BOLSHEVIKS IN ECLIPSE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22612, 28 December 1936, Page 8

BOLSHEVIKS IN ECLIPSE

Trotsky's charge that Stalin is deliberately "liquidating" the Communist revolution by killing off its old leaders contains too many elements of truth to be comfortably received by the dictator in Moscow. The trial and execution of 16 leading Bolsheviks last August brought to public notice a process of elimination that had been proceeding for years, beginning with the exile of Trotsky himself. World opinion was especially shocked, however, by the shooting of Zinoviev and Kainenev, Lenin's closest comrades while Stalin was still unheard of and Trotsky not yet a Bolshevik. Of the seven original members of the Politburo who were present at the foundation of the Soviet State, Stalin alone remains. The execution of the 16 was merely the culmination, but probably not the end, of the renewed "heresy hunt" started by Stalin two years ago, when 117 persons lost their lives to expiate the murder of Kirov. In this respect the Communist Revolution is repeating the history of other revolutions. As Danton remarked on his way to the scaffold, when they have consumed everyone else, revolutions consume themselves. Apart from this ghastly precedent, Stalin has been in conflict with the orthodox Bolsheviks on Marxist doctrine. Trotsky and the others have laid stress on the "international social revolution," an essential part of the Marxist creed which nevertheless kept the Soviet at loggerheads with the whole world. Stalin preferred to subordinate this larger objective to the smaller one of "Socialism in a single State." That fact is important in international relationships and explains Russia's rehabilitation in the diplomatic world. Yet, if Stalin succeeds in suppressing missionary Communism, he seems destined to replace it with a military autocracy and a nationalism that themselves hold threats to the world's peace.