Prisoner of the Soviet

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24633, 14 June 1941, Page 4

Prisoner of the Soviet

Mr Ameel is a Belgian national who was born and educated in Russia, and his book covers periods of his life both under the Czarist regime and the new Soviet State which emerged from the bloody revolution of 1917 He does not deal with the political aspects of gov-., ernment except in an abstract sense, but his work shows a profound and reasonably-stated contempt for the Soviet and all its works;' It is. in fact; a biased picture that he presents, although that could scarcely be otherwise considering the treatment that was meted out to him for no reason whatever, unless he is deliberately withholding something—a possibility which, in view of a singularly good faith generally apparent, does not seem likely. He does not write at any length on pre-revolutionary Russia, nor with his experiences in the Russian Navy, but hastens to the post-revolutionary era when, because of his knowledge of timber and forestry, he was stationed along the Finnish frontier as a forest and game warden His picture of Russian conditions applies almost entirely to a small corner of Russia and to a limited cross-section of the community but the facts he gives have been more or less borne out by other writers who have used a larger canvas to stress the bestiality and brutality, the corruption and crime of Soviet Russia—conditions which undeniably existed until that country began to settle down to some semblance of law and order. Totalitarian law and order, however, are vastly different from those prevailing in democratic countries, and in the emergence from a despotic Czarist rule

Red Hell. By Joseph Ameel (Hale). 15s 6d,

the law of the gun and the concentration camp took the place of the law of the knout. If under the Czarist regime those responsible for the law were anything but qualified, how less qualified were the revolutionay riff-raff who carried on an. even more brutal form of government than the country had ever known? Mr Ameel shows, with a sturdy forthrightness, that brutality was indeed their only qualification. . . „ . , For his part he kept rigidly aloof from political contentions of iliy kind, but this did not prevent his arrest in 1930 on astoundinglv vague and wholly unfounded charges of being engaged in sabotage and anti-Soviet activities. He received, after a mock trial, _ix months’ imprisonment, and experienced the grim inhumanities of a Soviet prison He was eventually released to find his property confiscated by the State and his family penniless. Two years later he was again arrested, the old charges being hurled at him once more This time he was sentenced to five years in a concentration camp He soon learnt what it meant to be a State prisoner in the “most free of all republics”: the conditions at their mildest he describes as “truly terrible.” His release came about only after vigorous representations by the Belgian Government, It cannot be said that Mr Ameel’s picture of Russia as he knew it is a happy one, but it has, and this is no pleasant thought, been so often confirmed by others in various ways, as to demand credence allowing, perhaps, for only a small percentage of exaggeration. A. A. A.