PITIFUL SPECTACLE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 300, 18 December 1937, Page 9

PITIFUL SPECTACLE

RUSSIA’S ATTEMPT AT DEMOCRACY Received Dec. 17, 9.33 p.m. LONDON, Dec. 17. The Times, in a leader, says: "The Russians have proved apparently to their own satisfaction their ability to hold elections in which nobody has power to elect and they are now wordily celebrating the victory which they have not won. They are unlikely, in the circumstances, to experience any difficulty in setting up a Parliamentary Government in which the Parliament will be unable to govern and the energies of the new deputies are unlikely to be taxed by anything more arduous than attendance at periodic meetings of a mutual admiration society. Yet it is doubtful whether more than a small, impotent minority of Russians yet are capable of realising the manner and extent in which they have been hoaxed. Outside Russia the election has been an obvious failure. Their machinery was so childishly engineered and the prearranged results acclaimed with so vast a volume of pure gush that Russia s prestige, which the firing squads have been busily destroying, has been still further impaired. All dictatorships are liable to seem droll sometimes, but Russia’s widely-adver-tised attempt to pass off herself on democracy has provided a spectacle half comic and half pitiful.