RUSSIA: Forgotten President

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When President Roosevelt sent his historymaking first telegram to Soviet "President" Kalinin (TIME, Oct. 30) he ignored the Constitutional quirk under which Russia has not one president but seven, all supposedly equal. Each heads a constituent Soviet Republic of the Soviet Union. Comrade Kalinin is President only of "Russia proper." As new republics are added so are new presidents. Thus should the U. S. join the Soviet Union tomorrow (as Communists hope all countries eventually will) Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be the eighth Soviet president. He and the other seven would preside in rotation at Moscow—in theory. In practice presidents of the lesser Soviet republics are very much forgotten men. For the first time in months, one of them was mentioned last week when Moscow's Government newsorgan Izvestia tucked away at the bottom of its last page a tiny notice headed Meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik Republic.

The meeting deposed both President Maksum Nusratulla and Premier Khadjibaiev of the Tajik Republic. They had been found guilty, said Izvestia, of "a Bourgeois-Nationalist deviation from the party line." Translated, this means that one of the "equal" presidents of Russia was cashiered because he and his premier did not do exactly as they were told by the Secretary of the Communist Party, J. Stalin. Whether Tajiks got a new president or not Izvestia did not bother to report. Speaking a language which is almost Persian, nearly 2,000,000 Tajiks live on 56,000 fertile square miles bounded by Afghanistan. Chinese Turkestan, Soviet Uzbekistan and the Soviet Kirghiz. To remind Tajiks who is master, their capital, Dushambe, was renamed Stalinabad.