''Superior to America"

Another 64 Soviet citizens were executed for "Trotskyism" last week. Dispatches passed by the Moscow censor described Joseph Stalin's hair as "rapidly greying," but the Dictator appeared unruffled as he took his place for a meeting of the Central Executive Committee. With him on the dais sat President Kalinin, Premier Molotov and Defense Commissar Voroshilov. while in a box just below the dais sat Foreign Commissar Litvinoff. Business of this august Bolshevik gathering in the onetime throne room of the Tsars was to take preliminary steps toward setting a date and perfecting details for the first Russian election under the new "Stalinist Constitution" (TIME, June 15, 1936, et seq.).

Soon 112 election rules had been adopted. Only one party, the Communist Party, will figure in the poll. Prison sentences are provided for anyone "who by violence, deception, intimidation or bribery interferes" with the polling, or miscounts or falsifies ballots. Cried Secretary J. A. Yakovlev of the agriculture committee of the Communist Party: "These regulations are superior to election regulations in America! In America there are property qualifications for voting in many States. None exist here. Here there is no disfranchisement of the Negro and there are equal rights for women, all of which makes the Soviet Constitution the most democratic in the world." The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press in the U.S.S.R.. but last week the big Moscow newsorgans continued to print no details of Russia's current series of "Trotskyist" executions. For this major news correspondents still had to comb copies of local Soviet newsorgans as these reached the capital. Neither in Moscow nor in any other office of the world-wide Soviet official news agency Tass could information be had about the Director of Tass, Jacob Doletsky. who so far as his Moscow journalist friends knew "simply disappeared" two months ago. In 1934 at the high point of his international journalistic career Doletsky signed up Tass with the Associated Press and the United Press in an exchange news arrangement, was feted in Manhattan. Last week The Ural Worker, an obscure newspaper published 900 mi. from Moscow at Sverdlovsk, arrived by mail and Tass men devoured its announcement that Director Jacob Doletsky and his immediate assistants are "Trotskyist bandits who penetrated into the main office of Tass and caused incalculable damage to the Soviet Press."

Doletsky and his Tass gang, according to The Ural Worker, tried to undermine the foundations of Soviet achievement by putting on Tass wires invariably rosy accounts of successes of the Five-Year Plans and achievements of leading Bolsheviks. "Instead of unmasking the shortcomings of Sverdlovsk industry and the mismanagement of collective farms," declared The Ural Worker, "Tass published a flowery story about the arrival of spring. . . . Thus Doletsky and his accomplices carried out the dictates of Fascist bosses."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.