Pure Terror

When some 77 Germans were shot during Adolf Hitler's "blood purge," they at least were accused of plotting with that plug-ugly pederast Captain Ernst Roehm (TIME, July 9). Last week Josef Stalin resorted to more drastic Bolshevik Terror, terror in its purest form. Because a member of the Soviet Politbureau or Red Big Ten had been assassinated (TIME, Dec. 10), Soviet firing squads last week mowed down 66 Russians, one a woman, who were not accused of having anything to do with Assassin Leonid Nicolaev or his crime. According to dispatches passed by the Soviet censor, "they died to express the Government's determination that Nicolaev's act should not be the model for others."

Assassin Nicolaev himself was being carefully nursed in a Leningrad hospital, doctors hoping to prevent Death from his self-inflicted wound and the beating he received. If saved, he was expected to go, first to the Gay-pay-oo for third degree, then into a monster Soviet propaganda trial and finally before a firing squad Last week the Gay-pay-oo were reported to have shot his 85-year-old mother, his wife, his daughters and his sons--in addition to the 66 executions of pure Bolshevik Terror.

To carry out this state butchery, Russia's Puppet President Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin was obliged by the Dictator to cancel with a stroke of the pen most of the "progress" ostentatiously made when the Gay-pay-oo was transformed into the Commissariat of Interior under its Gay-pay-oo chief, Comrade Genrikh Grigorevich Yagoda (TIME, July 23). Last week Stalin was said to be so vexed with Yagoda that he had suspended him as Commissar of Interior. The decree of President Kalinin deprived persons arrested not only of any right to be defended by a lawyer but also of the right to be accused by a state prosecutor. They were simply stood up before a Red judge and two assistants, with no right of appeal, and execution followed instantly after the Death sentence.

Picked for Death. In such circumstances just how does even the bloodiest state decide who is to be shot? Ever since the Soviet Government was established lists of undesirables have been kept. In times of emergency the Gay-pay-oo merely work down the list. Examinations are still guided by the rule of Lenin's famed Terrorist Executioner Latsis: "Do not look for clues in a case, whether the arrested man rebelled against the Soviets by word or by deed. First of all, you must ask him what class he belongs to, what is his extraction, what is his education and what is his profession. It is these questions that must decide the fate of the accused; this is the meaning and the substance of the Red Terror."

Since President Roosevelt cast the cloak of his popularity over Dictator Stalin by recognizing the Soviet Union (TIME, Nov. 27, 1933), the U. S. Press last week breathed no such denunciation as at Adolf Hitler's "blood purge." In Moscow the U. S. Embassy sent expressions of sorrow at the assassination of Comrade Kirov, Dictator Stalin's "Dear Friend Sergei." In Washington, however, Senator William Edgar Borah, longtime champion for recognition of the Soviet Union, boomed: "As far as I can determine, from the few facts I have been able to get, these executions were wholly unjustifiable and indefensible!"

Said Manhattan's Grand Duchess Marie:* "When my grandfather Alexander II was murdered, in 1881, many persons who were suspected were arrested. They were all investigated and those who were not guilty were exonerated. The assassins were given court trial which lasted for several months. They were found guilty and executed.

"The same thing happened in the case of my uncle the Grand Duke Sergei./- The police very quickly discovered there was no local plot and only the assassin was executed. There was no imprisonment of others. The law courts of Russia in those days were extremely just and there was very little corruption. . . .

"What has just taken place in Russia only goes to prove that the present regime is not what the world has come to think it is. ... The extermination of the whole family of the assassin is beyond words. Such a thing has not happened in Russia since Ivan the Terrible."

Chief Executioner. England's University of Birmingham conducts the ablest and most consistently pursued research study of the Soviet Union. In its latest report on the Second Five-Year Plan occurs this quiet, profoundly significant comment: "The legal and administrative compulsion to economic activity under penalty of capital and other punishment is so closely associated with the Soviet system of planning that a study of the U. S. S. R. economy at the present time should actually begin with an explanation of the criminal code. . . . The unusual duties which devolve nowadays on the Soviet public prosecutor may be judged from a statement made by M. Vyshinsky, the public prosecutor [at Moscow]: 'In the struggle for the realization of the harvest, one of the principal places by rights belongs to the organs of Soviet justice, Soviet law and prosecution [which must act] in regard to a full preparation--where this has not yet taken place--of reaping machines, the supply of spare parts, of oil products for the machines, and the completion of working plans for harvesting, and the struggle against harvest losses.'"

