SOVIET CHARGES

Hokitika Guardian, 26 November 1930, Page 5

SOVIET CHARGES

AGAINST BRITAIN AND FRANCE,

[United Press Association —By Electrio Telegraph.—Copyright.)

LONDON, November 24

“The Times’s” Riga correspondent says: Amazing allegations that France and Britain are preparing a war on the Soviet are being given prominence in ' the indictment against the eight Russian professors and engineers connected with various industrial enterprises who are charged with wrecking Soviet industry. Tiie trial begins at Moscow on November 25th. One of the chief objects of the trial is to explain to the masses the partial failure of the Five Years Plan, and also the breakdown of the food supplies, the scarcity of commodities, and the great privations which were the reason for the shooting, without trial, of forty-eight Directors and Managers ol the Meat and Fish Trusts last September, who were charged with deliberately “organising hunger.” The indictment declares that the total mens hership of the wreckers is two thousand, from which eight have been selected for a public trial. The indictment adds that the accused determined in 1028, to overthrow the Soviet and to establish a Democratic Republic with a Parliament lit which they would be ministers, after a temporary military dictatorship. It Says the wreckers visited Paris and London in connection with the Soviet’s business. They got into touch with former Russian industrialists, through whom they entered into negotiation with the French and British Governments’ general staffs, and worked out plans for military intervention in 1930, the French operating through Roumania, and the British Navy supporting in the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea, from which point they Avon Id attack, Leningrad. The indictment alleges that Colonel E. 'T. Lawrence conducted the British Staff’s negotiations, and the names of other prominent British firms and individuals. It declares that France and Britain would be rewarded by important Concessions of territory.

“The Times’s” correspondent emphasises the absurdity of the charges, and also expresses the belief that Russian opinion is being prepared for the eventuality of war as the issue of the present catastrophe.