Purgers Purged

During last year's bloody purge of "Trotskyists, Fascists, counterrevolutionaries, spies and wreckers," many innocent victims were framed by stool pigeons, police agents and prosecutors anxious to build up their reputations for zeal and vigilance. Communist Russia, unlike Nazi Germany, washes much of its dirty linen in public and last week characteristically made public the weirdest abuses of the purge.

In the mountain town of Leninsk-Kuznetski three ambitious agents of the NKVD (Commissariat for Home Affairs) and the acting city prosecutor, unable to fabricate cases against adult victims, took to arresting children for "Fascist terroristic activities." Scores were thrown into bedless, crawling cells along with common criminals and political prisoners. In their reports the purgers concealed the children's ages, passed them off as grown youths. Some of the child victims were shipped off to prisons in other cities, others were kept in Leninsk-Kuznetski and questioned night after night.

One ten-year-old sprout was dragged from his sleep on a cold cell floor to be prodded with the endless question: "Were you a member of a counterrevolutionary, Fascist, terroristic organization?" After nights of browbeating, the bewildered lad "confessed." The zealous agents then attempted to get him to confess that he had started recruiting for such an organization in 1935 (when he was seven years old).

Last week the three agents and the prosecutor were sent to jail themselves for from five to ten years. The released children were asked whether they even knew what Fascism was. "We have seen Fascists in the movies," they confessed. "They go about in white caps."

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