Syrzow Half Chairman

To long-faced Alexey Ivanovich Rykov, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics came a swift and sudden rebuke last week from Dictator Josef Vissarionovich ("Steel") Stalin.

Comrade Rykov had announced a bill permitting freedom of religious worship in fanatically anti-religious Communist Russia (TIME, May 27). Even though the bill was offered not as an aid to religion, but as a more subtle means of combating it, Dictator Stalin was vexed.

He knew that Rykov, described by New York's Evening Post as "a pale, sticky engineer of lowly birth," was a leader of the "Right Opposition" in the Communist Party; that glutinous Rykov had great influence among the peasants in the country districts, and that these peasants, despite ten years of ceaseless atheistic propaganda, remain hopelessly devout.

Therefore, last week, Comrade Rykov's various duties were declared too much for one man, and he was relieved as Chairman of the Council of the People's Commissars of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, i. e., the prime minister of Central Russia, though he still remained Chairman of the Council of the People's Commissars of the Soviet Union, i. e., the prime minister of all the Russias. Cergy Ivanovich Syrzow, a close friend of Dictator Stalin, succeeded to the first title. The suggestion was obvious to the most obtuse that further reactionary moves on the part of Comrade Rykov would find Comrade Syrzow prepared to undertake the other chairmanship as well.