ILLUSIONS LOST IN RUSSIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23491, 4 May 1938, Page 20

ILLUSIONS LOST IN RUSSIA

Entering Soviet Russia as a Communist by conviction of long standing, Mr Eugene Lyons, an American journalist, describes in his book, “Assignment in Utopia,” how six years’ observation and experience of the Soviet brought utter disillusion. Indeed, the main motive of his book is the weight on his heart obliging him to testify, against his own personal hope and long-cher-ished conviction, to the pitiful, the fearful, enslavement, the endless unimaginable suffering of the Russian people. Above all, he writes at the end, I had the sense of leaving behind me a nation trapped: with bloodhounds and machine-guns guarding the frontiers; with every thought prescribed and curiosity punished as heresy: with hypocrisy as the first law of survival. In the past the word freedom had been whispered in secret caves, but now punishment was too swift and too deadly. There was no longer even >the solace of martyrdom for the defiant; a technique had been evolved for breaking their spirit and dragging them into the limelight for slobbering confessions of guilt