New Spots, Old Skin

Because he gets around the world much more than other Bolshevik statesmen, Comrade Maxim Maximovitch Litvinoff, smart, roly-poly Soviet Foreign Commissar, has been tub-thumping for years in highest Moscow circles for some move to put a better face on the tyranny of ruling 147,000,000 Russians by means of a secret police of unlimited terroristic power. Last week Comrade Litvinoff got his way and dispatches from Moscow led U. S. headline-writers to splash out with SOVIET ABOLISHES ITS SECRET POLICE.

Actually the Ogpu was not abolished but Dictator Stalin deftly changed its spots, leaving its skin much the same. In most European countries the State police is under the Minister of Interior. Last week Comrade Genrikh Grigorevitch Yagoda, Chief of the Ogpu, was transferred to the newly created Soviet portfolio of Commissar of Interior. He took with him the Ogpu staff, somewhat reduced. Censorship blurred details of the spot-changing, but the official newsorgan Pravda ("Truth") significantly informed Russians that "formation of the Commissariat of Interior does not mean that the campaign against traitors to the Soviet Fatherland and against agents of International Capital will be lessened."

In his new job Comrade Yagoda retains direction of most of his old spies, who now become "agents"' of the Commissariat of Interior. He retains command of a large part of the Ogpu Special Troops, an army of super-drilled and super-equipped Praetorian Guards of the Soviet Regime. Up to now they have "liquidated" with poison gas, machine-guns and shrapnel every trace of political opposition to Dictator Stalin. Most recently wiped out, behind censorship, was a secessionist movement in the Ukraine last winter.

Only reduction of Comrade Yagoda's power seemed to be in transferring to Soviet courts the Ogpu's right to pronounce sentence of Death. Hereafter all grave cases are to come up before Bolshevik courts-martial, noted for their readiness to inflict the supreme penalty. In his new post as Commissar, Genrikh Yagoda can by fiat sentence any Russian to exile in Siberia or elsewhere, or to imprisonment for up to five years. Since it is unusual for a prisoner to live as long as five years in certain notorious Soviet prisons, notably that of Solovetskii in the White Sea, most Moscovites realize that Comrade Yagoda still retains effective powers of life and death.

Felicitating the new Commissar of Interior, Pravda exclaimed: "Long has the Ogpu worn a halo formed of the deep love of tens of millions of workers and peasants both in our Soviet land and abroad." This halo, Pravda felt sure, will long remain the radiant nimbus of the Commissariat of Interior.

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