The Hunter

One night in May 1939, an audience of Czechs and their Nazi masters packed Prague's National Theater. At the concert's end, Czechs and Germans began applauding. After a while the Germans stopped; the Czechs went on clapping stolidly -- not cheering, just beating their hands together as if they would never stop. The Germans looked baffled and angry. Finally, Conductor Vaclav Talich held up the score, kissed it and, with an expansive gesture, presented it to the audience. It was Smetana's Ma Vlast (My Country}, a cycle of symphonic poems breathing Czech patriotism; its last section tells of a glorious Czech liberation.

The Germans did not dare arrest Talich for his act of defiance; he played all through the occupation and through Czechoslovakia's second liberation. Last week Talich, who made the Czech Phil harmonic Orchestra world-famous, was fired.

Czechoslovakia's Communists had not been in full power a fortnight before their hand fell upon music. Last week, they expelled Pianist Ruda Firkusny from the syndicate of Czechoslovak composers.

They confiscated the estate of Baron George Daubek, central European representative of International Business Machines and husband of New York Metropolitan Opera Singer Jarmila Novotna; they announced that Daubek no longer had "an open protector" in the Czech cabinet. They did not say who the protector had been. The late Jan Masaryk had played piano accompaniments for Novotna on U.S. recordings of Czech folk songs.

Policemen of the Soul. To the Czechs, their songs are symbols of their liberty.

Communist cunning decreed that the mu sic of Czechoslovakia be "cleansed" be cause it was in music that the Czech spirit of independence was most likely to break forth.

Conductor Talich's dismissal was a measure of public order as natural for a Communist as it would be for a New York cop to take a pistol out of a maniac's hands. Once in power, the Communist de fines crime as whatever may undermine him; he wants to stamp out "crime" be fore it has been committed. This kind of preventive policing is more concerned with thoughts, attitudes, feelings, than it is with overt acts.

The police-state mentality, which the Communists have carried to systematic lengths beyond Heinrich Himmler's sadistic dreams, has sent tens of millions to die in Russian labor camps ; it has reduced the Russian people to an inarticulate mass of helplessness ; it has, in the last three years, fastened itself on 100 million Europeans outside Russia. This week it was lapping at Rome, frightening the spokesmen of 16 nations conferring at Paris, driving the U.S. to a belated recognition that the Axis had never been as dangerous as the imperial oligarchs of Communism.

The police state marching west across Europe, south across Asia, was embodied in the person of Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, Marshal of the Soviet Union (he never fired a shot), Hero of Socialist Labor (he never swung a pick), Member of the Politburo. He is a steady, quiet type who .has a wife, two children and a suburban villa to which he commutes in a Packard --with the shades always drawn.

To get any sort of understanding of Beria, the new kind of policeman whose beat runs around the world, the citizens of democracy, where his type is unknown, must look into his antecedents.

Something Old. People have always needed policing, but they have not always had policemen. Medieval watchmen were supposed to cry out if evil was abroad; the folk tumbled out and did their own law enforcing. The very word police (in its present meaning), like the institution it stands for, is no older than the 18th Century.

In complex modern society citizens need police to help them keep order; but in a healthy society the citizens, not the police, have the primary responsibility. A British M.P., Kenneth Pickthorn, expressed the principle in the 1930s, when a bill was placed before the House of Commons to give British policemen extraordinary powers in order to fight native fascists. "I think it was a governess, a butcher's boy and a curate," said Pickthorn, "who got in the way of a gunman after he committed a murder recently; and there was Mr. Fisk, the Battersea bricklayer, who seized a gunman . . . and held on to him, though [Mr. Fisk] was almost shot to pieces. These are the real defenders of our liberty."

Something New. Russia, long before the Bolsheviks, developed the sinister side of the policeman's role much farther than any democracy has to this day. The reason has an important bearing on Beria. The 19th Century Russian satirist, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, noted: "In every other country little boys wear trousers, but not our boys . . . everywhere else reason rules, but here only the whistle of the lash. . . . [In Russia] no independent form of social order [has] yet developed."

To make his own distinctly Russian substitute for a "form of social order," Czar Nicholas I (called "The Nightstick") in 1826 decided to create a new thing, a secret police which later came to be called the Okhrana (Guard). The inception of this dreadful institution took place in a scene of sentimental horror. When the Okhrana's first chief, Count Alexander Benckendorff, reported to the Czar for instructions, the monarch pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and said: "Dry the tears of the oppressed. May your conscience and the conscience of your subordinates ever remain as stainless as this linen."

