THE OUTER WORLD AND THE SOVIETS 275
Innitzer Committee in the New York Times. The entire
Hearst press next proceeded to deal with the Russian famine.
Early in summer the American-Russian negotiations had
almost been completed; now they began to lag, and, indeed,
could not be continued on the old lines. At this period even
Walter Duranty had to admit that all the hopes of Soviet
purchases had not been realized.
The plan formed by Moscow and her friends to make America
pay for Soviet Russia's foreign trade and hence for the con-
tinuance of her economic experiment, may be regarded as a
failure.1
Next in importance to the relations between Soviet Russia
and the Great Powers stand those with neighbouring countries
—and especially Poland. Here again Moscow has attempted to
employ its tactics of profiting by the quarrels between the
bourgeois states. When the friendship between Soviet Russia and
Germany came to an end, and Moscow, from being an opponent
of the peace treaties, suddenly became a champion of the
status quo, the time was considered ripe for an attempt to woo
Poland, like France, on this basis. Karl Radek was despatched
to Warsaw as emissary of the Soviet Government—the same
man who for years on end had described the "scandal of the
Versailles frontiers" and quoted the Polish Corridor as an
example of the necessity of altering them. As guest of the
Polish press in Warsaw Radek declared the opposite of what he
had been maintaining for years. But there was a special reason
why his attempts to win over Polish public opinion were bound
to fail. The Poles remembered the part played by Radek, who
was born in Poland, while he was a journalist at Cracow and
more especially in 1920 during the Bolshevik attempts to
conquer Poland.2
1 I describe elsewhere the growing interest displayed since tiie summer
of 1934 by religious bodies in the famine victims in Russia and the question
of their relief.
a In this connection the Kmjer Bydgoski, the organ of the Poles of Posen
and Pomerellia, who are particularly interested in the Corridor question,