In a land where people's ordinary labors are thus the subject of compulsion, explosions of the full Bolshevik Terror automatically attend times of stress. Last week the chief drumhead court in Moscow was presided over by Judge Vassily Ulrich, famed during the British Engineers' Propaganda Trial (TIME, April 24, 1932). In a tome published last year by Dr. Karl Kindermann. a German research student who was arrested on suspicion by the Gay-pay-oo some years ago, he describes Judge Ulrich thus: "I was particularly fascinated by the loathesomely hideous face of the President of the Court, Ulrich. ... I immediately associated him with the idea of a butcher who had just emerged steaming from an abattoir rather than that of a judge. In Russia he was commonly known as the 'Chief Executioner.' "

Still the Chief, Judge Ulrich polished off death sentences in Moscow last week with a practiced tongue, turned up with Comrade Stalin at the fine funeral of Dear Friend Sergei.

"Merciless Fight." On Moscow's coldest day so far this winter, with thermometers down to 15DEG below zero. Russians turned out by the ten thousands before 10 a. m. to stand pack-jammed in the snow, stamping their feet as they waited for the funeral at 1 p. m. in the five-acre Red Square.

Josef Stalin had brought the corpse of Dear Friend Sergei personally from Leningrad on a special train, its engine decorated with a huge "STALIN." After lying in stale in Moscow's onetime Nobles' Club, the corpse was cremated and the ashes poured into a bronze urn. This the Dictator and other pallbearers carried to a niche in the Kremlin wall after two hours of speechmaking. Their keynote: more and better vengeance. Cried Premier Vyacheslav Molotov: "We swear to carry on a merciless fight against every enemy of our Revolution!"

"There can be no holier task than merciless punishment!" clarioned the Party newsorgan Izvestia, lapsing by a slip into pious language. All Soviet papers emphasized that as soon as Dear Friend Sergei's ashes were in their niche, Dictator Stalin mounted Lenin's Tomb beside the Kremlin wall, funeral music changed to the bray of military bands, and crack detachments of the Red Army and Gay-pay-oo troops swung past at the double while 64 airplanes filled the sky, approximately one for every Russian executed.

Disappointment was general that the Government apparently could not make up its mind to state just why a fellow-Bolshevik had slain Stalin's friend. Rumors that the act sprang from a "private grudge" were circulated by the Kremlin, but public curiosity for the real facts was so strong that every news kiosk was surrounded as soon as fresh papers arrived. Eager Russians snatched, read and flung down tons of papers in disgust when they proved to contain only propaganda, such as this telegram from beyond the Arctic Circle: "WE SHOCK BRIGADE WORKERS ON THE NEVA HYDROELECTRIC STATION PLEDGE OURSELVES TO COMPLETE IT AHEAD OF TIME AS OUR ANSWER TO THE DASTARDLY ASSASSINATION OF COMRADE KIROV." The city of Vyatka, capital of the province in which the slain Big Red was born, asked and received Dictator Stalin's prompt permission to change its name to Kirov.

With censorship around the Kremlin airtight, travelers leaving Russia reported that at Leningrad the local Gay-pay-oo, in panic at Stalin's arrival to investigate Kirov's death fortnight ago, refused to admit agents of the Moscow Gay-pay-oo who accompanied the Dictator.

Latest dispatches from Moscow reported that rifle fodder was being rounded up in Soviet districts along the Polish frontier, remote from either Moscow or Leningrad, the scene of the crime. Twelve were arrested in White Russia, 37 in the Ukraine far to the south. As an afterthought the Government, having let in the clutch of its machine of systematic Terror, described the nondescript persons shot last week as "Terrorists."

*She lists herself in the Manhattan telephone book, "Marie Grand Duchess. . . . ELdorado 5-6273."

/-Assassinated while Governor-General of Moscow when Niece Marie was a young girl living in his Kremlin Palace, as she relates in Education of a Princess.

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