Foreign Correspondent

Two years ago British Newsman George Eric Rowe Gedye had to leave his New York Times headquarters in Vienna when the Gestapo kicked him out of Austria. The next year he lost his job with the London Telegraph for criticizing Neville Chamberlain in his book, Fallen Bastions. Month later the Gestapo chased him out of Prague. This summer he lost another assignment. Russia's new, ironclad press censorship had made transmission of news no longer practicable, forced him to close down the New York Times's 18-year-old Moscow bureau. There are now no U. S. newspaper bureaus in the U. S. S. R.

Last week, from Bulgaria, Correspondent Gedye had some interesting things to say about the system that had cost him his latest post. When the censorship went into effect on Jan. 1 the Russian Press Bureau clamped down with a bang, suppressing even such messages as "Censor will not allow this story to be sent." All unfavorable facts about Russia were promptly deleted from press wires, together with any comments or interpretation, any qualifying clauses crediting hypotheses to "the Soviet point of view." Even excerpts from the local press were erased if they hinted that all was not milk & honey in Russia. On top of this, official releases were often delayed until the censor's office had closed, giving the official Tass version an exclusive world release.

The censor himself made up for his deficiency in English by blue-penciling everything he could not understand. Deleting the word "dyestuffs" from a list of products Russia could take from Germany, he explained: "Foodstuffs mean stuff for food and dyestuffs mean stuff for dying. I am not going to pass an insinuation that the Soviets will import poison gases from Germany." "Secretaryship of the Comintern" was suppressed on the ground that the Comintern had no Navy. A reference to the "Baltic Division of the Foreign Office" was censored because "there are no Soviet troops in the Baltic now--not even a battalion, let alone a division, and in any case the Red Army is not under the Foreign Affairs Commissariat."

Less amusing, more significant were Gedye's firsthand accounts of Russia behind the censor:

> So skimpy were stocks of consumers' goods that even an Ambassador's wife besieged him on his departure, hoping to buy anything from dog biscuits to rusty coffee tins for use as cooking utensils.

> A shortage of food last winter left Moscow without bread for three days. Official German visitors drained Russian food stores to supply their families in the Reich.

>After the Nazi-Soviet pact orders from the Moscow Comintern made it the duty of Communists in every nation "to work for the collapse of resistance to Fascism in the interest of the Russian State, at whatever cost ... to themselves."

> Ruthless suppression of all opposition and the absorbing difficulties of mere existence has deadened the people's interest in questions of Communist policy, at the same time has made them determined opponents of war.

> Correspondent Gedye was unable to report that Russian papers during the past six months had commented on bad spring sowings, decreases in textile-machinery output, breakdowns in railway construction, failure of any republic to fill its potato quota, prices of necessities up from 25% to 150%.

> While prices, taxes and hours of work went up, incomes were stationary. Clothing and footwear are "virtually unobtainable, and it is patch, patch, patch all the time."

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