Bolshevik Barmine

M. Alexandre Barmine, the Soviet diplomat who was recently Russia's Charge d'Affaires at Athens, then broke with Moscow and denounced Stalin (TIME, Dec. 13), was being closely guarded in Paris last week by Socialists of the Second International and French detectives who stayed on duty day and night, fearing Soviet agents might kill or kidnap him. To British and French reporters Communist Barmine had told how he refused to dine aboard a Soviet steamer sent to Greece, suspecting the Captain had been ordered to shanghai him and take him back to Russia.

"The panic that my refusal seemed to cause to my legation staff and to the officers of the ship made it quite clear to me what would have happened." said M. Barmine, explaining that he then left all his property and luggage in Athens, fled to France. "Perhaps," he continued, "I can get a job as a laborer in a French motor car factory." Last week he was temporarily saved from this necessity by an offer from the New York Times and North American Newspaper Alliance of a chance to write about the Government he served for 19 years.

"Those who have been executed or have disappeared," wrote Diplomat Barmine in the Times, "were my chiefs, my friends, my comrades. I was 18 years old when the Revolution broke out in Russia. Like so many others of my generation in Russia, I was filled with hope and enthusiasm for the new Russia and the new world we were going to create. I left the university and engaged as a volunteer in the new army. At the same time I joined the Communist party."

What chiefly turned him against Stalin, Barmine indicated, was "the systematic method with which Stalin has exterminated all those who were Lenin's associates, all those who helped make the revolution, all those who have built up Russia during the last twenty years."

He concluded: "In what other country could it happen that the Prime Minister, the Minister of War and the Minister of Foreign Affairs could allow their staffs to be executed as spies and traitors without daring to defend them or without taking some share in the responsibility in what they are alleged to have done? . . .

"Litvinoff was my chief. He was in time past a courageous revolutionary who had Lenin's confidence. He has shown his intelligence on a score of different occasions in world conferences. What tragic fate has overtaken him to see his best collaborators, his closest friends, disappear --to see the whole framework of his service broken and to be obliged now to approve what has been done, even to praising the executioners of his associates!"

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