Bugs

For nine years Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff trotted about Europe as the Foreign Commissar of Soviet Russia. Although he had never been much of a power within the Soviet Union, he was one of the few old-line Bolsheviks who could talk to capitalist diplomats in their own language. He made an able traveling salesman for Joseph Stalin. At the endless, shilly-shallying, post-war conferences he was the vigorous symbol of an era when the Soviet was plugging the theory of collective security, backed every democratic move aimed at the Axis. But he was sold out all along the line.

By last fortnight Comrade Litvinoff and the policies he stood for had been parked in the wings for two years. When the National Conference of the Soviet Communist Party met in Moscow he was just an obscure member of the Central Communist Committee. On the closing day of the Conference last week even that post was taken away from him. Ousted with three other Committee members for "inability to discharge obligations," Comrade Litvinoff, an old revolutionary who had worked with Lenin on the early Communist Iskra (Spark), who once played the fence for money stolen in a train robbery by Comrade Stalin, who was the only moderate to push his way to the top through the ranks of rabid 100 percenters, was out of a job.

More important, if less well known, heads were rolling too. Removed as alternate Committee member was Paulina Semionovna Zhemchuzhina, for five years head of Russia's big cosmetics trust, upped to Vice Commissar of the Food Industry in 1937--and the wife of Premier and Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov.

Commissars in charge of the aircraft, chemical, munitions, electrical, maritime & river transport, and fishing industries were warned to untangle production difficulties or get out. For Soviet bigwigs had discovered that "technical discipline" was not keeping pace with rising production quotas. Pig iron intended for spring steel turned unaccountably into stiff-rail steel. Of 80,000 files turned out at Voroshilovgrad one month, 33,000 were worthless because of faulty tempering. The whole Gorky Automobile Plant was stopped "for some time" while its chief technician tinkered with new production methods.

The new Central Committee members pushed in to fill the vacant posts bore names which stood for principles rather than individuals. One was V. G. Dekanozov, onetime Deputy Foreign Commissar, who went to Berlin with Commissar Molotov three months ago, stayed on as ambassador. Another was Otto Kuusinen, head of the abortive Finnish People's Government during the Russo-Finnish war, elected president of the Karelian-Finnish Soviet Republic after his 1939 coup flopped.

Their appointments sounded like an overture to Germany with one hand, a threatening minor for the rest of Finland with the other. Cagey Comrade Stalin was still beating out Red diplomacy 16 to the bar. Appointed as an alternate member of the Committee was Litvinoff's old friend, Anglophile Ivan Maisky, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

First act of the reshuffled Central Committee was an order to the State Planning Commission for a new 15-year plan "to surpass the most advanced capitalist countries in per capita production of iron, steel, fuel, electric machines and consumers' goods."

But to President Mikhail Kalinin there were worse bugs than those in the Soviet production machinery. Said he of his comrades: "They sit in a nest of bedbugs and discuss deep-mindedly what will be the peculiarities of men living under full-fledged Communism. They pronounce highbrow speeches on the education of children and breed bedbugs as best they can."

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