The Reluctant Russian

Ever since the Allied Council for Japan was set up at war's end, the Russian members have battled doggedly with U.S. representatives over everything from land reform to schoolbook censorship. But from the start they appeared more or less resigned to U.S. predominance in Japanese affairs, and the council was spared the almost daily Russian flare-ups and walkouts of the now comatose Allied Control Council in Berlin. One day last week the Russian tactics changed: burly Lieut.

General Kuzma N. Derevyanko finally kicked up a typically Russian uproar.

Cause of the incident was a touchy, tragic subject. When Russia concluded her one-week war against Japan in 1945, she scooped up a total of 2,400,000 prisoners, soldiers and civilians alike. Last week, 376,000 Japanese were still listed as Russian prisoners, and U.S. officials estimated grimly that most of them had died in Russian labor camps.

Derevyanko had known in advance that the subject was on the council's agenda for the day. Just before U.S. Representative William J. Sebald rose to read a prepared statement blasting the Russians for their treatment of Japanese prisoners, Derevyanko took the floor himself, went through the formality of charging "American imperialists" with cooperating with "Japanese Fascists." Having had his say, Derevyanko stalked moodily out of the meeting room.

Next day, the problem of the prisoners gave Derevyanko new troubles. When his car pulled up to the Soviet embassy shortly after noon, he found the gate closed, the compound surrounded by some 400 sad-eyed Japanese who wanted an answer to a petition in which they begged information on their missing relatives Derevyanko sneaked into the embassy by the back door, later sent an interpreter out to deal with the crowd. He got the petitioners to disperse on promise of an answer this week.

Said General Douglas MacArthur of Derevyanko's walkout: "I can well understand the reluctance of the Soviet member to listen to so gruesome and savage a story in all its harrowing barbarity. It would well chill and sicken even a hardened old soldier."

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