Black Record

The tale reads like a detective yarn. How many of us knew of the career of the British spy Captain S. G. Reilly, and his record of underground activities against the Soviet power? How many of us knew that the master writer Maxim Gorki was done to death by the agents of Nazism? Or that a Fascist hireling. Yagoda, had risen to the rank of Chief of Police in Soviet Russia?

No book describes so exactly in its historical perspective the tie-up between all the anti-Soviet forces of the world—the German Nazis, the American big business interests, the so-called "Trotskyists," and individual malignants like Jan Valtin, Charles E. Lindbergh, William C. Bullitt and their kind.

The Russian people have had a hard time trying to have their form of government recognised by the outside world.

The first signs of recognition came in the form of armies of intervention from England, France, Germany, Japan and America, supporting the Czarist nobles Wrangel. Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin. But the tough resistance of the Russian people, and the indignation of the rank and file of the very invading armies, soon forced their withdrawal.

From then on, the chief tactic of the criminal west was the building up of a strong Germany and a strong Japan to "contain" Bolshevism. We all know what that policy led to.

Do you wonder that the Russians are suspicious of the diplomacy of the US and Britain—especially when they see the new building up of Germany and Japan, the military loans under the openly military and anti-Soviet Atlantic Pact?

Sayers and Kahn began their chronicle of events with Colonel Raymond Robins of the American Red Cross setting off on his secret intelligence task of "keeping Russia in the war" in 1917. They close with an interview with the same man thirty years later. This is what he says: