Health Harangue

Russians listened in over the radio, last week, while Minister of Health Semashko delivered a "psychopathological analysis of the Romanov Tsars." Said he: "They were depraved and drunken despots. . . . Peter the Great personally decapitated many victims of his bestiality and buried others alive. . . . All the Romanovs were incurable epileptics. . . . Alexander III was a fat, greasy hippopotamus. . . ." During the Health Commissioner's harangue, Dictator Stalin, Premier Rykov and 200 other prominent communists sat gravely before Dr. Semashko in the Imperial Opera House, applauded him heartily.

More popular on the program, however, was a series of playlets, Scenes From The Lives Of The Romanovs, during which Ivan the Terrible murdered his son, and Catherine the Great had one of her ladies-in-waiting "flogged through the trap."* The high point of the performance was a scene showing the astute Tsar Nicholas I cajoling the revolutionary poet Releyef into betraying his associates in conspiracy. Wrote the dramatic critic of Isvestia: "One came away hating the Romanovs like so many viperous snakes."

*An invention attributed to Catherine. Court ladies whom she desired to have flogged were made to stand upon a small trap door, clad in the billowy skirts of the period. When the trap was sprung, the victim's clothing prevented her from falling completely through, but exposed her to the ministrations of two men with cat-o-nine-tails below. Thus the Empress Catherine could witness the agony of those whom she wished to punish without offending her gaze with the vulgar aspects of chastisement.