RUSSIA: Poison in Jest

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Russia's purges are traditionally grim affairs. The conspicuous difference between the current nationwide"houseclean-ing" and others is the sprightly (and skin-crawling) humor with which the tares of the malefactors have been exhibited in the Soviet press. Thus the toughest sentence is doubly justified, since the defendants have been proved not only criminal but ridiculous.

The latest case is the "Olkhovatka Hermes." Olkhovatka is a remote rural region of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Its Hermes is one Comrade Vakhlin, the "unrelenting" prosecutor of a local committee engaged in snooping into irregularities on collective farms. He was nicknamed for the mythological Hermes, who, according to the Soviet press, once stole a sheep, saying to the owner as he made off: "Don't do as I do, do as I tell you."

Prosecutor Vakhlin, according to the same source, stole a collective cow from the Red Partisan Collective Farm. He had it processed into bologna, and invited the members of his committee to eat it with him. In due time, the committee decided that the time had come for the prosecutor himself to be prosecuted. Charge: he had not only stolen the cow, but pocketed the proceeds.

Cried Vakhlin: If the cow was collective, so is the guilt. "Did you eat the cow? Yes. So all must answer for it."

Despite this irrefutable logic, said the Soviet press, Comrade Vakhlin was expelled from the party and fired from his job. Later, for unstated reasons, he was reinstated in the party and is now trying to practice law. But, runs the coy official moral, "the cow won't be reincarnated and the bologna has been eaten." Minimum meaning: Siberia is vast, and there is always room there for another Russian.