2i8 HUMAN LIFE IN RUSSIA
reports of the famine as "inventions." But he differed from
M. Litvinov in admitting that "certain economic difficulties"
were making themselves felt even in Russia as a consequence
of the world crisis.
This admission is an indication of the new tactics. State-
ments similar to that of Petrovsky were also made by the
official Izvestia. The paper went further, however, and saw
fit to couple its attacks on the Reichspost with a description of
Austria, "a country of hungry beggars living on alms from
abroad." Incidentally, this was the first occasion on which a
new argument of Soviet propaganda was used, when it was
claimed that the Reichspost statements were due to ecNational
Socialist machinations." This is a significant point; for it
indicates the sources of the assertion later made by M. Herriot,
who also claimed that the allegations of famine in the Ukraine,
the Northern Caucasus, etc., were £CNational Socialist lies and
insinuations." The Catholic and anti-Nazi Reichspost was
enabled to put in the right light these new Russian tactics
directed against the attempts to organize relief by pointing out
that Pierre Berland had almost simultaneously published his
report on the Russian famine in the Temps. The Reichspost
wrote: "The idea that the Reichspost of all papers should open
its columns to National Socialist tendencies will be taken at
its proper value by all shades of political opinion. It should
be added, however, that if reports about the Russian cata-
strophe were due to National Socialist influence, it follows
that this influence is particularly powerful in Paris."
Moscow issued equally unequivocal dementis in reply to
Cardinal Archbishop Innitzer's appeal to the world public.
Once again the Moscow press declared that references to the
disastrous condition in the Ukraine and the catastrophe
following the famine were "absolute inventions."
According to a United Press report the Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs even went so far as to state officially that in
Russia "there was neither cannibalism nor cardinals," and that