The Milkman v. the MVD

Listeners who tuned in late on the midnight Moscow radio news got a shock--the Russian broadcaster was saying: ". . . Truth can only be arrived at if there is freedom to hear different points of view . . . Many facts and views are withheld from you, and there is no freedom of speech and free access to knowledge of how the rest of the world lives and thinks . . . [Foreign] broadcasts to the Soviet Union [are] jammed by your government. I wonder why. What has your government to fear?"

Off the Spike. The radio announcer was reading from next day's issue of Pravda. In June, Britain's Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison had challenged Pravda to print, in full, an appeal from him to the Russian people (TIME, July 9). After keeping the Morrison statement on the spike for a while, Pravda last week printed it. The statement was also printed in other Russian papers, giving it a circulation well up in the millions.

The Morrison statement continued: "In Britain we set great store by ... freedom from arbitrary arrest . . . British citizens are not removed from their homes, they are not deported, they are not sent to labor camps. If there is a knock at the door in the early morning, it will probably be only the milkman . . .

"You are told we are warmongers; that, in alliance with . . . the U.S., we are arming to the teeth to attack the Soviet Union. That is not true . . While we had demobilized and disarmed [after World War II], your government had retained vast armed forces . . . We concluded that we must be strong enough to make clear that aggression, from whatever quarter it might come, could not succeed."

Back to the Czar. Pravda's reply, twice as long as the Morrison statement and printed right alongside, is in its way as remarkable as the unprecedented gesture of publishing the Morrison text. By Soviet standards of invective, it is mild; in spots, it sounds strangely apologetic and naive.

Pravda describes Russia's huge armed forces as "a certain minimum regular army necessary to defend [Russian] independence," and goes all the way back to 1920 (when Britain, the U.S. and France made a halfhearted attempt to erase the Bolshevik Revolution) for an instance of "imperialist aggression" against Russia. To justify the Communist regime, Pravda also reaches back, almost sentimentally, to "Czarist exploiters and landowners" (all of whom are long dead or out of Russia). Pravda repeats the old line that: 1) MVD labor camps and censorships exist only for "enemies of the people . . . terrorists and assassins"; 2) Russians have freely chosen the Communist party to rule their land, etc. Concludes Pravda, in an odd brand of non-Marxist piety: "Such has been the will of the people--and the voice of the people is the voice of God!"

What are the Russians up to? The inevitable conclusion: Moscow is again trying to sell the notion, long held by dupes & dopes in the West, that the non-Communist world has nothing to fear from Soviet Russia.

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