Happy Khuligan

Like many another guest at the Red Army Day party in Moscow, U.S. Embassy Clerk Waldo Ruess (rhymes with U.S.) of Hollywood was feeling no pain. Some time during the evening his eye lit on a lovely actress from the State Theater and he asked to drive her home. The girl accepted, but before they had gone far she had a change of heart and jumped out of his car, yelling for help. As a cop or two ran up, Clerk Ruess sighed at the wonder of woman and drove off to bed.

That was last February. In March U.S. G-men in Portland, Ore. arrested a young Russian naval officer, Nikolai Redin, for spying. Next month Moscow police called Ruess, who had almost forgotten the Army Day episode, and summoned him to court. The charge: khuliganstvo (hooliganism).

In Russia, as in the U.S. and Britain, a hooligan is an unmannerly rough, named in all likelihood for the Irish family Hooligan whose rioting through London's Southwark was immortalized in a music hall song of the period.* Later cartoonist Frederick B. Opper endeared well-meaning, disastrous Happy Hooligan to millions. The U.S. State Department says that in Soviet law hooliganism means "a mild form of disorderliness."

Technically embassy clerks are not diplomatically immune. But Ambassador Walter Bedell Smith, aware that Washington grants a courtesy immunity to all embassy personnel, refused to surrender Ruess. The Russians insisted. Ambassador Smith demanded an exit visa for his clerk. The Russians refused. Last week, with Clerk Ruess confined to Embassy grounds, the khuligan crisis was at a standoff. Meanwhile, spy-suspect Redin, under $10,000 bail bond, was awaiting trial (on June 25).

* Some etymologists trace the term to another Irishman named Hooley, whose gang became known as the Hooley-gang. Still others connect it vaguely with a notorious thug named Muldoon whose name spelled backwards reads "noodlum"; hence hoodlum and hooligan.

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