RUSSIA: Gay-pay-oo

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An engineer hesitates to fix his engine because if it goes wrong after that he may be seized by the G. P. U., convicted of "sabotage" and shot as a "counter revolutionary." His hesitation becomes laziness and indifference, until the G. P. U. perhaps arrests him for "willful negligence" and shoots him for "counter revolution."

Shooting is here a figurative term.

There are other punishments. Death sentences are, for cause, commuted.

Horrors laid at the door of the G. P. U. run the whole gamut from individual rape and extortion to general massacre of rebellious villages. One can believe little or much—as in the case of "German Atrocities" and the "Third Degree" administered by U. S. policemen.

The G. P. U. third degree is supposed to begin by awakening the prisoner in the dead of night, never telling him with what he is charged, and beginning gently with tea and perhaps cigarets. If he will not talk, and if the examining official smashes him suddenly in the face with the butt of a revolver, that is called "playing on the guitar."

When someone has to be beaten in Russia, and the someone may be a refractory Red Army soldier, or of course a prisoner of the G. P. U., the order is dat shompola, "to give the cleaning rod." A heavy "rod" of twisted wire, such as soldiers use to clean their rifles, is used as a whip.

Even the G. P. U.'s sharpest critics do not suggest that resort is had, except in the most urgent cases, to "taking the glove off." This is supposed to consist in fixing the arm of the man being questioned in such a position that the hand is immersed in water. The water is then boiled. It is asserted that after a time the flesh of the hand can be drawn off like a glove.

At the recent "Radio Trial" in Moscow, Professor Leonid Ramzin and the other "counter revolutionaries" who confessed by the hour bore no marks of torture whatever and were certainly in possession of both hands. The power of the G. P. U. lies less in horror than in the infinite ramifications of its net of spies. Fathers and mothers can scarcely be sure that their own children, rosy-cheeked "Young Pioneers," are not household spies whose babbling to an older child will reach the G. P. U. If President Hoover knew as much about every U. S. citizen as Dictator Stalin knows or can shortly find out about any Russian, the political future would hold for him few mysteries—for Knowledge is Power.