The Lena Goldfields Arbitration
The Lena Goldfields Arbitration has ended in an award of nearly £13,000,000 in favour of the Company against the Soviet Government. The facts laid before the Court were startling. It was most unfortunate that the Soviet was not represented, but that was the Soviet's own fault. As it was, Sir Leslie Scott, who represented the Company, did all he could, in accordance with the best traditions of what a judicial inquiry should be, to say what was possible in the interests of the absentee. The concessions to the Company were made in 1925 when the New Economic Policy was in being. That great realist, Lenin, recognizing the intolerable backwardness of Communistic industry had hit upon the device of calling in Capitalism though Communism remained nominally supreme. The concessions were of enormous value. The Company would have had at its disposal 30 per cent, of the production of gold ; half of the production of lead, copper and zinc ; and 80 per cent, of the production of silver.
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