During last year's bloody purge of "Trotskyists, Fascists, counterrevolutionaries, spies and wreckers," many innocent victims were framed by stool pigeons, police agents and prosecutors anxious to build up their reputations for zeal and vigilance. Communist Russia, unlike Nazi Germany, washes much of its dirty linen in public and last week characteristically made public the weirdest abuses of the purge.
In the mountain town of Leninsk-Kuznetski three ambitious agents of the NKVD (Commissariat for Home Affairs) and the acting city prosecutor, unable to fabricate cases against adult victims, took to arresting children...