Stalin's Secrets

Ten Russians who have rendered such supreme services to the Soviet Government as to win its highest decorations, the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Star, received their beribboned medals from the Soviet Central Executive Committee last week. What had these heroes done? Who were they? As to nine of the ten, Moscow correspondents could find out absolutely nothing, not even where they live or what may be their jobs. The only hero definitely spotted was Leonid Mikhailovich Zakovsky, and everyone in Russia knows that little more than two years ago the Secret Police of Leningrad were put in his charge after the assassination of Dictator Stalin's "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934 et seq.). In Moscow this week most people were willing to bet that the other nine heroes have also distinguished themselves by deeds the nature of which will be kept quiet so long as the Secret Police can manage it.

Joseph Stalin last week was in such genial spirits that, when publicly welcoming the Soviet North Pole Expedition home to Moscow, he kissed its chief, heavily bearded Professor Otto Schmidt, full on the mouth. Also back in Moscow last week from their Coronation trip to England were U. S. Ambassador and Mrs. Joseph E. Davies, he bent on making an immediate tour of the Ukraine. As if most of the Soviet Union were not weltering in a lather of treason trials, executions and suicides of Big Reds, and purges from the Communist Party which its news-organs reported under screamers daily (TIME, June 28 et ante), life went on at Moscow in most of its accustomed grooves. The story about What Ails Russia was so big that most correspondents in Russia completely gagged on it last week, sent few dispatches. Suddenly New York Times Correspondent Harold Denny, whose Moscow by-line has for many weeks shone alone while famed Walter Duranty visited the U. S., started sending reams of matter which the Pulitzer Prize Committee can hardly overlook and which the Times printed day after day with the proud notation "Uncensored."

Denny details which the delighted Times picked as most meriting cogitation: "The anxiety that broods over Moscow was painfully palpable the other night at a diplomatic reception. Dozens of faces of Russians we were accustomed to seeing were missing. Everyone was watching for confirmation or proof of the falsity of the rumors that this or that high official who ordinarily would have been there had been arrested. And many so reported did not come. 'It is like being in the midst of a bubonic plague,' said a foreign woman guest from the Far East, 'watching to see who have been stricken.'

"If one accepts only what is authoritatively published here and only what has admittedly happened, two conclusions suggest themselves--either the Government and the Communist Party leadership, which in reality are identical, have staged a frame-up on a gigantic scale or there exists a situation of discontent, unrest and active disloyalty in the Stalin regime amounting almost, if not fully, to a counterrevolution. . . .

"There have not been any riots in Moscow and probably no place else and there probably will not be. Few, if any, qualified foreign observers appear to believe there is a likelihood of anything more dramatic happening here than a continuation of the arrests, dismissals, trials and shootings." It was dramatic enough that the Premier of Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, the Vice Premier, and the Mayor of Bukhara were ousted from their jobs last week. The Premier's brother had meanwhile committed suicide. Over in White Russia, where the President killed himself fortnight ago, it was Railway Commissar Nikolai Vladimirsky who committed suicide last week. A further shake-up in Red Army circles, following the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven generals

(TIME, June 21), brought the discharge and arrest of four more high officers. Thirty-six more "wreckers" were executed at Khabarovsk.

Against the lurid background of such facts as these Harold Denny wrote:

"Soviet industry is still functioning, though in a manner that would be totally intolerable in any advanced capitalist country. Soviet industry and supply have not actually broken down, but are sadly disrupted, and they are becoming worse instead of better.

"And the significant thing is that the Kremlin's apparently frenzied efforts to arrest the decline by wholesale dismissals of executives and engineers, setting the whole population on a hunt for 'Trotskyists,' is making matters worse instead of better. . . . Now it becomes evident that many past figures of industrial output were false because executives, under pressure from the Kremlin to fulfill their plans, simply faked them. . . .

"Recent disclosures of foreign engineers who have now left the country as a result of the Soviet Union's drive to get rid of foreigners, form a vivid picture of industrial chaos from top to bottom. Foreigners having business with Soviet organizations report them in confusion. They start dealing with one set of executives only to have them disappear and be succeeded by another, who know nothing of what has gone before and who themselves soon disappear, to be succeeded by another set of novices. . . .

"Nearly every mind that might have disputed with Stalin for leadership has been destroyed by execution, exile or imprisonment. If Lenin were to return to life in this Red State that he founded he would see few familiar faces. . . . The happiest people here now are those in middling jobs. It is only obscure people who feel safe. That is true in every field, including the Communist Party ranks. . . . This city's aspect is not different from ordinary times and no more troops than usual are in evidence. . . .

"The prestige of the Russian Communist Party undoubtedly has suffered a severe blow in the eyes of the people of its own home country.

" 'These men, these great Bolsheviki, turn out to be crooks and traitors,' they say to themselves. And they wonder who the next of their heroes will be branded enemies of the people. . . ."

How Harold Denny could keep sending reams of this off to Manhattan day after day, using only the ordinary means of communication open to any Moscow correspondent, was itself a commentary upon the difference between conditions in Russia when the State was not honeycombed with uncertainty and today.

As a postscript to his series, Harold Denny came through with some official statistics showing that in the past five months the Soviet birth rate has doubled. This major phenomenon is due, of course, to Dictator Stalin's having suddenly last year made abortion no longer legal in the Soviet Union (TIME, July 6, 1935). Communist sex morals had been so loosened by nearly two decades of abortions in State clinics that millions of Russian females have continued promiscuous relations and, without abortions, the increase in births has shot up so sharply that Moscow, with 2,000 maternity beds last year, has had to be swiftly equipped with 2,000 more.

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