The Lady & the Commissar

What the free world knows of the nightmarish operation of the Russian police state has been mainly divulged by people who fled the regime because they hated it. U.S.-born Anna Louise Strong, 63, apparently still loves and admires the Soviet system, although she was roughly tossed out for "spying" (TIME, Feb. 28). The New York Herald Tribune (with 20 other U.S. newspapers) this week published Anna Louise's own story of her arrest.

Said the Trib, in its introductory note: "It is damning because it is authentic; and it is authentic because its author is a convinced Soviet sympathizer . . . Every present protestation by Miss Strong of her continued devotion to the Kremlin only underlines . . . the fact that friends and enemies alike are only insects under the heel of the vast, impersonal and inhuman despotism which she served . . ."

A Bang on the Door. In her first installment, Anna Louise related:

"I went to bed [in Moscow] very early on Monday, Feb. 14 . . .A bang on the door awoke me and the loud word: 'Open!' ... I threw on a kimono . . . Three men in uniform strode in. 'Come with us. You are arrested.'

" 'Me?' I cried. 'Me?'

" 'Quickly,' they said.

" 'What for?' I gasped.

" 'Come at once.' "

Anna grabbed her Chinese padded gown, a box of vitamin pills, three handkerchiefs, and followed her captors. "My mind raced madly . . . What, what, what had I done? Why, everybody liked me here! At the last diplomatic reception, Mme. Molotov had shown me a special favor . . . We turned . . . into the inner court of Lyubyanka prison . . . 'How,' I gasped, 'shall I ever get out of here?' "

Prisoner Strong was examined by a woman doctor, then locked in a solitary cell with a peephole through which guards could watch her. A bright light glared down in her face. "All night between snatches of sleep, I faced my sins." Why was she there? Her best guesses: 1) she had annoyed somebody by trying to get to China via the "closed" Manchurian frontier; 2) it was a "stupidity of some department eager to make a record."

Next day, a jailer announced: "The commissar wants you." Across a long table, Anna Louise confronted the commissar:

" 'What am I supposed to have done?' I demanded. The commissar quelled me with a glance. 'I'm asking the questions,' he said . . . thy name, birthplace . . . How many times in the U.S.S.R.? Over what frontiers? . . . Why should any American go back & forth to the U.S.S.R. except for subversive reasons? He had no concept of the life of a journalist.

"I wanted to cry: 'But I loved your country! I wanted to write, to explain it to the world!' The words froze. He wouldn't permit them, nor would he understand them." The commissar rose to pronounce judgment: Journalist Strong was to be expelled for spying. "I tried once more to protest that I wasn't a spy ... He said, 'Dismissed,' very curtly, and I went . . ."

"Who Knows?" For three days, Anna Louise languished in jail. Then the commissar thrust some papers at her to sign as acknowledgment of ownership--letters to her dead Russian husband, copies of her own stories, a book by Chinese Communist Mao Tse-tung. Anna protested vehemently, "That's nothing against your country."

Said the commissar: "No comments! Sign!"

"He didn't care a hoot what happened in any foreign country, not even to all the Communist parties of the world. Two weeks earlier I had seen a Moscow play that attacked this 'narrow specialism,' arguing that one must see one's job in relation to the wider interests. It hadn't reached this commissar yet. 'Maybe he'll get cleaned out himself,' I thought cheerfully, 'for that play shows the line is changing.' Who knows?"

In New York, the Communist Daily Worker turned waspishly on its onetime friend. Shrilled the Worker: "The Strong articles are written in a familiar Trotskyite line . . ." The Worker did not know, or chose to ignore, that Journalist Strong had decided to turn over part of her fee for the Trib articles to the defense of eleven top U.S. Communists, now on trial in Manhattan for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government.

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