The indiscriminate incrimination of British subjects in the Moscow trials
is more entertaining than disturbing (if " entertaining " is a word to be used at all in connexion with proceedings so repellent). Anyone may clearly at any moment be cited as an agent of the British Secret Service, and I can think of various recent visitors to Russia who must be quite disappointed that they haven't been. Anything more absurd than the charges brought against Lady Muriel Paget and Mr. A. V. Alexander it would be hard to imagine, but they may have a serious side if, as is possible, Lady Muriel is prevented from going back to Russia to continue the admirable work she does among indigent British subjects there. But Michael Farbman is not alive to defend himself, and those who knew him as well as I did, owe it to his memory to testify to his singular and striking integrity of mind. He was a Russian of essentially sane and moderate outlook, not White, not Red. He saw the virtues of the Soviet regime and he saw its vices, and wrote of them both with admirable 'objectivity. Few men did more to enable Englishmen to take a reasonable and accurate view of Russia. The Soviet authorities realised that or they would not have let him come back, as he often did, after he had settled in London. * * * *
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