MOSCOW SNUBS BERLIN

Taranaki Daily News, 15 July 1929, Page 9

MOSCOW SNUBS BERLIN

MAY DAY INSULTS.

The Soviet Government has made the German Government eat humble pie, stated the Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail. . On May Day a model of the new German cruiser, with comic actors on board, dressed to represent the German Chancellor (Herr Muller) and his colleagues, was one of the attractions of the Moscow procession reviewed by Voroshiloff, Commissar for the Red Army. The cruiser bore the inscription; “Eight million marks for armoured cruisers; not a pfennig for feeding the children; bullets for the unemployed.” In his speech Voroshiloff, it was reported, spoke of the downtrodden proletariat of so-called democratic Germany, where the President of Police, like the former Tsars of Russia, forbade the workers to demonstrate on May 1. In Petrograd a riotous crowd demonstrated against Germany outside the Consulate.

The German Government ordered its Ambassador to protest to Moscow against this interference in German affairs. The reply was that the authentic text of the Commissar’s • speech does not contain the passage complained of, and that the Petrograd demonstration must have been spontaneous.

Ordinary Germans were not satisfied with the reply, and that moderate newspaper, the Borsen-Courier, stated that the insults to Germany were deliberately arranged. Kalenin and Rykov, it said, were against the proposed insults to Germany, but Voroshiloff said that as honorary president of the German Red Front Fighters’ organisation he would lose all credit with the Communists of Germany if he did not condemn the action of the Berlin Police President. Ho added that, whatever happened, Germany would not dare to break diplomatic relations with the Soviet during the Paris Conference. It was finally arranged that no Commissar except Voroshiloff should appear at the May Day demonstration, and Stalin, the Soviet dictator, ordered him to attack Germany in his speech and to make caricatures of the German Minister’s figure in the procession. All this the German Government knows perfectly well, of course, but is prepared to humiliate itself .to retain the favour of Moscow.