Useful Vengeance

About six weeks is the time lag necessary for Joseph Stalin to realize that one of his major policies has provoked hostile world public opinion and to hush it up accordingly. Last week the Soviet Press had been hushed since March 19 on the subject of Stalin's vengeance, exacted from citizens of Leningrad for the assassination there of the Dictator's "Dear Friend" Sergei Kirov (TIME. Dec. 10). Correspondents, unable to pry a single fact from the State since it announced that 1,074 Leningraders had been arrested, did get past the Soviet censor last week these bits of circumstantial news:

P: Every second-hand store in Leningrad is crammed to bursting with household effects of Russians who mournfully admit they must sell at any price "because our family is being exiled to Siberia."

P:Travelers reaching Moscow from the Far East via the Trans-Siberian report trains of "Kirov Exiles" moving eastward under armed guard.

P:One correspondent guessed that at least 25,000 Leningraders have been exiled since the State stopped issuing Press handouts about the Kirov case.

P:Another declared that "in many cases no specific charges have been preferred against those sent into exile other than that they held such and such a position in pre-revolutionary Russia."

Since Kirov was assassinated not by an elderly Tsarist but by a youthful Communist, the expiation of his death by exile to Siberia of the sort of Russians who were being bundled off last week has been found, on a short term basis, peculiarly effective. Thus restive young Communists, many of them more or less disgusted with the Stalin Dictatorship, are not themselves "liquidated" but are terrorized by the liquidating of Tsarists, and relapse into useful Party obedience.

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