Bluecher Out?

What hundreds of Soviet soldiers, tanks and heavy guns were unable to do ten weeks ago--drive the Japanese off bleak & barren Changkufeng hill on the Siberian-Manchukuoan border--September's floods accomplished. Last week travelers from Manchukuo reported that Russian troops, after Japanese retired before the flood, planted their red flag atop the hill and began to pit it with fortifications.

Strangest feature of the Changkufeng affair to Russian and outside observers was that during and after the border battles Russian press comment omitted all mention of the Soviet's famed "Red Napoleon," Marshal Vasily Bluecher, Commander in Chief of the Far Eastern Army. One yellow newsman, the Japanese Domei agency's Ihacha Hagueno, dared to flash the flat statement that Marshal Bluecher had been arrested. In retaliation, Soviet secret police pounced on Hagueno's Russian woman translator and clamped her into jail. Promptly Japanese newsorgans announced that Marshal Bluecher had been not only arrested but had committed suicide.

Certainly many Red army officers who served under him in the Far East were purged. One good reason why Russia showed little enthusiasm for the Czecho-slovak cause fortnight ago was that her two top-rank military heads, Defense Commissar Kliment E. Voroshilov and Vice Commissar of Defense Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis, were not even in Moscow. They were over 3,000 miles away keeping a personal watch on the purge's progress in Siberia.

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