STALIN ATTACKED

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 December 1939, Page 2

STALIN ATTACKED

MODERN IVAN THE TERRIBLE A bitter attack, in the form of a biography, on Stalin —according to the author, “wielder of a dictatorial power unparalleled in the world and unprecedented in history”—has appeared in London from the pen of a former member- of the executive of the Communist International, Boris Souvarine. The purpose of this book. "Stalin." is to show that, far from being the upholder of the Lenin tradition. Stalin is the creator of an unprincipled semioriental despotism which he maintains by murders, betrayals and assassinations. Lenin himself, it is stated, severed all relations with Stalin in the last letter he ever wrote. Of more immediate interest than the long and dreary catalogue of intrigue and violence is the author’s estimate of Stalin’s present strength and policy. The periodic mass executions and arrests. M. Souvarine declares, are partly designed to divert blame for the wholesale disappointments of the regime. He compares them with those of Ivan the Terrible. The industrial structure is declared to be unworkable, even model factories producing 50 per cent failures. Productivity of industrial labour is estimated at one-fifth that of the great industrial countries, while agriculture produces less than in 1913. "Millions of hours of unpaid labour, and the sacrifice of millions of lives" are needed to make up the annual deficit. Population increases, expected under the second Five-Year Plan, have not appeared, and the results of the census have been suppressed, together witli the officials responsible for it M. Souvarine estimates that at the end of 1938 Russia had lost a population equivalent (0 that of Poland.