RUSSIA'S TWO FACES

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 1, 2 January 1936, Page 8

RUSSIA'S TWO FACES

Uruguay's reported severance of diplomatic relations with Russia, one of the closing events of 1935, is a reminder that during the year Russia has "rejected protests" by the United States, Britain, Italy, and Latvia. But there is a vital difference between the Uruguayan charge and the other charges. The Uruguayan Council of Ministers holds that it is proved on evidence that the Russian Minister to Montevideo, M. Minkin, and members of the Soviet Embassy were "directly connected with the recent bloody revolutionary outbreak in Brazil," and that they have made Montevideo a centre of revolutionary activity not only for Uruguay but for other South American States. There is also a charge against the Communist International (the Comintern), which Russian institution is held, by various countries, to be a general offender in the way of propagandist mischief. But, so far as the published details of other countries' protests' show, no country save Uruguay has charged the Soviet Government's own officials with direct revolutionary action in the terms of the Uruguayan accusation. M. Minkin seems to be the only Soviet Minister who has had the honour of being expelled in 1935. The next nearest thing to a crisis was the United States statement in August published in reply to the Moscow Government's contemptuous rejection of an earlier Washington protest against Red propaganda. Mr. Cordell Hull, United States Secretary of State, implied that diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Government by the United States might be discontinued, and he said flatly that Moscow's reply to the Washington protest "almost in so many words repudiates the pledge which the Soviet Government gave to the United States Government at the time of recognition." That is to say, Washington regarded the pledge as putting an end to Moscow's Jekyll-and-Hyde policy, whereby the Soviet Embassy (except, apparently, in Uruguay) acts correctly, but the Comintern stirs up unrest by propaganda and by financing local radical leaders, for which Comintern action ihe Soviet Government disclaims responsibility. On the strength of such disclaimer, the Acting Foreign Commissar at Moscow, N. N. Krestinsky, made diplomatic history on August 25 by replying to Mr. Cordell Hull's protest against the Comintern: J I cannot accept your protest and I am compelled to reject it. As some concession lo M. Krestinsky's sense of compulsion, Mr. Cordell Hull's published rejoinder, quoted above, "took the form of a public document ralher than of a Note to the Russian Government." Notwithstanding these diplomatic refinements, ihe ice in August was rather thin.

Four protests (which Moscow is "compelled" to decline) and one expulsion raise llic question whether ihe Soviet Government has changed its heart or merely changed its tactics. If Russia's onlry into the League of Nations meant a change of hca.il, why ihesc protests?

Alexander Kerensky, who tried lo rule Russia in the interim between the Tsar and Lenin, says that Western nations arc under an illusion if they imagine that Lilvinoff's League and foreign policy is due lo anything belter than fear of Germany, Poland, and Japan, and if lhey imagine thai Russia's new internal policy of permitting the small peasant capitalist, and of giving the Soviets a democratic facade, arises from anything higher than economic failures and fear of the future. Yet Kerensky remarks that it is questionable whether there is a real danger from the "aggressive triangle encircling Russia: Tokio, Warsaw, Berlin"; so that it amounts to this —thai while he thinks Western belief in a Russian change of heart is an illusion, the fear that has changed the Soviet's tactics (not its heart) may also be an illusion. Probably there is a good deal of the hypothetical in such speculations, but Kerensky at any rate sounds a cautionary note against trusting the New Russia —a note not to be disregarded. His comparison of Sovietism with Hitlerism is to the effect that, in tactics, these mortal enemies have inspired each other — but that is another story.