THE FOREIGN SCENE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3813, 25 September 1936, Page 11

THE FOREIGN SCENE

RUSSIA’S GREAT AIR FLEET. v' VLADIVOSTOK AND VULNERABLE JAPAN. STORIES OF THE O.G.P.U. Japan will note with special interest the report of the French aviation pioneer, M. Breguet, on his return from Moscow, that “each year 5000 ’planes are built in Russia, where 200,009 specialists are, working night and day to ensure the aerial supremacy of the country.” Since the Soviet authorities believe that they may one day have to face a joint attack by Japan and Germany, they are doing something to discourage it. Air-power is particularly impressive to Japan, because of her Vulnerability. Bombing from the air is an ideal means of starting fires and Japan is the most inflammable country in the world. To be more precise: A thermite incendiary bomb (which may turn out to be the principal aerial weapon of the neat war), weighs only a couple of pounds. A big ’plane can carry hundreds and hundreds of these “eggs.” As one strikes, the contents bum at a temperature of about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The blaze cannot be put out with water, or with any of the usual fire brigade gear. Because of the intense heat it generates, a small quantity of thermite f will quickly eat through steel and makes the metal run in an incandescent stream capable of consuming any inflammable substance it encounters. The Japanese houses are of wood. The windows are of paper. The frail structures are raised a couple of feet from the ground, so that if a fire , begins, it enjoys a favourable draught. Alt certain times, there are strong winds which will spread a fire from street to street with the most appalling swiftness. Much modem architecture may be seen in Japan, but ths •Id-style dwelling still preponderates. From Vladivostok, Russia’s easternmost Siberian port, the distance to Tokio is less than 600 miles. The Urge multi-engined Russian bombers stationed in the VUdivostok region have an action radius of 600 miles With two tons load, or 750 miles witn one ton. They ean thus reach most of Japan's important cities and harbours •n a there-and-back-flight. A Japanese War Office pamphlet quotes General Vassily Bluecher, Soviet com- * mander in the Far East, as saying: < “Three tons of bombs can destroy Tokio as completely as the great earthquake did.” When Russia had no Far Eastern ain fleqt, Japan could have isolated Vladivostok with her army and bombarded it with her navy. Now she would be exposed to reprisals capable of wrecking her vital centres. , Her own scope for air action in Siberia would be relatively negligible. There is a lack of worthwhile targets in the sparsely settled Soviet Maritime Province, while Japan herself is “all targets.” Japan’s aircraft industry is comparatively small, her civil aviation not impressive. The geography of the country is unfavourable to aerial development, and the demand for air services is limited. The Soviet, it may be noted, has an expanding commercial aviation, and takes care to make it a feeder for military aviation. With few, if any, exceptions the Russian civil machines are adaptaf tions of military types. In Manchukuo, Japan, has made a network of airlines, but Russia can, of course, strike there as well. The whole set-up for air warfare between Russia and Japan has been pronounced by experts to be vastly in Russia’s favour; and if Russia is really menaced, her Air Force (with its personnel 75 per cent. Communist Party members), is far and away her best insurance. Bolshevik Russia has found the principle of “asylum” as obstructive as Czarist Russia did formerly. Norway has refused the Soviet request that she should cease to harbour the exile Trotsky and has declared that she will not let herself “bq subdued by anybody in such matters.”

The Czar’s Government, in like manner, collided in the past with this right of a State, by virtue of its being sole master; within its boundaries,” to allow fugitives from another country to enter or stay on its territory. If Trotsky were a common criminal, he might be given up extradition treaties provide for such surrenders; but Norway protects him because Stalin is after him merely on political counts.

Strange how one country may cherish and protect the revolutionaries of another while handing out red-hot punishment to its own! In 1908-9. the United States was firm in its resistance to a Czarist demand for two men, Jan Janoff Pouren and Christian Rudowitz. Russia claimed that Pouren committed the crimes of arson.

robbery and assault; Pouren and his

friends claimed that he was a member of a revolutionist body, that in what he did he acted under the orders of his leaders, and that the acts he committed were not for his personal benefit, or due to personal hatred, but “formed part of an organised movement to fight lawless anarchy with lawless revolution.” Secretary

Root declined to issue a warrant of extradition. Checkmate to the Czar !

Christian Rudowitz was charged with complicity in the murder of Christian Leshinsky and the latter’s wife and daughter (note the unconscious irony of the double “Christian”) and the robbery of the daughter’s husband. The strongest count against him was his own admission that as a member of the revolutionary party he voted to have the Leshinskys put to death as spies. Extradition was successfully opposed on the ground that the act with which Rudowitz was charged wgs a political offence. The United States stuck to its regular practice, and the voter for arson and murder was safe.

