Political Notes

Sensation. A significant despatch last week indicated that Gregory Zinoviev, "spiritual son of Lenin," has been re-elected chairman of the Third International, or world-wide Communist bureau for propaganda, terror and general subversion.

Since almost every foreign commentator upon Soviet politics has predicted within the last few months that M. Zinoviev would instead be ousted from this post by those potent "moderate Communists," Stalin and Premier* Rykov, the sensation of last week was notable.

The chief Soviet representatives on the new Executive Council of the International, as chosen last week, are MM. Zinoviev, Stalin and Bukharin. A representative was also chosen from each nation. To Charles Ruthenberg, U.S. communist, was entrusted the task of "representing" not only the U.S. and Canada but Japan as well.

No League Delegate. The People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister Tchitcherin) sent out a 3,000-word statement to the press last week, the nub of which was that Soviet Russia will not send a delegate to the League of Nations Preparatory Disarmament Conference at Geneva, now scheduled for May 18. The statement wandered far afield and declared among other things that the recent League fiasco had led to "a weakening of coherence among Western European powers" which "clears a path for the growing American economic penetration of Europe, after which American political penetration is but a step.

"No matter what formula American statesmen advance, the final outcome of such a process will be the further subordination of Western Europe to domination by American capital."

Private Capital. M. Emanual Quirning, vice-chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, indicated the trend of "moderate Communism" when he announced last week:

"The private industrialist is preferable to the private merchant and will be of great assistance to us at present, when we are unable to supply the peasants' needs for manufactured articles and textiles. The state cannot now neglect private capital. . . . Private industrialists must have the privilege of importing machinery and raw material with which to establish factories."

Simultaneously the Ukrainian Soviet authorities announced that private persons will hereafter be allowed to erect small factories under their own exclusive superintendence. Heretofore such "liberty of capital" has been abhorred as flat Communist heresy.

*The whole administrative system of Soviet Russia is made difficult to understand by the deliberate care with which perfectly well understood relationships are disguised under new and strange names. Thus M. Rykov is not, literally speaking, "Premier" but "Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars," who perform exactly the function of ministers in an ordinary cabinet,