Most unscrupulous and most famous Okhrana agent was Evno Azef. He went so far in preventive criminology that he became a leader of the pre-revolutionary Socialists whom he was assigned to watch. He betrayed each side to the other, not once or twice, but day in & day out over nearly 20 years. He sent his revolutionary comrades to Siberia and organized the murder of several Czarist bigwigs. Where did his real sympathies lie? Probably with Azef. He managed to get out of the country and lived out his days in Germany, peacefully playing the stockmarket and horsing around at bourgeois seaside resorts (see cut). Azef was the living transition between the Czar's police state and Lenin's.

Something Borrowed. If Russia lacked "a form of social order" before the revolution, what was the case after Lenin completed his handiwork? He destroyed Russia's institutions and tried to impose a form of society of which 99 Russians out of 100 had never heard, which had not been tried anywhere, and for which Russia was called unfit by the very men who had invented this idea of society. If Czarism needed an Okhrana, clearly the Bolshevist state would need a super-Okhrana to fill the larger social vacuum.

The man Lenin picked as first policeman of the proletarian revolution was borrowed from the Polish aristocracy. When Felix Dzerzhinsky was made head of the Bolshevists' CHEKA, he wrote to his wife: "I am now in the front line and I want to be merciless, to tear the enemy to pieces as a watchdog would do."

Dzerzhinsky yearned to correct the faults of his fellow man. One of the first people he corrected was the head of the Revolutionary Military Committee for Combating Alcoholism & Banditry, who wandered into Dzerzhinsky's office one night, drunk. Dzerzhinsky had him shot.

Once, at a meeting of political commissars, Lenin passed a note to Dzerzhinsky "How many vicious counter-revolutionaries are there in our prisons?" Dzeizhinsky's scribbled reply was: "Abou: fifteen hundred." Lenin nodded, made a cross on the note, and returned it to Dzerzhinsky. That night, on Dzerzhinsky's order, all 1,500 were shot. It turned out to be a mistake. As Lenin's secretary explained later: "Vladimir Ilyich usually puts a cross on a memorandum to indicate he has noted the contents."

Dzerzhinsky approved and did his best to carry out the directive of Grigory Zinoviev, then chairman of the Comintern: "If out of 100,000,000 population, 10,000,000 do not want to obey the Soviets, they have to be destroyed physically." Nobody will ever know how many hundreds of thousands were killed by Dzerzhinsky's CHEKA.

One day, at a Politburo meeting, he contradicted Stalin on a minor matter. The Leader suddenly (and for the first time on such an occasion) let go with several frightening Georgian curses. Dzerzhinsky suffered an apoplectic stroke and died. The Soviet press always refers to him as "Fearless Knight of the Revolution."

Something Blue. Dzerzhinsky was succeeded by another aristocrat, Vyacheslav Rudolfovich Menzhinsky. Before the revolution Menzhinsky wrote a prophecy: "If Lenin ever reaches power in fact, and not in imagination, he will make a mess of it, the like of one made by Czar Paul I. ... Leninists are a clan of political gypsies, with a strong voice and a love for wielding the knout, imagining that it is their inherent right to serve as coachmen for the laboring masses."

After the revolution, Prophet Menzhinsky became the Leninists' knout. Lenin called him "the decadent neurotic." This policeman was interested in Persian art and higher mathematics. He wrote erotic poetry and read pornographic novels in his office between executions. He was plump, languid, soft-voiced, given to blue moods. He said: "Our task is to bring culture to the masses at a terrific speed." His OGPU, successor to the CHEKA,' brought death by execution and starvation to millions of Ukrainian and other peasants.

Menzhinsky died of what Europeans still call taedium vitae. In his case, that meant that the dirty books, the torture chambers, even the high cultural mission had ceased to interest him.

Menzhinsky's pupil and successor was Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda, a dull-faced man with a Chaplin mustache under whose regime developed the idea of putting prisoners to work. Even children arrested for "stealing Socialist property" were put into labor camps. The writer Maxim Gorky, a great admirer of Yagoda, glorified "this policy of education by teaching the truths of Socialism. . , ." Gorky added: "People whose historical duty it was to kill some beings in order to free others are martyrs. . . ." Two years later, Yagoda was accused, among other things, of having poisoned Gorky, and condemned to death.

