Chestny Chelovyek

No great respecter of Reds is Sir Esmond Ovey, British Ambassador to Moscow. In the Soviet citadel his Embassy flaunts life-size oil paintings of King George & Queen Mary in their coronation robes. In Moscow the Ambassador's young men never hesitate to express on Communism, its leaders and practices, opinions which would cause instant arrest for any but a foreign diplomat. Britons are not popular in Moscow.

It looked last week as though Soviet officials had taken quiet revenge. In still another drive to end sabotage in Soviet plants, the OGPU (secret police) arrested, then shot without public trial, 35 Russians. This the world took calmly, bat the next move was to arrest six British subjects, employes of Metropolitan-Vickers (electric contractors) and charge them with responsibility for a series of breakdowns in Russian electric plants.

For 48 hours no one knew what had happened to Britain's six. The London Daily Mail which has been getting quick service and considerable publicity from its extensive use of the transatlantic telephone, kept the wires hot to Moscow but could learn nothing. Were the six Britons being exiled, tortured, executed? At the end of 48 hours, 46-year-old Allan Monkhouse. Moscow director of Metropolitan-Vickers, drove up in a limousine to the British Embassy.

"I was treated with extraordinary courtesy and consideration," said he.

"At the end of the questioning, which lasted a majority of the 48 hours, I was told that I was 'chestny chelovyek'--an honest fellow--and that I was to be released. . . . The commandant of the prison actually carried my bag downstairs for me.

"Although I was under prison regime the conditions seemed to me better than those I witnessed once on a visit to Dartmoor. The cell to which I was taken . . . was really a moderately sized room, with table and bed but no chair.

"For questioning I was taken through several corridors and on to another floor.

. . . In this questioning room and everywhere else in the building the last word in efficiency was manifest. My questioners certainly knew what they were doing. That is. among other things they knew engineering. . . . At intervals food was brought in, and in abundance. Among other things there was caviar."

Four of the other British chelovyeks were not quite so chestny. Though treated almost as well, they remained in jail. Ambassador Ovey was allowed to see them once, in the presence of OGPU officials. Soviet Foreign Commissar Maxim Maximovitch Litvinov declared that they would be given a fair and public trial in April, with Russian lawyers assigned to their defense. Meanwhile, panic seized U. S. engineers in Russia who had no embassies at all to defend them. From Moscow a General Electric official telephoned Berlin that he was "unable to hold the men." Hardly had he rung off before 17 U. S. engineers arrived in Berlin. Said one:

"I will not run the risk of remaining in a country where such a power as the British Empire seems helpless to protect its citizens."

Again British Tories demanded that diplomatic relations with the U. S. S. R. be broken off. The House of Commons cheered when it heard that the British Government had suspended negotiations for a new Anglo-Russian trade treaty. It appeared likely that this might scare the Soviets into calling off the trial, which had perhaps been planned anyway to quiet the resentment of plain Soviet citizens at the innumerable privileges--maximum food rations, special living quarters, freedom from eternal standing in line--which foreign technical experts in Russia have so long enjoyed.

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