It speaks volumes for the vile reputation of the Czarist Government that the decision was reported with great approval, not to say glee, by respectable American papers. The O.G.P.U. (secret police of the Russian revolution), has spread panic, the “Daily Mail” reports, among the members of the Russian colony in London, where its agents are smelling out conspirators against the life of Stalin, and plotters in a Red Army plan of revolt. (The Soviet denies the raid). A few years ago, new premises were built for the Leningrad headquarters of the O.G.P.U. In them was an elaborate mincing-machine. The O.G.P.U. put its victims through the mincer before washing their remains out into the waters of the Neva. Such was one fantastic tale firmly believed by thousands of Leningrad people.

Another sample of the fear in which the O.G.P.U. is held: It is the conviction of many Russians that the organisation practises tortures beside which the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition would seem mild. The writer who records these beliefs (Allan Monkhouse, who lived for many years in Russia), expresses his conviction that they are quite unfounded and that O.G.P.U. officials themselves circulate horror-stories to make their work more effective.

In order to quake before the O.G. P.U., however, no Russian needs to believe in mincers or racks. He need only reflect on the fact that secrecy shrouds the O.G.P.U.’s. actions; that its agents make an arrest at dead of night and afterwards a newspaper item may appear recording the death sentence already carried out. There is enough in that for the imaginative mind to dwell on. Mistakes—especially at times when the authorities are nervous; mis-carriages of justice due to malice on the part of informers—these are obvious possibilities unsettling for perfectly innocent citizens to contemplate. Nor can the chance of at least occasional sadistic practices by perverse individuals be excluded. Secrecy favours the worst. While opponents of the Soviet see nothing excusable in the system, defenders argue that the aims of the revolution justify it. Lady Astor (on her Russian trip in 1931 with Lord Lothian and Bernard Shaw) alked Stalin: “How long are you going to continue killing people?” The answer was: “As long as it is necessary.” Killing by the Russian secret police is believed to have been on a vast scale between 1918 and 1922, when the predecessor of the O.G.P.U. (the Tcheka) flourished. There were endless denunciations, endless arrests and summary executions. Russia in those days was between two terrors a WJhite and a Red, some of the generals of'the White Armies being undoubtedly ruthless butchers. By the time public order had been achieved, the Bolsheviks decided to replace the Tcheka (or “extraordinary Commission to deal with counter-revolu-tion, speculation and sabotage”) with a new organisation. The move is said to have been due to their hope of inspiring public confidence. The O.P.G.U. (“Union State Political Administration”) was then created. Observers were tempted to quote the French tag—“the more it changes the more it’s the same thing”; for the O.G.P.U. though more non-committal in name, had much the same duties to perform as the Tcheka. Further, it had the same chief and largely the same agents. Here is a curious story which W. A. Rukeyser has given, about the death-sentenees of the 0.G.P.U.: “There are two peculiarities . .. First, it is said that the convicting prosecutor must execute the sentence himself. Second, the condemned are not lined up against the wall to be shot. They are led from their cells ostensibly for another interview ... as the doomed man, all unknowingly, walks between, his guards, he is shot as mercifully as possible; the bullet usually goes into the back of his neck dt the base of the brain. A third peculiarity ... is significant. Notices in the newspapers notwithstanding oftentimes the sentence has never been executed at all . . . Good, experienced engineers are now too scarce in Russia for many still to be shot promiscuously. They must be kept working for the Plan.” The vast majority of those who come into conflict with the Soviet are, of course, visited with penalties short of death. The concentration-camp system with forced labour has been a favoured instrument of the O.G.P.U. At one North Sea camp conditions were so bad that an appalling proportion of the prisoners died. An official inquiry was held and as a result numbers of overseers and warders were shot, while others were variously punished. The most spectacular example of forced labour by political prisoners was in the construction of the BalticWhite Sea canal. The Soviet was delighted with the speed of the job. consequently, it announced afterwards

that 12,000 of the prisoners concerned had received a full amnesty, and 59,000 others had had their sentences cut down. It contended that the working conditions had been good and d>iew all possible attention to the work. The result was that some foreign commentators were full of praise, while others used the figures cited as proof of the presumably tremendous numbers of political prisoners in Russia as a whole.

As a matter of strict terminology, the O.G.P.U. no longer exists, it was converted in 1934 into the “Commissariate of Internal Affairs” (Narkomvnutdel). A new mildness of method may have been contemplated; but the latest conditions to develop in Russia are precisely of the sort that sharpens terrorism. The Govenment has had confessions of an assassination plot; it is investigating an alleged conspiracy to tamper with the Red Army. Nervousness will almost inevitably mean a relapse into harshness.

The police force of the revolution is directed by Genrhik Yagoda, who in 1913 was cashier of a Russian factory. The two fanatical devotees of the Soviet who preceded him were both Polish noblemen by birth—Felix Dzerzhinsky (died 1926) and Vyacheslav Menzinsky (died 1934).