Ginsberg's Revenge

Three months ago the Communist New Masses gleefully revealed that one Walter G. Krivitzky, exiled Russian general who was publishing a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, was really one Shmelka Ginsberg (TIME, May 22). In April General Krivitzky had claimed that Stalin was trying to team up with Hitler, and the New Masses took a lot of trouble to discredit him. Last week, while the Communist press was stammering explanations of the Russo-German treaty (see above), the Post bought nearly a full page in Manhattan, Philadelphia and Chicago papers to boast that it had predicted just that. "THIS NEWS DIDN'T SURPRISE POST READERS," crowed the Post.

The Post was not alone in boasting of its prescience. Liberty matched the Post's Krivitzky with a Princess Radziwill, who predicted a Russo-German alliance in the issue of September 3, 1938; and in the October 20, 1938 issue of Ken one Edward Hunter had practically the same idea. Winchell guessed it, of course. He, too, reads newspapers. And Bad Boy Columnists Pearson & Allen knew some of the details a month before the deal. Among the amateurs, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. wrote in a letter dated June 7: "I still believe that eventually Russia and Germany will get together."

But all the prophets were not dopesters and gossips. So many well-informed foreign correspondents were aware of the situation (TIME, Nov. 14, 1938, et seq.) that it looked as if the only people who had not known just what was going to happen were the statesmen of England and France. Soon after Munich, Gilbert Redfern, Warsaw correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, predicted: "Within a year or so we will see a Russian-German tie-up, or Russia will retire to her fastnesses," and the New York Time's Walter Duranty wrote: "There is no reason to believe that Russia would refuse collaboration with Germany." On January 18 the Daily News Syndicate reported from London that Berlin was envisaging economic and military collaboration with Russia, and week later the London Daily Herald warned that "There is reason to think that its objects are political rather than commercial." On May 6, the New York Times'?, Berlin correspondent, Otto D. Tolischus, forecast the agreement in detail. Soon after that hints of what was coming began to appear in the German press. Said the Volkischer Beobachter on May 26: "National Socialism does not war against a State because that State has a different content from our own. .. . The anti-Comintern pact does not strike primarily at the State, but ... at Bolshevism when it reaches out beyond Russian borders. . . . That is the German viewpoint and it also appears favorable to the Kremlin."

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