WHY DID ANNA STRONG WEAKEN?
MEYER, PETER
Why Did Anna Strong Weaken? •By Peter Meyer rnpHE NEW YORK HERALD TBIBI UNE. in publishing six articles by j - Anna Louise Strong on her ex| periences in a Soviet jail, has rendered an...
...The second day, a jailer came and inquired about Miss Strong's health...
...True, nothing happened to Anna Strong — she had a quiet cell, a decent bed, an appropriate diet, medical care and...
...Neither is it news that Miss Strong ' was innocent, that she still thinks her misfortune was due to a mistake of some subordinate official, that she is still proud to belong to Mr...
...A QUESTION TO-MISS STRONG: How did you know, Miss Strong, that anything disastrous could happen to a completely innocent person in the hands of those pristine guardians of the Revolution, the NKVD...
...The articles don't disclose any of the horrors of Stalin's concentration camps — Miss Strong did not get so far...
...She knew, yet jshe did not find it necessary to protest, or to inform her beloved American progressives about such trifles...
...she had had tea with the ambassador of the North Korean puppet govern(Peter Meyer has written for Politic* and Modern Review...
...If the ordeal lasts king enough, she may even find her way back to decent standards — one never knows...
...Stand what...
...Even 50, she still defends the Soviet regime...
...An American citizen, and a noted journalist, she could not disappear without attracting public attention...
...Molotov had showed her special favor by taking her, arm in arm, right into the inner room with the high ambassadors—a reminiscence which continues to send shivers of delight down Miss Strong's Stalinist marrow...
...i» doomed to travel down the road reserved for all "renegades...
...She had worked for the Communists for twenty-eight years, and one shock, however great, is insufficient to destroy lifelong servility...
...in publishing six articles by j - Anna Louise Strong on her ex| periences in a Soviet jail, has rendered an outstanding public service...
...What Anna Strong does not grasp, is that she will fail to convince her former co-believers that she was.not a spy, because her damnation has become an article of faith like everything which derives from Moscow...
...AND NOW...
...Miss Strong's articles do not reveal ¦ any new facts...
...When the Lubianka door closed behind the car which brought her in, Anna Strong gasped: "How shall I ever get out of here...
...I began to think I must be a docile prisoner...
...Note carefully the following: "My Ijnsion relaxed...
...she writes, "they're not going to be brutes, not yet, anyway...
...Nobody ever called ma docile before...
...She...
...no beatings...
...AT THE POINT OF HER ARREST, Anna Strong was seemingly persona grata...
...at a reception, Mme...
...For hard labor in the woods or for what...
...Initially paralyzed with astonishment, when she recognized her whereabouts she was seized by endless horror...
...Anna Strong, a woman of sixty-three and not in the best of health,' thinks she may be sent to work in the woods...
...ment...
...She was arrested without warrant, held incommunicado, confronted with no concrete charges, afforded no possibility to defend herself, condemned without trial, deported and slandered as a spy...
...But they reveal a spectacle almost as horrible and abject: the lowest depths of a faithful fellow-traveler's mind...
...In the ballroom of the Waldorf —to which Anna Strong faithfully went, incidentally—one did not hear the cries from the taioa and from the cellars of the Lubianka...
...But note Miss Strong's reaction: "My health...
...Wallace's Progressive party, and that she wanted to give part of the money she got from the Herald Tribune to the defense of the eleven Communist leaders now on trial...
...r ' * \t • • • APPARENTLY, SHE KNEW...
...If there is any place in the world where even a strong man can be stricken with terror, it is there...
...May we deduce that she has known all along that innocents are tortured by the NKVD, and that she has spent a lifetime covering up just such truths...
...The Waldorf colleagues of Miss Strong should not be allowed to evade the question which Anna Strong has all these years: "Ami™ my brothers' keeper or not...
...But it should be the task of all honest liberals to make them heard everywhere...
...Lubianka is no joke...
...And this: "From the tint arrest to the end nobody laid hands on me...
...If you did "not know that innocent people may be killed, jailed without trial, put to concentration camp, or tortured, what did you fear...
...One should not laugh...
...This hofror leaps out from every line of her articles, from all her words, thoughts and dreams — indeed, Anna Strong seems to be suffering from its effects even yet...
...Then, suddenly.....Lubianka...
...I was scared stiff and dazed...
...But she did not mind as long as it happened to others, thousands and hundred thousands of them...
...Nevertheless, the experience drove her almost crazy with terror...
...But such happenings are common in the Soviet paradise...
...Can it be that she has always known that women, old and sick people, in_ nocent of whatever category, axe sent to the tatpa to work themselves to death...
...Even if she defends Stalin, her former comrades will charge her with writing for "Wall Street newspapers...
...Anna Strong would never give straight answers to these questions if asked directly...
...They pointed and I went...
...Torture...
...She became terror-stricken only when it happened) to her...
...she remained in Lubianka prison only five days...
...But the answers are to ^be found, perhaps unbeknownst to her, in her confessional articles...
...She had just been invited by high-standing Communists to China...
...If you did know about such things why did you conceal them*before the world, and be/ore the progressive American people you purport to serve so faithfully...
...What an example of Stalinist morality...
...Nice gesture, wasn't it...
...When the doctor gave Anna Strong a routine examination, our heroine "wondered, in panic, if she (the doctor) was deciding how much I cculd stand...
...I thought...
Vol. 32 • April 1949 • No. 15
