Soviet Notes

Parents attending a local Soviet meeting at Leningrad, last week, voted in the proportion of 7 to 3 that it is right to destroy imbecile infants.

Soon one of the parents, Vladimir Orlovsky, an aviator, went home and destroyed his three-year-old idiot son. With lightning swiftness a Soviet court found him "technically guilty of murder," sentenced Aviator Orlovsky to six months in jail, then suspended the sentence, allowing him to remain free.

P: Floods in the region of the famed Lena Gold Fields engulfed 70 villages, last week, raced nearer and nearer to the gold fields.

P: The Government of the Russian Soviet Republic ("Russia Proper") appointed, last week, an extraordinary "Grain Dictator" and requested the other state governments of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics ("Asiatic & European Russia") to appoint similar officials.

The Moscow "Grain Dictator" is Comrade G. K. Ordijonikidze, who is also one of the three Vice Prime Ministers of the Soviet State.* His duties: to organize the national grain sowing and harvest campaigns, to fix the legal price of grain, to stamp out speculative hoarding or other anti-social procedure. His powers: absolute, and supported by the right to declare in emergency regional Martial Law.

The reason for so drastic an appointment is, of course, that the Russian peasantry still seem disposed to raise only enough grain for their own needs, thus leaving the urban population facing a perpetual grain shortage.

P:Soviet Foreign Minister Georg Tchitcherin cabled a stern protest to Bucharest, last week, protesting a high-handed sale by the Rumanian Government of some 200 small Soviet steamers and fishing boats, which have been seized in Rumanian waters.

Since the Prime Minister of Rumania, bearded, bulking, bowed Vintila Bratiano, mortally hates but does not fear the Soviet Power, he ignored Tchitcherin's protest.

P:The notorious international seditionist and Communist spy, Bela Kun, onetime Soviet Dictator of Hungary (for 143 days in 1919) was deported from Austria, last week, in an airplane which soared across Germany and made connections with a steamer for Russia.

Arrived at Moscow, Comrade Kun was wildly cheered by his employers, the Third Internationale, the Sixth Congress of which is now in session. (TIME, Aug. 6.)

P: The ashes of the most famed U. S. Communist were solemnly interred, last week, in the Red Square, at Moscow, not far from the immense, squat tomb of Nikolai Lenin.

The late U. S. citizen thus honored was famed William D. ("Big Bill") Haywood, once a renowned I. W. W., later the most prominent American actively associated with the Soviet State.

* In Sovietese, Vice President of the Union Council of People's Commissars.