Russians In Exile

Southland Times, Issue 23377, 8 December 1937, Page 4

Russians In Exile

M. Alexander Barmin, formerly Counsellor at the Soviet Legation at Athens, has disobeyed an order to return to Moscow, and has asked to be allowed to remain in Paris as a political emigre. According to a cable message printed yesterday, M. Barmin “has appealed to the central committee of the League for the Defence of the Rights of Man for energetic action to save the lives of numerous Soviet diplomatists now imprisoned in Moscow, and also on behalf of those still at their posts

. . . ‘who must choose between risking death in a Moscow prison .... or murder by secret agents if they stay abroad.’ ” That this appeal is based on something more than the nervousness of a conscious transgressor has been proved in advance by the fates, known and rumoured, of other Soviet diplomats in recent years. In too many cases recall to Moscow has been a preliminary to trial and imprisonment, followed by execution or exile. Those who ignore the summons and trust to the shelter of obscurity seem to pass from one fear to another, exchanging the definiteness of punishment for a suspense which must make all their days uneasy. Matters of this kind lead to much rumour and distortion: the field is a useful one for writers of sensational fiction. Yet it is undeniably true that Russian exiles do vanish from the streets of Paris. At the end of September the disappearance of General von Miller gave trouble to the French police; and it is worth noting that this 70-year-old veteran had become president of the Federation of Russian Ex-Servicemen in 1930, just after its former president, General Koutepoff, had also been kidnapped by unknown enemies. These are documented cases; there must be others which never come under public notice. Whether the kidnappings and murders are the work of Russian agents is another matter. Political emigres are notoriously susceptible to intrigue, and there is no lack of dubious organizations with which they can make new alliances. The strange immunity of M. Leon Trotsky from violence strengthens a belief that Russians who refuse to return to Moscow may not be in any great danger, for this man has been set up as the arch-enemy of Stalinism, and his removal could therefore seem to ardent imaginations a supreme service to the State. But if absentees are comparatively safe there are no grounds for believing that the same can be said of those who go back to face the displeasure of the dictator. Indisputable proof exists that some of them die before the firing party; many are exiled; and the iron north is peopled now, as it was under the Tsars, with the victims of repression. Not all the exiles are men who have become known to the outside world. It would seem, from the reports of those who have had first-hand knowledge of the Soviet Union, that even mediocrity is unsafe. Criticism has become a new name for treachery, and under a system which favours informers and encourages a fanatic adherence to the party line there must be a constant sifting of all that is liberal and individualist in the new Russia, leaving servility in all but the highest places. “It is no longer possible to save the dead,” wrote A. Rudolf to Andre Gide, after he had published his “Back From The U.S.S.R.” “But it is possible to prevent other people dying in the same way. It is possible to restore to life those who, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, in the immense tundras of Siberia, in the G.P.U. cellars of the famous Liubianka prison are still breathing.” This may indeed be possible; but it can be done only within the Union, and as the result of some new political convulsion which must bring further troubles to Russia. And M. Stalin still rules in the Kremlin.