A Spectator's Notebook
LOVERS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES will, no doubt, be suitably pained to learn that Donald Maclean should have been followed by plain-clothes policemen wherever he went before his flight behind the Iron Curtain. However, citizens of the Soviet Union who have chosen liberty might well envy him the facilities accorded by a tyrannous bourgeois government. When the spy Kholkov. on a mission to assassinate Russian émigrés in West Germany, gave himself up, I do not recall that there was any mention of his wife being allowed to join him, whether via Switzerland or not. Indeed Article 58 of the Soviet penal code provides specifically for the death penalty in cases of treason against the homeland by a Soviet citizen. under which rubric comes the case of 'flight abroad by land or air'. Under Section C of the same article we are told what happens to the relatives of members of the armed forces who go abroad. If they are cognisant of the offence, they arc 'deprived of freedom' for periods of from five to ten years. If not cognisant. they are deported to the 'remote regions of Siberia' for five years. True, this only refers to relatives of members of the armed forces. but I shouldn't like to swear that something similar does not happen to relations of foreign office officials as well.
Previous page