He was succeeded by a shrieking little man named Nikolai Yezhov, who wanted to get back at the world for the years he had spent in bitter poverty. He began his reign by purging the ranks of the NKVD, successor to the OGPU. Next he purged Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and practically the entire High Command of the Red Army. He gave his name to two of the Red Terror's maddest years (1936-38), the "Yezhovshchina." In the Yezhovshchina, the most fantastic denunciations were accepted at face value by the NKVD; no one was safe. Terror was completely indiscriminate, torture equal to anything that went on in Nazi concentration camps. The papers referred to Yezhov almost as lyrically as to Stalin: "Our hero, our father, who destroyed the vipers' nests."

After two years, Stalin called a hait. Yezhov disappeared. Some think he is still in an insane asylum. In 1938, with war threatening in Europe, began the reign of Lavrenty Beria.

At Last, Sanity. It was no accident that Beria's four predecessors were, to say the least, neurotics. But Beria seems to be a sane, well-balanced man. In that fact lies the deepening horror of Russia. For Beria, without shrieks or dark yearnings, plods along, like the efficient bureaucrat he is, in the bloody footsteps of Dzerzhinsky. Some time ago a former Communist explained: "The task of the Soviet government is to create a new man with a new 'morale,' according to which it will be as easy to kill on the party's orders as to drink a glass of water." Beria, who was under 20 when the revolution broke, is that "new man."

Pro-Communists have spent years and millions telling the world that the "excesses" of the Soviet regime were to be accounted the inevitable evils of a violent transition. For such a period, fanatics like Dzerzhinsky and Yezhov were inevitable choices as wielders of the purifying pistol. The transition, however, obviously ends in

Beria; he is the normalcy of the Soviet state. Has he established a society whose normal members can be trusted to "keep order"? In a way, yes. An active Yezhov-type terror no longer stalks Russia. Most Soviet citizens go to bed at night without fearing that Beria's MVD will pound on their doors. This security, however, is bought at a terrible price. The Russian people live in a sort of "house arrest." They dare not shift from city to city in search of work. They do not talk or even think too long about how they are ruled. If they do, they are likely to join the 12,000,000 in Beria's labor camps.

The human mind, even the Communist mind, turns toward order. In a land where brother cannot trust brother, fear of the policeman must serve instead. The policeman has to be everywhere, because there is no other cement in the society. The spy, the informer and the censor are the aristocrats of the Communist world. The cop at the keyhole is king.

The Fiery Colchian. Beria, king of the cops, was born March 29, 1899, at Merkheuli, a village in Stalin's own Georgia. His family were poor peasants. He attended the polytechnic school at Baku and joined the Bolshevik Party before he received his degree in draftsmanship and engineering.

As a hard-working young Chekist he had his ups & downs, never amounted to much until he wrote a book. It was not about police work as understood in Western countries. But for Communist police work it was just the thing to commend him to his superiors. It was called On the History of the Bolshevik Organization in Trans-Caucasia. Largely through fictitious evidence it disputed Leon Trotsky's charge that Stalin never amounted to much as a pre-revolutionary theorist. Beria's Stalin is always right, always on the Leninist beam, always out in front of "the toiling masses." Why did this crass flattery matter to Stalin, who was already the world's most powerful autocrat? Precisely because the Communist regime had struck no real social roots, it attached fantastic importance to nuances of "theory." The Communist victory had been made by ideas in the heads of a handful of men, plus overwhelming police power used to cover up the failure of those ideas to create a genuine society.

To the man who said that Stalin had always had the best ideas went the police power. It was pure balm to the aging dictator when Beria recalled that in the old days Stalin used to call Lenin "the mountain eagle," and that Lenin in return called Stalin "the fiery Colchian." The man who put that on paper was the man Stalin trusted. He who expressed the Leader's truth so baldly must be the Leader's chief hunter of heresy.

Mail Call. After the German attack, Beria had the gigantic task of keeping order behind the Russian lines. He directed the mass exiles of the Crimean population (which was not "reliable") to Asia. The policeman of the soul also watched, in peace and war, over the Red Army's morale. One NKVD report, recently smuggled out of Russia, showed how that was done. Two security officers attached to the 348th Rifle Corps, sist Division, reported to the regional NKVD on such carefully tabulated items as political mood, giving away of military secrets, rumors, food, family affairs. The men's "reactions" (from their letters) were listed as "positive" or "negative." Sample positives: "As you know, our own Soviet Union is surrounded, but we are not scared." "We have borsch, hamburgers with spaghetti, stewed fruits." Sample negatives: "I have nothing to live for any more. . . ." "I see that we are being prepared for cannon fodder. . . ." "If we grumble, well, then one answer: a bullet."

