Cold Comfort

Somewhere in Australia last week, Mrs. Evdokia Petrov, another fugitive from the Russian secret police system, was at last reunited with her husband. But the reverberations of her dramatic, eleventh-hour escape from the agents of the MVD who tried to carry her back to Russia (TIME, April 26) echoed and re-echoed through the world. Mrs. Petrov, like the others of her kind who have defected in recent weeks, is no ordinary refugee from Communist tyranny.

Black Smoke. Ever since the execution last year of the MVD's pasty-faced boss, Lavrenty Beria, there have been reports of trouble within the MVD itself. The surrender to the West of an MVD agent, Yuri Rastvorov, in Japan last January, the defection of Khokhlov in West Germany and of the Petrovs in Australia, are the known cases; official Washington sources hint that there are others. Try as it may, Communist propaganda cannot mutter a simple "good riddance" at the defections of such people. They know too much. Evdokia Petrov was not just a spy's wife. As an expert code clerk in her husband's espionage apparatus in Australia's Russian embassy, she knew secrets.

From Moscow itself last week came a suggestion of panic. Three days after Mrs. Petrov was rescued from the Russians at Darwin, the Russian government abruptly severed diplomatic relations with Australia. In one breath, the Russians accused the Australians of "slander" for calling Petrov a spy, and in the next, demanded his immediate return as a swindler and embezzler. Unable to get back the documents delivered to Australia by Petrov, the departing staff at Canberra's Russian embassy spent their last hours getting rid of other information that might prove valuable to the West. Black smoke belched from the embassy chimneys as files went into fireplaces, and on the embassy lawn a Russian stood guard with a hose over a bonfire, not hesitating to turn a full stream of water into the face of any snooper peering through the hedge. In Moscow the Russians held up the departure of the Australian embassy staff, after first ordering them out of the country within three days.

Topical Knowledge. In Washington, the spines of those who once rubbed shoulders in the diplomatic corps with former Russian Ambassador Alexander Panyushkin crawled slightly at the news that he was now the efficient chief of MVD's assassination department. To Washingtonians who had found the ambassador's stilted conversation pedestrian to the point of boredom, it was cold comfort to realize that they had merely seized on topics that failed to interest him. On the right subject, apparently, Panyushkin could be fascinating. "He is a clever and attractive person," said ex-MVDman Khokhlov in Bonn last week, "and he knows how to explain to you the right way to kill a man with poison bullets."

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