"Never Heard of Stalin"

Of its Moscow bureau, Boston's Christian Science Monitor asked recently: "Has Russia gone Democratic?", referring to Premier Molotov's recent announcement of "secret, direct and equal" suffrage. Excerpts from the tart answer of Monitor Muscovites last week: "If the Communists were content to express their aims honestly, and to describe conditions in Russia as they are, it would be much easier to sympathize with them. Unfortunately, they prefer to misrepresent conditions not only to their own people, but to the outside world as well, to lay claims to a democracy which still has no existence in Russia and to dismiss with ill-natured contempt and scorn the hard-won political freedom of western democracies."

Appended was an anecdote about a Soviet udarnik (shock-brigade worker) personally known to a Monitor Muscovite. The udarnik "recently visited a meeting at which the Communist organizer delivered a eulogy to Joseph Stalin. In his speech the organizer said: 'Our Stalin has led us from the first days of our Revolution to the present.'

"The simple workman, who rarely spoke at a meeting, then asked a question. He said: 'I have followed the Revolution from the beginning, but cannot understand one thing. Will you please tell me why it is that for many years after the Revolution I never heard of Joseph Stalin? In those days it was all Lenin and Trotzky.'

"There followed an ominous silence. The other workers looked at their fellow with fascinated horror.

"Then the Communist speaker found his tongue. He bitterly denounced the honest workman as a 'class enemy' and a 'counter-revolutionary.' He concluded: 'How dare you say our great Stalin always was not known to everybody?'

"The workman went home to his wife with a troubled mind, and told her about it.

" 'I meant no harm,' he explained. 'I truly did not hear of Stalin.' She tried to reassure him.

"Two days later secret police came to the worker's room at night and took him away, with no word of explanation to his wife.

"Several weeks later, when the writer verified this incident, she had had no word from him, did not know where he was or what had happened to him."

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