Stalin Speaks

Throughout the Soviet Union it is a grim jest to say that neither the Voice of God nor that of the People can be heard above the silence of Comrade Josef Stalin. Always shabbily dressed, the Dictator prefers to dominate Russia from his unobtrusive post of Secretary of the Communist Party--the only political group permitted to exist. Even at party gatherings Secretary Stalin habitually sits in watchful silence on the back row of a crowded speakers' platform. Therefore when the man whose name means "Steel" suddenly chose to speak, last week, before the Central Committee and the Central Control Committee of the Communist Party, his few words were treasured up as pregnant oracles.

Rustication. The Dictator sternly warned party executives that they must not lose contact with the masses, nor ignore or stifle criticism, nor fail to take effective precautions in advance of looming difficulties. Each of them must spend, he said, at least one month per year in the provinces, doing local party work.

Grain Hoarding. Secondly M. Stalin announced that unrelenting pressure would be maintained upon the Peasant Squires or "Fists" who hoarded their grain during the last three months of 1927 and finally produced something very like an artificial famine (TIME, Feb. 27).

"These Kulak speculators," rasped M. Stalin, "shall be prevented from ever again attempting to starve the Red Army and the urban Proletariat."

As everyone knows, the recent "speculators' famine" was broken by sending through the provinces bands of strong-arm grain collectors who literally forced the peasants to sell their hoarded grain at the fixed prices offered by the State.

Economic Intervention. Lastly, Dictator Stalin stated with apparent deadly seriousness that the Capitalistic Powers, having failed to penetrate Russia by "military intervention" in 1918-20, are now seeking to subvert the Soviet State by "economic intervention carried out by bourgeois technicians."

M. Stalin explained that he referred especially to the six German engineers who were recently arrested in the new

Russian industrial region of the Don and charged with "counter revolutionary sabotage." Only two of these men have been released, despite the repeated protests of the German Government.

Apparently M. Stalin is convinced that even the few foreign technicians who have been imported to teach Russians the tricks of industrial trades now constitute a counter-revolutionary menace and are subsidized by the Capitalist Powers.

He concluded: "For the future there are only two possibilities. Either we pursue our revolutionary policy in organizing the proletarians suppressed in all countries around the working class of the Soviet Union--in this case international capital will attempt to prevent our promotion by all means--or we abandon our revolutionary policy and make a number of concessions to international capital. In the latter case international capital possibly would be willing to assist us to degenerate our Socialist State into a bourgeois republic.

"But, since we cannot make concessions in principle without abandoning ourselves, we must be prepared that international capital will continue to wrong us in all ways."

Observers recalled that Stalin, though phenomenally astute in Russian matters, has never visited Europe, speaks neither English, French nor German, and is at a disadvantage when he attempts to estimate mentality and machinations of Occidental Powers.