The Daily Worker

A Soviet Epic

TREMENDOUS epic of human heroism
and nobility was completed yesterday
as the last Soviet plane took off from the
ice floes of the frozen wastes of the North-
Northern Bering Sea.

With the last trip of the Soviet planes
to this lonely, storm-swept point of the Arctic, the
last of the 109 marooned members of the Soviet
arctic expedition were finally snatched from the
cracking ice and carried safely to the mainland.

But there was even more than splendid individual
heroism in this thrilling epic of Arctic heroism. In the bravery of the rescuers, in the wonderful discipline and fortitude of the marooned expedition, led by the heroic soldier of science, Professor
Otto Schmidt, there was embodied the qualities
of the new humanity that is being created in the
Soviet Union in the greatest epoch of history, the
epoch of the struggle for Socialism, for the class-
less society of Communism.

THERE is no parallel to the bulldog persistence
with which the Soviet Government flung all its
energies to protect its 109 marooned citizens. From
every possible point the Soviet Government sent its
messengers to the rescue. From Siberia, from New
York, from around the Panama Canal, came Soviet
planes, Soviet ice-breakers, ships, etc., all converging
with undaunted persistence upon the tiny point
where 109 Soviet citizens were facing a frozen death.

And the Soviet Government won. It won because
it is the first government in the history of
the world that is not the oppressive whip of a
ruling class, but embodies the full humanity of its
whole laboring population.

It won, to use the eloquent words of the "Izvestia,"
central organ of the Soviet government:

"For the same reason that the Bolsheviks won
and maintained power, for the same reason that
the ragged Red Army of a hungry country ruined
by capitalists completely repulsed the invasion of
counter-revolution, and led by its Party of steel
has built numberless first-rate factories, remodeled
the countryside, uprooted the kulaks.

"For the same reason that our country is the
country of the proletarian dictatorship, the country
of Socialism, where the toiling masses have
become the masters of life, where they themselves
are making their own destiny, where they themselves
are forging their own happiness, and the
happiness of all humanity."

The triumph of the rescue of the Chelyuskin expedition
is a tribute to the proletarian discipline
of the refugees as well as the Soviet Government.

Under the Soviet Government leading the march
to Socialism, humanity marches upward. All honor
to the Soviet aviators, the Chelyuskin expedition,
and the Soviet Government!