Old Soldiers Do Die

In the past three weeks, the authoritative London Times has reported the deaths of a countess, a viscountess, a baroness, two lords, two baronets, a knight and the widows of eight knights. It seems possible that these deaths, coupled with widespread student rioting, disaffection with the Westminster government and the bloody battles in Ulster, indicate that at last the British proletariat have begun to throw off the bloodstained shackles of the aristocratic governing clique.

So, suggested Columnist Tony Clifton in the Sunday Times of London, might a Russian reporter with a conspiratorial imagination interpret recent events in Britain. Clifton was taking a puckish poke at Kremlinologists in the West. Suspicious by trade, they have been agog with speculation and wild surmise about the deaths of twelve Russian generals within a recent 17-day period.

Released Piecemeal? Last week the passing of another general, G. Volkov, continued to provoke conjecture, fanciful as it seemed, about some sort of vast cabal. One rumor was that the generals had died together, either in a rocket accident or an airplane crash, and the death notices were being released piecemeal to hush up the tragedy. Another speculation, fed by the fact that this year's May Day parade in Moscow was predominantly a civilian show, was that the military had attempted a putsch and failed. The ringleaders were quietly executed, so this tale went, and the unreliable Soviet army was forbidden to march through Red Square. Then there was the intriguing matter of General Valentin Penkovsky, most important of the dead generals--and the great-uncle of the most highly placed Russian ever to be recruited to spy for the West inside the U.S.S.R.--Oleg Penkovsky.

In its string of obituaries, the Soviet army newspaper did say that nine in the fallen constellation of red stars had died "tragically." This is official jargon for accidental death, and it reinforced the disaster rumor. But the other officers, many on the retired list, were reported to have died of natural causes. Volkov, a retired air force technical expert, was 70 years old. General Mar-ikyan Popov, a staff officer in the Ministry of Defense, was 67 at the time of his death and General Penkovsky, 65. Despite the twelve deaths in 17 days, overall the mortality has been steady: 46 have died since the beginning of this year, only nine more than in the comparable period of 1968. Considering that Russia counted 10,000 generals in its army at the end of World War II, the close deaths of that many of them a quarter of a century later was curious but actuarially quite plausible. Old soldiers, after all, do die as well as fade away.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.