"Naive Untruths"

"The Soviet Government can only express regret at Mr. Kellogg's fantastic attacks. . . .

"Whether the question at issue is the miners' strike in England, or an attack by the American Navy against the independent Republic of Nicaragua, or the shooting of people in Java and Sumatra, there is always made by the statesmen of Great Britain, or the United States, or the Netherlands, the same justification, the 'plots and intrigues' of the Bolshevist Government."

Thus read a statement released in English last week by the Soviet Foreign Office in reply to U. S. Secretary of State Kellogg's recent excuse to Congress (TIME, Jan. 24) that the U. S. Administration's policy toward Nicaragua and Mexico is based on the existence of "Red plots" in those countries.

Premier Alexei Rykov said informally. "The Soviet Government has not sent and will not send any agents to Nicaragua to conduct anti-United States propaganda. . . . The Third International [world Communist propaganda bureau with headquarters in Moscow] appears to be so far from conducting such activities that I was amused to find the other day that only two out of the five principal officials in charge had any definite idea where Nicaragua was. . . . The statement of Mr. Kellogg contains naive untruths. . . . He is only following the example of the British Tories who counterfeited a letter supposed to have been written by a former director of the

Third International [Grigory Zinoviev] and by judiciously circulating it won the election on which the present Tory Government of Great Britain falsely rests."