Yen for Revolution

Soviet newspaper readers last week were bug-eyed at a trial in Manchukuo which seemed to them as deliberate a miscarriage of justice as the Moscow Old Bolsheviks Trials must have seemed to Manchukuoan Emperor Kang Te, Japan's bland puppet. To Red Russians there is nowhere a more detestable body of men than the "White Guards" in Manchukuo, a group of ex-Tsarist soldiers, aristocrats and riff-raff who live just outside the Soviet Union border, expecting momentarily and scheming year after year for "the collapse of Bolshevism."

The jail at Harbin recently contained six White Guards, convicted of having murdered a pro-Soviet Jewish orchestra conductor named Simon Kaspe. The Manchukuo Supreme Court presently reviewed their case and, according to the Moscow Pravda's passionate account last week, had before it the evidence of Harbin Police Chief Yeguchi who testified: "These men are Russian patriots preparing a revolt on Soviet territory." Even the prosecutor, according to Pravda, tacitly admitted that "the crime had a political background."

Verdict: the Manchukuo Supreme Court ordered "the release of the accused from the accusation on the grounds of an amnesty." Winding up the story with a gruesome punch, Pravda said that the White Guards who thus go scot free murdered the Jewish orchestra leader after kidnapping him, sending his father "your son's ears to show we mean business," and attempting vainly to get by these means 300,000 yen for their revolution.

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