guilty he may disappear without trace. The Ogpu makes 3000 arrests a month, compared with 7000 a month- last year, which is regarded as proof of the growing stability of Stalin's regime. Soviet's Creation of Classes As a matter of fact, essential liberties arc non-existent in Russia, whose revolutionaries liberated the land from one tyranny and imposed another more deadly, replacing the exploitation of man by man with the exploitation of man by the State. Moreover, the suggestion that the Soviet is evolving an ideal classless State is an illusion. On the contrary, it is creating classes as fast as possible. Already 85 classes exist. The only classless elements are the outcasts, who are in an infinitely worse plight than the British " bottom dog," owing to tho passport system introduced to relieve the appalling congestion in Moscow, where 4,000,000 people live on an averago floor space of five square yards a person. People Now Merely Robots It was hoped that passports indicating membership of a trades union or other recognised category would reduce the population by 1,000,000 useless mouths, consisting of poor who had struggled thither in search of succour, forcing them to die in ditches or end their useless lives. " When I heard," says the correspondent, " that ' humanism,' had replaced God, I asked where was the humanism in this grim experiment. The people, whether commissars or factory workers, are mere robots subjected to iron discipline, and their actions are easily construed as wrecking or counterrevolutionary if the Ogpu wishes. Hence its power over millions of homes. " All literature is mere ideology, the newspapers 1 are State gramophones, and the Courts echoes of the Soviet's policy. I believe that Russia some day will become an industrial State, with a standard of living comparable with the best in the world, but not on the basis of pure Communism."