TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 122, 26 May 1933, Page 11

TRAGEDY OF RUSSIA

OGPU’S GRIM RULE. DREAD TRINITY OF POWER. LONDON, May 9. “Before Russia can be happy and prosperous, the Ogpu (secret police) must go, and I believe that eventually it will disappear as a tragic, terrible relic of a transitional phase,” declares a special correspondent of the News Chronicle, who remained in Moscow after the recent trial of the British engineers, to study the Russian riddle. Until the Soviet deprives this sinister body of its peculiar powers and transforms it into civil police in accordance with modern ideas, says the writer, Russians will never feel secure nor will the Soviet command the world’s confidence. Every man and woman arrested by the Ogpu—which possesses tho dread trinity of power, being investigator, judge and executioner—knows that whether innocent or guilty he may disappear without trace. The Ogpu makes 3000 arrests a month, compared with 7000 a month last year, which is regarded as proof of the growing stability of Stalin’s regime. Soviet’s Creation of Classes. As a matter of fact, essential liberties are non-existent in Russia, whose revolutionaries liberated the land from one tyranny and imposed another more deadly, replacing the exploitation of man by man with the exploitation of man by the State. Moreover, the suggestion that the Soviet is evolving an ideal classless State as an illusion. On the contrary, it is creating classes as fast as possible. Already 85 classes exist. The only classless elements are the outcasts, who are in an infinitely worse plight than the British “bottom dog,” owing to the passport system introduced to relieve the appalling congestion in Moscow, where 4,000,000 people live on an average floor space of five square yards a person. People Now Merely Robots. It was hoped that passports indicating membership of a trades union or other recognised category would reduce the population by 1,000,000 useless mouths, consisting of poor who had struggled thither in search of succour, forcing them to die in ditches or end their useless lives. “When I heard,” says the correspondent, “that * humanism, ’ had replaced God, I asked where was the humanism in this grim excitement. The I

people, whether commissars or factory workers, arc mere robots subjected to iron discipline, and their actions aro easily construed as wrecking or counterrevolutionary if Ogpu wishes. Hence its power over millions of homes. “All literature is mere Soviet ideology, the newspapers are State granioi phones, and the Courts echoes of the /Soviet’s policy. I believe that Russia some day will become an industrial State, ith a standard of living comparable with the best in tho world, but not on tho basis of pure Communism.”