Beria greatly expanded the forced-labor camps and inaugurated several efficiency-boosting devices. At dawn in many of his camps, as the prisoners drag themselves to work, MVD bands play lively march music. He also organized highly successful special corps of police dogs; the huge dogs (trained in a five-year course) catch escaping prisoners without human assistance, but are specially taught to be friendly toward officers and better-dressed civilians.

New Duties. More & more power gravitates toward Beria, not merely because he is an ambitious intriguer, but because power brings more power. Naturally, Beria was put in charge of atomic-energy research. His spies abroad and his scientists at home are an integrated team. His men run the Jachymov uranium mines in Czechoslovakia. Naturally, his stooge, Usevolod Nikolaevich Merkulov, controls the U.S.S.R.'s "investments" in occupied countries. Foreign Office men and diplomats know that Beria's agents dog them. Factory managers feel Beria looking over their shoulders.

Direct boss of the MVD is Sergei N. Kruglov, a big (6 ft. 2 in., 245-lb.), baby-faced hulk who watched over Vyacheslav Molotov at San Francisco. Kruglov now bosses half a million men who wear Red Army uniforms and the distinctive MVD blue caps. How many million spies and informers he has, no one outside the Kremlin can say.

The MVD has its own shoe and uniform factories; they get top priorities on raw materials. There are special MVD schools, and sanatoriums for policemen who become nervous. The MVD has also organized the nationwide "Dynamo" sports clubs. Reported an American recently returned from Russia: "There were few things I enjoyed more in Moscow than going to the Dynamo football stadium where 80,000 fans cheered like mad for Tsedeka (the Red Army team) to knock hell out of the police eleven. Maybe it didn't mean a thing. But on the other hand maybe it did."

"A Prison Is a Prison." Beria, of course, has an office in the Kremlin; but he does most of his work in Lyubyanka Prison,* not very far from the tomb of Lenin, who said he would make a state without crime, police or prisons. In the old hopeful days it was called the "Soviet Home for Those Who Have Lost Their Freedom." These days, it is frankly known as Lyubyanka Prison, for, as an eminent Soviet journal wrote in a campaign against squeamishness: "A prison is a prison." On his rare public appearances with other Soviet big shots, Beria usually seeks out Georgy Malenkov, obese, agate-eyed secretary of the Communist Party. Beria and Malenkov chat vivaciously, swap notes. They seem to like each other. The other leaders do not seem to like either of them.

A Brief Glow. The horrors of Beria's camps and inquisitions have been told by David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, by Victor Kravchenko and Vladimir Tchernavin. These atrocities are so vast that, like Himmler's corpse factories, they are almost unbelievable. Meanwhile, a smaller, gentler story gives a notion of life in the police state:

A Moscow woman was aroused from her sleep one night by two strangers, kept four months in Lyubyanka Prison, sent to a labor camp In Khazakstan by cattle car, kept there for four years, brought back to Moscow and released without hearing, trial or explanation. An American was with her when she met an old friend in a Moscow street. He described the scene which followed: "Plainly, the friend thought she had encountered a ghost. There was a brief glow of happiness on the faces of the two women, then they fell into a humdrum conversation about the weather. A few minutes later, they parted on this unspoken note of things it was better not to speak about."

That is Berialand, the most rapidly expanding power in the world today. It moves in wherever a society decays or falters or listens to fools, and destroys what is left. Patriots like Nikola Petkoff in Bulgaria are shot. Compromisers like Jan Masaryk are driven (by Communist hands or their own despair) through windows. Men like Talich, who can express what the people feel, are silenced. Beria's march will continue until the brains, the dollars, the power, and a reawakened moral force of the West stop it.

But not everyone in the democracies is worried by Lavrenty Beria; last week when President Truman declared he did not want to see Communists in the Chinese government or any other government, Henry Wallace called that wish "utter folly and hypocrisy."

*Lyubyanka is no longer a really tough prison. Anyone taken there instead of, say, Lefortovo on the outskirts of Moscow considers himself lucky. Citizens of a police state quickly acquire such vital information, as citizens of free countries know about good or bad hotels.

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