In London last week a famed German professor of metallurgy and an English lawyer of 'such distinction that he sits upon His Majesty's Privy Council resolutely announced this awful decision:
The Russian Government is ordered to pay the sum of $65,000,000 to Lena Goldfields Ltd., and this company's concession —the largest ever granted in Soviet Russia to foreign businessmen—is at an end.
Would Russia obey this order? Could two private citizens successfully command a Great Power? How did they ever get to thinking that they could? Was this to be the historic test case on the outcome of which businessmen throughout the world may base their opinion of the Soviet State's good or bad faith?
Young Comrade Litvinov. The stock control of Lena Goldfields Ltd. is held by a small group of U. S. and British tycoons who maintain the privacy of their identity. Board Chairman of the company in London is Herbert Guedalla, cousin of elegant British essayist-poet-biographer Philip Guedalla. Of the Directors close-lipped Major Frederick Davis Gwynne is easily outstanding. He went to Moscow in 1925 and signed the original terms of the Concession Agreement, a Russian signatory being young Comrade Maxim Maximovitch Litvinov who has since risen until today he is Foreign Minister of the Soviet State. Last week the Soviet Embassy in London, acting upon orders from Comrad Litvinov, declared that the German and the Englishman who ordered Russia to pay Lena Ltd. $65,000,000 had absolutely no right or jurisdiction to do so, and that their act is a total nullity.
Lena's Choice. The German thus smackingly snubbed is Herr Professor Doktor Otto Stutzer. Early this year he was peacefully lecturing upon metallurgy to beer-drowsy students at the University of Freiburg. He read in the papers of disputes, ever more violent, between Lena Ltd. and the Soviet Government over operating details of the concession. Gradually the rupture grew so wide as to demand arbitration. Thereupon, under Article 90 of the Lena Goldfields Concession Agreement of 1925, the Soviet Government chose a panel of six German professors, and Lena made ready to pick one of these as chairman of the Arbitral Board. When she had looked over all the six professors carefully Lena picked Dr. Stutzer.
The Arbitral Board was to consist of three, and Lena chose as her personal champion a man in whom she knew all England (and particularly "The City") would have confidence, Rt. Hon. Sir Leslie Frederic Scott, P. C., onetime Solicitor General of Great Britain. In due course last Spring arbitral Chairman Stutzer summoned his Board to meet in Berlin. All seemed to be going swimmingly when:
1) Lena Ltd. informed the Soviet Gov ernment by telegraph that working condi tions in the gold fields had been made in tolerable and impossible by the interference and oppression of Soviet officials and. secret police. In these circumstances Lena wired that she was cancelling the powers of attorney of her representatives in Rus sia, withdrawing all her Occidental representatives from the country, and would await the decision of the Arbitral Board upon what must inevitably be the final winding up of the concession.