Foreign News: Happy Gorky

Russia

If critical, sarcastic, Boob-Baiter Henry Louis Mencken should abandon the American Mercury and edit a Happiness Monthly and Rotarian Booster, it would not arouse greater surprise than the announcement from Moscow last week that a new Soviet magazine. Our Achievements, has been started under the editorship of Maxim Gorky.

Gorky, world-famed as a beetle-browed dramatist, storyteller, vagabond, and apostle of gloom (The Lower Depths), has decided that the mass of Russian journalism, directly under Soviet control though it is, is far too self-critical. Our Achievements will paint only the bright side of Soviet life.

This paradoxical change in a man whose earlier work dealt exhaustively with harlots, drunkards and rat infested cellars, is partially explained by the enthusiastic recognition which the Soviet State has given him as an oldtime enemy of Tsarism.