Red Prince

One of Moscow's favorite stories is about a bootblack from the Soviet Republic of Georgia who used to hang around the Kremlin gate refusing to shine shoes. "I only need to wait until my old Georgian neighbor Stalin comes along," the bootblack haughtily explained to Bolsheviks who sought a shine. "He will make me a Commissar or Ambassador at least!"

That many a Georgian has wangled a soft job out of "neighbor Stalin" all Russia knows. Therefore disclosures that the record grafter of the of the entire Soviet Union has just been caught in Georgia were hailed with suppressed excitement last week. In Stalin's good graces, the No. 1 Grafter, whose name was not revealed, was a Communist Party member and director of a Georgian State vineyard. In four years he embezzled 500,000 rubles, lived in the luxury of an Asiatic Prince, and according to the Moscow press "actually called himself the 'Heir of the Mingrelian Princes,' the hereditary rulers of Georgia."

Several months ago graft charges were preferred in a local court against the "Red Prince," but he brazenly announced, "I am called away from Georgia on an imperative official mission." Before he was caught he had squandered 128,000 rubles on the grandest Bolshevik spree on record.

Such facts only reach the Soviet public with a moral attached. Pravda, in reporting the Georgian grafter's arrest last week, urged all Bolsheviks to heed a recent warning by Dictator Stalin that "no Communist must think because of his position that he is above the law." To emphasize that this time Stalin means business, Pravda carried the news that "no mercy will be shown to embezzlers of the people's property, no matter who they are."

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