RUSSIA: Dizziness From Success

If last week's news had no other effect, it certainly pepped up diplomatic gossip. Around the embassies went the story about Yang Chieh, Chinese Ambassador to Moscow: The day before the German-Russian pact was announced, Yang Chieh called on Russian Premier Viacheslav Molotov and asked what was up. Said he with Oriental suavity, he had heard rumors of a German-Russian plan to dismember Poland. . . . Thunderstruck, Premier Molotov gasped, drew back, while the veins of his forehead stood out in his apoplectic fury: this, he reminded his visitor, was the Soviet of Socialist Republics, the fatherland of the toiling masses, the vanguard of the antifascist struggle; that any ambassador could believe such a slander of the Socialist State made him, Molotov, wonder if he was the proper ambassador to be accredited to it. The Chinese Ambassador left, to read in Pravda the next day the laconic notice that the agreement had been made. Molotov hadn't been told.

Premier Molotov, whose name in Russian means Hammer (Stalin means Steel), whose pretty wife Paulina is Commissar of Fisheries and is very close to Stalin, may well have been taken by surprise. If so, his astonishment last week must have mounted hourly. No sooner had the German-Russian pact been hailed as thwarting the foul design of British Tories to direct German expansion to the East than the German Army did what (in the Russian view) Tories had failed to accomplish—i.e., directed German expansion to the East.

Across the plains of Poland, getting closer every minute, hurried Russia's new friends, 1,000,000 of them, armed with tanks, planes, propaganda equipment, armored cars, machine guns, and complaining every minute about the atrocities of the Poles who delayed them. On they hurried, capturing cities, blowing up bridges, destroying old military theories, shooting down Polish airplanes, dropping bombs on fleeing ambassadors, machine-gunning refugees, going twice as fast as the Russians did when they invaded Poland in 1920.

Snug in the workers' fatherland, Premier Hammer and Secretary Steel watched their friends approaching. To the rest of the world the race-rout through Poland looked like a bloody blur. To Poles it was just bloody. But to Russians it was coming closer all the time. Over the plains, around the swamps, through the cities, past Cracow, Lwow, Brest-Litovsk, into Galicia, down to the Polish Ukraine, hurried the approaching friends, grabbing the industrial region and the coal mines in passing, looking as big and as powerful as an express train seems to a motorist stalled in the middle of the track. Hammer and Steel put their heads together.

History. Everybody thought the Germans were fast, but Russians found them particularly impressive. Nineteen years ago last August Russians, too, were knocking at the gates of Warsaw. In the spring of that year Pilsudski had invaded the Russian Ukraine, been driven back so far that on August 12 Marshal Tukachevsky, following a plan worked out by a Tsarist general in 1831, circled Warsaw to the North; SimeonBudenny,with the Red Cavalry, had taken Lwow; a third force was ready to encircle Warsaw from the South; Dzerzhinsky, Polish-born nobleman, ruthless organizer of the Cheka, waited outside Warsaw to spring the uprising of the Warsaw proletariat.