June 4.
When at the end of last week M. Chicherin stated thai the position between Great Britain and the Soviet was serious, he was. obviously not exaggerating things. A copy of the "Viadivostok Daily News' "which has just reached us contains a number of striking extracts from the Bolshevik Press on the subject of the British Note to the Soviet, and after perusal we are not surprised that affairs between the two Governments are described as in a thoroughly bad way. The British Note has met with] such a howl of vituperation from this Press that the only conclusion to be reached is that, in spite of all we have heard in the past months of a change of spirit, the prime movers in Red circles at Moscow remain at daggers drawn with all except the Communists of the world. Remembering the refined and educated representatives of the Soviet who have been encountered in Shanghai, and having every reason to regard agents such as M. Krassin og similar in type, we might desire to believe that in the coun-oils of Moscow' are men sincerely desirous of a better understanding with the other nations. The feeling to-day, however, must be that they are a weak minority, and that a fresh infusion of extremists has still further sncarnadined the Red policy. The Press comments leading us to such a point of view preach class wat-fare in excelsis, and dismiss the whole of tha British contentions as the outcome of the capitalist State's robber instincts: right and virtue are the attributes of the Soviet and proletariat alone.
The species of mentality with which the Soviet Press is afflicted could not, of course, fail to con-neet the murder of M. Vorowsky, the Bolshevik envoy at Lausanne, with the capitalists' thirst for oil, notwithstanding that it has been fully demonstrated that it was the outcome of a desire for pri-vote revenge. Thus one writer:
Up to the time writing we have as yet received no details of this hideous and traitorous murder, but none the less the latest political events show that the instigators of this bloody murder are those who need our Russian oil and who are stretching out hungry hands to bend the backs of the Russian peasant and worker.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.