(2 of 3)
"There have not been any riots in Moscow and probably no place else and there probably will not be. Few, if any, qualified foreign observers appear to believe there is a likelihood of anything more dramatic happening here than a continuation of the arrests, dismissals, trials and shootings." It was dramatic enough that the Premier of Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, the Vice Premier, and the Mayor of Bukhara were ousted from their jobs last week. The Premier's brother had meanwhile committed suicide. Over in White Russia, where the President killed himself fortnight ago, it was Railway Commissar Nikolai Vladimirsky who committed suicide last week. A further shake-up in Red Army circles, following the execution of Marshal Tukhachevsky and seven generals
(TIME, June 21), brought the discharge and arrest of four more high officers. Thirty-six more "wreckers" were executed at Khabarovsk.
Against the lurid background of such facts as these Harold Denny wrote:
"Soviet industry is still functioning, though in a manner that would be totally intolerable in any advanced capitalist country. Soviet industry and supply have not actually broken down, but are sadly disrupted, and they are becoming worse instead of better.
"And the significant thing is that the Kremlin's apparently frenzied efforts to arrest the decline by wholesale dismissals of executives and engineers, setting the whole population on a hunt for 'Trotskyists,' is making matters worse instead of better. . . . Now it becomes evident that many past figures of industrial output were false because executives, under pressure from the Kremlin to fulfill their plans, simply faked them. . . .
"Recent disclosures of foreign engineers who have now left the country as a result of the Soviet Union's drive to get rid of foreigners, form a vivid picture of industrial chaos from top to bottom. Foreigners having business with Soviet organizations report them in confusion. They start dealing with one set of executives only to have them disappear and be succeeded by another, who know nothing of what has gone before and who themselves soon disappear, to be succeeded by another set of novices. . . .
"Nearly every mind that might have disputed with Stalin for leadership has been destroyed by execution, exile or imprisonment. If Lenin were to return to life in this Red State that he founded he would see few familiar faces. . . . The happiest people here now are those in middling jobs. It is only obscure people who feel safe. That is true in every field, including the Communist Party ranks. . . . This city's aspect is not different from ordinary times and no more troops than usual are in evidence. . . .
"The prestige of the Russian Communist Party undoubtedly has suffered a severe blow in the eyes of the people of its own home country.
" 'These men, these great Bolsheviki, turn out to be crooks and traitors,' they say to themselves. And they wonder who the next of their heroes will be branded enemies of the people. . . ."