INTERNATIONAL: Wheat, Death, Reds

Other governments are merely political monopolies. The Soviet State is monopoly incarnate: political, economic, social. If some imp should pop the idea of trying to depress world automobile prices into President Herbert Hoover's head he could not order Fords and Chevrolets sold at $100 apiece. But Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin can do things remarkably like that. To understand this, to gauge the potential power of Red statesmen to work mischief in world markets, was more vital last week than to be scared by lurid rumors of Red grain dumping in Liverpool and Amsterdam, Red speculating for the decline in Chicago's wheat pit (see p. 17).

Moscow meanwhile was in significant frenzy about an internal food crisis, useful measure of the limit beyond which Red statesmen cannot go in external dumping. The Soviet press (a Government monopoly) told citizens throughout Russia of a British plot to "starve" them. Naming names, Izvestia declared the chief villain to be Andrew Fothergill Esq., a director of the British Union Cold Storage Co.'s plant at Riga, Latvia. He was said to have bribed the Chairman of the Soviet Meat Trust, Professor Alexander Riazanzev, to "disorganize the Soviet food distribution system and promote wholesale famine in Russia." Some Soviet papers said the Meat Chairman had taken a $50,000 bribe, others raised the sum to $500,000.

With 47 alleged associates Professor Riazanzev, once a General in the Tsarist army, was arrested speedily at Moscow. Fired by the Soviet press, workers' meetings throughout European Russia telegraphed to the Capital resolution after resolution demanding Death for the 48 accused. One resolution asked that the supreme Soviet decoration, "The Order of Lenin," be conferred on Ogpu, the secret service organization which had ferreted out this plot. A new flood of contributions poured in from workers for the proposed Soviet Zeppelin, to be christened Ogpu in honor of the secret police.

Royal, Ancient Gamble. Within 48 hours, the 48 accused had been tried as "irreconcilable enemies of the Soviet State," found guilty, shot. Usually such executions are announced in tiny type on inside pages of Soviet papers. But last week the Government ordered big black headlines, first-page position. So breathlessly fast did events move, so blatantly sincere and joyous seemed popular response to the shootings, that all question of whether the dead men could possibly have provoked a general famine vanished from the realm of practical politics. Point of the savage affair seemed to be that it offered fresh, significant proof of Ivan Ivanovitch's present pressing concern to fill his belly. If food were even fairly easy to obtain in Russia, popular fury could not thus be roused to national frenzy merely because the No. I Soviet meat man was supposed to have taken a bribe.

This being so, the ability of the Soviet State to dump foodstuffs abroad is not spaciously limitless but definitely limited in 1930. Much as docile Russians will stand from their Dictator, eagerly as they swallow what Stalin tells his press to print, he can still take just so much grain and no more out of their mouths to sell abroad for ready cash.