Stalin Silent, Stalin Crashed

RUSSIA

Stalin Silent, Stalin Crashed

Inside the Kremlin Fortress 600 pink-cheeked, drably-dressed Russians met last week in the gorgeous, glittering onetime Throne Room of Tsar Nicholas II. Stamping the snow off their shoes, blowing on their hands, wiping their red noses, lighting cigarets and shouting greetings they sat down on wooden benches for a brief session of the Soviet Parliament, or Union Central Executive Committee.

Silent on the platform sat Dictator Josef Stalin, and to No. i Correspondent Walter Duranty the Man of Steel looked "benevolent." Comrade Vyacheslav Molotov, the thickset, middle-aged Soviet Premier, talked. Six hundred stomachs quaked with laughter when he said: ''We are trying to erect next year more blast furnaces than the United States will close down."

By giving the Union Central Executive Committee a good dose of 1932, Stalin's spokesman worked the assembly up to an appropriate pitch of optimism. But he also admitted 1931 gaps in the Five-Year Plan, gaps which hundreds of delegates knew to exist in the places from which they came. Neither Russia's transport system, nor her production of steel, iron or coal, nor the general productivity of labor in Soviet factories, admitted Premier Molotov, have fulfilled the 1931 schedules of the Five-Year Plan.

Spending to fulfill the Five-Year Plan has exceeded all estimates. With a throb of triumph in his powerful voice, Orator Molotov drew cheers from his audience by stating that whereas the Government had planned to spend only $23,250,000,000 on the Five-Year Plan it will have spent by next year $27,000,000,000, the original scope of the Plan having, of course, been much enlarged. "We shall yet fulfill the Five-Year Plan in four years!" cried Premier Molotov. Twenty times in this part of his speech he repeated his pet word, "we shall organize this. . . . Organization will fix that. . . . The important thing is to do things the right way by organizing them. . . ."

Turning to foreign affairs Premier Molotov said that the coming Disarmament Conference (see p. 7) "will be an Armament Conference, each nation striving to disarm its rivals and to obtain a free hand to arm itself. . . .

"The Soviet Union," he promised, "will follow steadfastly a policy of peace. . . . The events in Manchuria merely illustrate the designs and schemes attempted to draw the Soviet Union into war."*

Moscow assumed that as usual the Union Central Executive Committee would vote complete confidence in the Government and adjourn early in January, leaving Dictator Stalin (who runs the Committee by Communist wire-pulling behind the scenes) to run Russia.

Silent in public, Comrade Stalin was loquacious last week in conversation with Dr. Emil Ludwig, best-selling biographer of Napoleon, potential best-selling biographer of Stalin.

Dr. Ludwig crashed the Stalin gate by rushing to Moscow as the representative of Germany's most potent daily, the Berliner Tageblatt. Shrewdly Tageblatt had raised a rumpus about an innocuous pact of non-aggression now being negotiated between Russia and Poland. Did that mean the end of Russo-German friendship? Did it mean Russian support for the Treaty of Versailles and the Polish Corridor? Germany must know! Stalin must speak! -- such was the smart Tageblatt-Ludwig gate-crashing approach. Stalin spoke:

"We are politicians of a peculiar kind. There are politicians who promise peace today and tomorrow forget it or deny it without blushing. We do not act that way. . . .

"When the Poles explained that they were ready to negotiate for a non-aggression pact, of course we agreed and commenced negotiations. What is there to fear from the German standpoint? . . . We must state in the pact that we will employ no force and undertake no act of aggression in order to change Poland's frontiers or to violate its independence. Just as we give the Poles this promise, so they must give us a similar pledge. . . .

"Is that recognition of the Versailles Treaty? No. Is it a guaranty of frontiers? No. We have never guaranteed that and we never will, just as Poland never has nor ever will guarantee our boundaries.

"Our friendly relations with Germany will remain now as before. That is my firm conviction."

*Moscow papers mysteriously reported last week that "Citizen G" had been urged to assassinate the Japanese Ambassador and thus provoke a Russo-Japanese war by one Karl Vanek, attache at the Czechoslovak Legation in Moscow.

"Citizen G" did not assassinate anybody. Instead he reported the alleged Czech suggestion to Soviet authorities who praised "Citizen G."

Attache Vanek, who has been stationed for five years in Moscow, suddenly left for Prague.

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