Dorothy Thompson

Buffalo Evening News/February 15, 1928

Dorothy Thompson Finds Police Officials Kind and Efficient, But Stern in Their Duty.

A vast experiment in government according to political and economic theories never before put to practice has been going on for ten years in Russia behind a veil of censorship, conjecture and rumor. The Buffalo Evening News and New York Evening Post sent Dorothy Thompson, a Buffalo girl, into Russia to survey the true conditions. This is the eighth article in a series placing before the American public for the first time a detailed revelation of the Russian picture and a discerning insight into what the Soviet government and its aims actually mean to the rest of the world.

The war psychosis is largely responsible for the terror in Soviet Russia.

It is easy and cheap to be melodramatic about Russia. The terror is certainly exaggerated in the popular mind, outside of Russia; that is to say, there is a misconception of the form which it takes. 

One reads tales, most of them faked, but some of them true, about the terror-orgies of the earlier Bolshevist regime; about tortures; about executions in strange and terrible ways out of sheer lust for murder; about burials alive; about pathological sadists in the service of the revolution. Thus the person who has not been in Soviet Russia is likely to regard the people in power as hate-motivated brutes who take a genuine pleasure in torturing their opponents. 

Terrorism Is Avoided

This, of course, is not true. Whatever may have happened during the period of active revolution, the Bolshevist regime, since its stabilization, has made every effort to liquidate any futile terrorism or any arising out of personal motives, and has succeeded in doing so. 

The Bolshevist spy who gives false information is likely to incur the punishment he has planned for his victim.  In its ordinary police practice, the Soviet government to anything but brutal. The police are not allowed to strike anyone in making an arrest, and it is a common enough sight to see a policeman trying to arrest an offender who indulges in a heated argument, with everyone inside a range of two blocks participating in the quarrel. The tendency is to be humane with criminals. 

For everything except political crimes — which category include acceptance of bribes, conspiracy, counter-revolution, abuse of power and graft — the death sentence has been abolished. It has been recently abolished for smaller offenses of the nature listed above, but it still holds for espionage, conspiracy, and counter-revolution. 

Spy System Traditional

It is not my desire for a moment to present an apologia for the system of secret policing and star chamber judgment embodied in the O. G. P. U. — the successor of the notorious Tchecka— but I believe it contributes to understanding the present system in Russia to bear in mind that it is in many respects a continuation of an old czarist habit.

The spy is a Russian tradition. In the old days a house owner could not appoint a porter or concierge except from a list in the hands of the government, and every concierge was a secret agent.  A private citizen could not invite to his home more than seven guests without getting a permit from the authorities. 

But the unpleasant tradition continued in the present in a most thorough manner. The O. G. P. U. has a small army of uniformed men. They are picked for their reliability and I have been told by people living in Russia that they are perhaps the most efficient and incorruptible off all government agencies.  

They are organized under the Commissariat for Labor and Defense, and in addition to their duties as the eyes and ears of the Communist revolution, they are in charge of the customs and are the border police. 

Demonstrate Efficiency

My only encounter with them was when I lost my trunk, somewhere between the last station in Poland and Moscow. My complaints to all other agencies having failed after days to produce the trunk, I took the matter to the O. G. P. U. and the trunk appeared within 24 hours. 

I do not mean to infer from this that one of the chief activities of the O. G. P. U. is being helpful to foreign visitors! The uniformed officials are not one-tenth of the O. G. P. U. service. The great mass of the members is invisible.  

It works through civilian agents in the most extensive and thorough secret service system existing anywhere in the world. It trains men for foreign work and sends them abroad on false passports. It exercises a control over the post, and opens many of the letters which enter the country, especially if they are addressed to foreigners. It is rather amusing in Russia to cut open the envelopes of the letters one receives, and from studying the inside see how cleverly they have been opened and pasted together again. 

Watch Foreigners

Most of the time the secret service is invisible and unobtrusive. It varies in direct proportion as the Communist revolution feels secure and as it feels itself threatened. It is safe to say that during the last few years in the length and breadth of Russia, in the villages and on the farms the peasants are practically unaware of the existence of the O. G. P. U. 

The foreigner coming into Russia feels himself to be watched with uncomfortable closeness; I noticed that wherever I spoke with any one, whether in a school or factory, someone else managed to enter the room and sit nearby, ostensibly engaged in other work.

In the country,  where I went with two or three friends to study conditions among the peasants and where we got lodgings in an old monastery, now a museum administered by the government, we seldom opened the door of our apartment without finding someone sitting outside it. But of course it is impossible to say how much of this flattering interest is espionage and how much is mere curiosity. If for a moment the Communist revolution feels itself threatened, then suddenly the arm of the O. G. P. U. becomes visible; the hand becomes a fist, and the fist smites ruthlessly. 

Terrifying Methods

The terror employs terrifying means. It makes arrests late at night; it enters houses and turns them upside down in the search for incriminating evidence. It extorts confessions by giving victims front seats at executions. (Most executions take place without the condemned person knowing it—he is shot in the back of the head at a convenient moment).  It frightens people half out of their wits by arresting them and holding them for days in prison without explanation, only to release them in the end. It takes its cases before its own courts, where the judges are armed, where the atmosphere is not that of a court but of an inquisition. 

Everyone fears for his job, fears to make a blunder, and the result is that the average official prefers to do nothing rather than to do the wrong thing. It is the hardest thing in the world to get an official to take responsibility in Russia. The idea that the Soviet official is an enviable personage is nonsense. He is a slave; a slave to a collective, ubiquitous, inhuman system. This as much as hard work is responsible for the amount of nervous illness and the high mortality among Soviet officials. 

Tehicherin is a physical wreck: Joffee, the brilliant ambassador to Japan and Vienna, committed suicide at 44; Frunze, the former war minister, died from an illness complicated by nervous disorders. Soviet officials are themselves the victims of’ a system which their fanaticism supports. When I remarked, jestingly, that the best and safest job in the country must be to be the head of the O. G. P. U., a Russian said seriously: “Heavens no! That man might lose his head any time.” 

There is no sign whatsoever that the Soviet government intends to demobilize in foreseeable time this extra-legal body for the defense of the revolution.