Out of Line

Conservative estimates place the number executed in Joseph V. Stalin's current "blood purge" around 500. In addition to these admitted executions, tens of thousands of unadvertised arrests have been made in the past three months in the drive to wipe out opposition to the Stalinist regime. Persons accused of being "wreckers, Trotskyists, Rightists, diversionists, counterrevolutionaries, saboteurs" are in fact generally guilty of just-one common crime--deviation from the "party line." So changing, undefined is this line that almost every Russian writer or speaker on Soviet politics, art, literature, social studies, must have been guilty at one time or another of an utterance which could now condemn him as an "enemy of the people."

Last week Webb Miller, United Press's European manager, published a series of six "uncensored" articles whose material he gathered in Russia this summer. High point of the series was a story illustrating the vigilance Soviet writers must keep to stay in line:

"On a previous visit to Moscow last February, I dined one night with members of the Foreign Office and a few journalists. . . . Paul Lapinsky, at that time foreign editor of the newspaper Izvestia, the official organ of the Central Executive

Committee of the Soviet Union, was being chafed about his pet cat, of which he was inordinately fond. 'Well, I should love that cat,' Lapinsky said finally, grinning. 'The other day he scratched one of my manuscripts, and I found that he had saved me from a grievous deviation from the party line.' Lapinsky has disappeared now--no one knows where. Apparently his cat failed him at last."

Few days before this anecdote was published in the U. S., in the U. S. S. R. Moscovites were gasping at an editorial run in Izvestia which offered an explanation, privately held by many an observer, for Stalin & Co.'s purge of line jumpers. In an article headed "Panic Raisers," Mikhail Suvinsky daringly accused Communist authorities of the Saratov region of covering up their own inefficiency with a campaign against "saboteurs and enemies." "What woebegone leader would not jump at such a convenient slogan to cover up his own inactivity and inability to work?" asked Newsman Suvinsky, in an editorial that somehow got by Izvestia's editors. "Spurred by thoughts of sabotage, the leaders developed a series of trials and demotions of dozens of collective farm chairmen, brigade chiefs and chairmen of village Soviets. . . . But it is clear to every one that the violent administrative rage that has swept leaders of the region has nothing to do with the Bolshevist struggle against the true enemies and wreckers. Better Bolshevist organization and more businesslike care of combines and combine operators, of thousands of shock workers and of collective farm labor and less panic and terrible sentences, Comrades of Saratov."

Few days later Izvestia officially admitted its editorial "error," labeled the Suvinsky editorial "essentially an enemy's outburst. . . . The author of the article, who crudely distorted facts and made completely wrong and politically harmful conclusions, has been removed from Izvestia."

Meantime, the purge continued. In Moscow, V. I. Liubchenko, president of the People's Commissars Council of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic--one of U. S. S. R.'s seven autonomous republics--was reported to have committed suicide, an announcement which reminded some cynical U. S. newsgatherers that many a third-degreed prisoner slips getting into the patrol wagon.

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