Davies & Bolshies

"There is a strange charm which binds you like a narcotic addict in chains to this marvelous country." --Walter Duranty last week from Moscow.

Before quitting Russia to make for Manhattan this week aboard the Queen Mary, then recross the Atlantic to attend the Coronation of George VI, successful new U. S. Ambassador to Russia & Mrs. Joseph E. Davies gathered at their Spasso Palace in Moscow last week the flower of the Red Army, to be exact its three toughest plants: Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky and Budenny.

These three were "comrades" to their Red soldiers until suddenly upped by Dictator Stalin to the hitherto capitalist rank of "Marshal" with enormous five-pointed stars of rank in their lapels. Millionaire Ambassador Davies called for a toast "to the Red Army, an army of citizenry devoted to peace!"

To this, Marshal Klimentiy ("Klim") Voroshilov, Soviet Defense Commissar, replied with a speech promising that "when there shall be no further need for uniforms, the Red Army will put on civilian clothes!" After dinner the Red Army leaders were entertained by an Embassy showing of the musicomedy cinema Rose Marie. Three nights previously other Bolshevik bigwigs had been regaled with Naughty Marietta. "Each soldier in the Soviet Army," Red guests told Host Davies, whose wife's fortune came from food, "now receives 5,000 calories per day, whereas in the Tsarist Army the ration was but 3,300 calories."

Sensation of the Moscow week, apart from the unprecedented behavior of Bolshevik bigwigs who never before have attended Embassy functions, was an abnormally candid speech "made privately" to 700 Soviet industrial managers by the newly appointed Commissar of Heavy Industry Valery I. Mezhlauk (TIME, March 8). Since 700 people are too many to keep Quiet, it was soon learned that Comrade Mezhlauk had dropped some strong hints as to the next Moscow Old Bolshevik trial, intimating that the Ogpu's efforts to wring confessions are being "strenuously resisted" by the two star prisoners, onetime Soviet Premier Alexei Rykov and onetime Soviet No. 1 Editor Nikolai Bukharin, both finely bearded Old Bolsheviks. Smooth-shaven New Bolshevik Mezhlauk smoothly voiced indignation, but not at third-degree methods. "It is hard to imagine a more atrocious spectacle," said he, "than Bukharin and Rykov, who have betrayed the interests of the working class and of their country!"

Reputedly Ambassador Davies believes the Old Bolshevik trials have been "on the level." Certainly it would be undiplomatic for him to believe otherwise. Correspondents who accompanied him on his recent Russian industrial tour by private train -- (TIME, March 15) paid their rail fare at the Embassy before leaving Moscow and only four went. They were surprised and delighted to be handed back their money afterward, assured that they had been the Ambassador's "personal guests." Before leaving Moscow last week, Mr. Davies predicted a rapid rise in U. S. exports to the U. S. S. R., based this on the fact that Bolsheviks are fuming today at the slowness of deliveries on goods they have ordered in Britain, as that Kingdom seems to have dropped everything else to attend to its Rearmament and Coronation. Today the U. S. is third in exports to Russia, Britain second, Germany first.

How deeply under Stalin's skin has penetrated world-wide suspicion of the Old Bolshevik trials as frame-ups, the Dictator disclosed in a slashing speech delivered secretly to Moscow bigwigs on March 3 and broadcast last week by electrical transcription to all Russia. "It is a rotten theory to say the Trotskyists do not have reserves in the Soviet Union among the remnants of the exploiting classes and among foreign traitors!" came Stalin's voice off the phonograph record. The U. S. translator of Trotsky's works, Max Eastman, was termed by Stalin "a notorious swindler and the leader of a horde of writing bandits who live only by slandering the working class and the Soviet Union."

After departing Ambassador Davies, the Dictator cast assertion that "America is invaded with Japanese spies and Japan with American spies! . . . Can we expect capitalist states to treat us differently from the way they treat each other? No! Bourgeois states must, in fact, send twice or three times as many spies to our country--and not only spies, but wreckers and terrorists!"

This peep into Stalin's mind broadened as the Dictator described "Capitalism, Trotskyism and the conceit of members of the Communist Party" as "the three great enemies of Russia."

He recalled the early Five-Year Plan slogan, "We must master technique," and sounded what Stalin's entourage said is the Moscow keynote of 1937:

"WE BOLSHEVIKS MUST MASTER BOLSHEVISM!"

Using military terminology and foreshadowing regimentation of the Communist Party tighter than ever, Stalin described Russia's 3,500 most prominent Communists as the "general staff," their 35,000 immediate Communist subordinates as "party officers," and the next immediate 125,000 subordinates as "noncommissioned officers" of the remaining 1,800,000 party members in Russia. Tactful Generalissimo Stalin did not call these "soldiers."

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