Bolshevik Prisoner

"She is much less sinister than her photographs indicate . . . She is so garrulous, so lovely a person . . . She is not my idea of an active Bolshevik. . . ."

It was jaded, world-traveled Correspondent Walter Duranty of the New York Times who thus described last week with sly enthusiasm the notorious Madame Borodin, wife of the Soviet Russian emissary to Chinese Communists, Michael Borodin. When Mme. Borodin was captured by Chinese anti-Communist troops near Shanghai (TIME, March 21), many a non-Communist thought, "Serves her right!" What sort of treatment has Mme. Borodin received? She told last week in the bare, white-walled waiting-room of a prison at Peking.

Said this so-sinister-in-photographs lady: "I was terribly afraid at first. . . ."

Then, chattily going back to the very beginning, she seemed to become again the commonplace "Mrs. Grosberg," under which name she was known in Chicago, years ago. "Well," she said, "things are so dear in Moscow that when I got to Shanghai and found them so cheap I just bought all sorts of things. . . .

"The Chinese soldiers who captured me handcuffed my wrists and put me in a freight car. . . . "When they led me up before Chang Tsung-chang [minor anti-Communist War Lord] I said: 'Well, you have searched my baggage and found nothing [incriminating], so why hold me a prisoner?'

"He said, 'Madame, you are not a prisoner, but a guest, in proof of which I invite you to a banquet to- night'. . . .

"So I had a fine dinner with him --just fine! He asked me to write a letter to my husband saying I had been well treated, so I did. . . .

"When they decided to send me to Peking, Chang Tsung-chang sent his own automobile and his principal wife to take me to the station. . . .

"Well, here I am ... I stick to my principles, as I believe I will feel that my suffering and anxiety here in prison are not in vain."

Observers recalled that Chang Tsung-chang has the reputation of being China's "basest War Lord," keeps a string of over 100 concubines, and has often put to death every living soul in captured villages. His superior, the great Manchurian War Lord Chang Tso-lin, at Peking, evidently instructed that Mme. Borodin should be gently treated because of the might of Soviet Russia.