WHY RUSSIA LOOKS ON.
Sir-Your leader of February 28 suggests that Russia has not resisted Germany because she cannot, being too dirty and disorganised. Hitler apparently disagrees with you, for London press cables declare that he has 1,500,000 men, a third of his entire army, on the Russian frontier. Surely that spells fear of Russia. Surely the real reason Russia hasn’t resisted is that she hasn’t been attacked. Sigrid Undset and Professor Hogben, a mathematician, are quoted as witnesses of dirty Russia. Well, Russia covers one-sixth of the globe, and both your witnesses apparently took no more than a hurried railway journey through it. How much of living conditions over a sixth of the globe could they have seen? Yet Hogben declares that the " whole" country "is one vast slum!" ‘ The truth is that Russia has had to sacrifice a great deal in the way of immediate improvement in living conditions in order to lay the foundations of a gigantic industrial system. She has had to prefer factories and machines to butter. At the same time she has felt it necessary to arm and equip an immense army and air force, starting almost from scratch. And this in a vast Empire stretching from
Europe to Japan and from the Arctic to the tropics, inhabited by barbarous and semi-barbarous people originally illiterate, dirty and untaught, speaking a multitude of tongues from Chinese to Ukranian! What we should ask then is not whether conditions are better in Russia than in other countries but whether they are better than before the revolution.-
E.
SATCHELL
(Auckland).
(Our correspondent’s letter offers a sound excuse for the present confusion in Russia. It does not disprove our assertion that Russia looks on at Germany’s advance into the Balkans because she is afraid, in her present state, to attempt to stop it. The fact, if it is a fact, that Hitler has a third of his entire army on the Russian frontier means (1) that he does not trust his neighbour, and (2) that it is a long way from the Baltic to the Black Sea. We have never suggested that six million soldiers spread across a continent could be watched by a few thousand frontier guards.-Ed. )
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 4
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369WHY RUSSIA LOOKS ON. New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 91, 21 March 1941, Page 4
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