Black on White

News dispatches out of Moscow in recent weeks have been most intriguing to people acquainted with the intimate background who have learned to read between and under the lines of official pronouncements.

One piece of news that went almost unnoticed here seems particularly significant. That was the dissolution of the Society of Old Bolsheviks by dictatorial flat. The action was ostensibly taken as usual, “at the request” of the veterans themselves. But only political morons accept such things at face value. The “voluntary” character of everything iposed by force and fear and the perfect “unanimity” with which everything transpires are almost the earmarks of dictatorship.

The fact is that an organization hitherto treated reverentially, as a depository of living traditions, has been suddenly liquidated. It is as though President Roosevelt were to issue an edict wiping out the Daughters of the American Revolution (not that that would be a great loss). Only more so. The Old Bolsheviks, unlike the D.A.R., had not yet become fossilized.

The romantic revolutionary struggle the memory of which they kept alive was not a second-hand heritage but something out of their own lives. Their chief function as an organization, indeed, was to pass on that memory untarnished to their younger comrades.

My private guess is that the liquidation of the most respected of the many organizations in that land came because heresy in some form had lifted its red head in the ranks of the veterans. I claim no special credit for this deduction. It is unquestionably the private guess of millions of Soviet citizens who read of the dissolution in their newspaper.

The older generation of Bolsheviks often finds it hard to adjust itself to new interpretations of Marx and Lenin and new concepts of orthodoxy. It has seen many of its greatest figures exiled and humiliated. It has seen some of its most cherished ideals revised and distorted—perhaps for better, perhaps for worse, but in either case the spectacle must have pinched many an old Bolshevik heart.

The presumption of anti-Stalinist sentiment among the revolutionary veterans is therefore not far-fetched. It would have been more remarkable had there been no resentment among the old-timers.

Most of them, like veterans of all causes, were inclined to exaggerate their own importance. They must have proved difficult material to handle. Their liquidation as a class breaks another link—perhaps the most important—between the revolutionary past and the orthodox present in the land of the hammer-and-sickle.

The significance goes even deeper. It is an expression of a tendency which no open-minded student of the Soviet scene can fail to note—namely, the rapid decline of the Communist Party as a political factor. In Lenin’s day the Party was everything, and most of the phraseology of this dominance is still in vogue. But in reality its power and prestige have been monopolized by a small group of its officials, headed by Stalin. Once it was a leader, now it is a figurehead.

The eventual abolition of the party seems to me more than a likelihood. A plausible “dialectic” excuse is at hand. With the theoretical abolition of classes and the establishment of a “classless society” promised for the end of the Second Five-Year Plan, why have a party representing one class? The entire population becomes the party, the ruling bureaucracy holds 100 per cent of the power and the Communist organization is “liquidated.”

This may sound like an extreme forecast. But the abolition of the Society of Old Bolsheviks would have sounded equally absurd a day before it happened. It is no accident that Stalin recently stressed the importance of non-party officials and minimized the difference between them and party members. More and more non-members are being put in posts of primary importance.

The disgrace of Abel Yenukidze, for so many years one of the Kremlin big boys, is another item from Moscow that tempts speculation.

Yenukidze, a florid, white-haired, jolly fellow, Georgian to his polished fingertips in his love of life’s amenities, was the kind of man American reporters would call a playboy and first-nighter. His fondness for the ballet and the ballet girls has been notorious for at least a decade. Those moral delinquencies on the basis of which he has just been expelled from the Bolshevik party and deprived of all political offices are not sudden discoveries.

They were winked at by the bosses in the more Puritanical days of 1928-33. Why have they been punished in the more spacious days of 1935?

The real story is in the answer to that question. Did Yenukidze, in his expansive life-loving way, show tolerance for some Oppositionist backsliders from the true faith? Did his interest in the lighter side of mortal existence lure him into excessive contacts with foreigners?

I can easily imagine the fascinating theories being worked out in a thousand whispered conversations over vodka and tea glasses. Life is more interesting in places where the government lets its subjects know only as much as is good for them and leaves the rest to their imaginations.

Vessels of the Ford Motor Company fleet will move hundreds of thousands of tons more raw materials and finished parts during the coming navigation season than in 1934, it was announced Friday.