Word: butenko
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Dates: during 1938-1938
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Photographic evidence from Moscow and Rome to settle the most significant controversy in which Soviet Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Maximovich Litvinoff has become involved in recent years arrived in the U. S. last week. The case has concerned M. Fedor Butenko, one of the New Bolsheviks who are being spectacularly advanced in the Soviet Union by Dictator Stalin to replace the liquidated Old Bolsheviks. Since Stalin's purge has been mowing down Soviet diplomats right & left, the Moscow diplomatic school has to work fast and overtime to keep filling up the constantly depleted ranks. Through this forcing house...
Apparently Commissar Litvinoff, himself an Old Bolshevik, which today in Russia is risky and apt to leave one out of things, judged that New Bolshevik Butenko was a typical favorite of the Stalin entourage. Meanwhile, the Soviet Secret Political Police, who operate strictly on their own, were closing in upon Butenko at the very time when all Rumania was in ferment because of the Goga Cabinet collapse (TIME, Feb. 21). When the Soviet Chargé d'Affaires suddenly "disappeared" one night in Bucharest, the local Soviet Tass news agency man concluded that Rumanian Fascists had kidnapped or murdered...
...days later, New Bolshevik Fedor Butenko quietly turned up in Rome. He explained that he had ducked out of Rumania because he had felt the hot breath of the Soviet Secret Political Police on his neck, and then provided a pretty good reason for their propinquity by going on to denounce Joseph Stalin and excoriate conditions in the Soviet Union. This seems to have left the Soviet press, Tass and Old Bolshevik Litvinoff in a predicament. Thereupon, with all the authority of the Soviet Foreign Office, the Butenko in Rome was branded an "impostor." although Commissar Litvinoff observed darkly that...
Meanwhile, in Rome, the "impostor" has been able to show neutral correspondents his official Soviet diplomatic identity papers and Soviet police identity card, each bearing his likeness confirmed by Moscow's official stamp. By last week the Rumanian Government had also compared the Rome pictures of Butenko with pictures of this New Bolshevik in its files at Bucharest, verified the likeness. Further, the Rumanian Government affirmed that a letter from the Rome Butenko attesting that he "fled voluntarily" and was "not kidnapped" is in the same handwriting as that of the Soviet Chargé d'Affaires...
...From the description of conditions in Russia and of Stalin given by New Bolshevik Butenko, it is not difficult to understand why he figured it was best for him to skip. Excerpts: "I personally attended many of those treason trials in Russia. . . . I know better than anyone else the horrible tortures with which the Bolsheviks have taken the lives of many worthy and innocent persons. . . . The Bolsheviks promised the people of Russia full and complete liberty and autonomy. They even proclaimed the 'free right of the different regional nationalities to leave at their will the Soviet Federation.' Every...