A Business Man Looks At Communism By FRED C. KOCH One hot, summer day in far away 1929 I was host at a luncheon to a group of about a dozen men in the old Wichita Club, in Wichita, Kansas. These men were the elite of the oil industry of Soviet Russia, plus their aides, flunkies, inter- preters, and secret Communist police, who always go along on such expeditions. Some months before my firm had re- ceived orders for fifteen oil-cracking stills to be erected in the U.S.S.R. in Grozny, Tuapse, Batoum, Baku, and Yaroslay for the Soviet Government. There were present at this Iuncheon ‘Mr. Ganshin, president of Soyuzneft, the All Union Oil Trust, the president of Groz- neft, whose name I cannot recall, and Mr. Barinoff, president of Azneft at Baku, a very large man with handle-bar mus- tache. Mr. Barinoff told me to be sure and come to see him at Baku. When I came to Russia a year and half later Mr. Bari- noff was dead, shot by Stalin, and Mr. Ganshin was on trial for his life, to be later shot, During the period 1929, °30, and '31 a number of Russian engineers came to Wichita to see us, and to be located in various oil refineries for a course in American refining practices. As far as I could tell most of these men were subse- quently shot or sent to Siberia. One man, a little fellow by the name of Hatchatouroff, after leaving Wichita to return to Russia, found out in Germany that he would be shot when he reached home, so he came back to the U.S.A., and ‘to Wichita. In order to help him we gave him a job, but after a few months, in the spring of 1930, he either committed sui- cide, or was murdered by the Soviet Se- cret Police, which unknown to most people has operated in the United States for thirty years. There is a saying among Communists that it is easier to commit an artistic murder than an artistic suicide. In other words many murders are made to look like suicide, so we will never know the truth about Hatchatouroff’s death in Wichita. I went to the U.SS.R. in 1930, and found it a land of hunger, misery, and terror. The government detailed a little man by the name of Jerome Livshitz to go around to our various installations with me. Livshitz had taken part in the revo- lution of 1905, and had spent twelve years in the U.S.A. as a revolutionary, most of the time in jails. Upon his return to Russia, Livshitz had taken part in the revolution of 1917. He was a hard-core Communist, one of the old Bolsheviks, and had tremendous power as everyone feared him wherever we went. In the months I traveled with him he gave me a liberal education in Commun- ist techniques and methods. He told me how the Communists were going to infil- trate the U.S.A. in the schools, universi- ties, churches, labor unions, government, armed forces, and to use his words, “Make you rotten to the core.” I believe that due to his American experience he was one of the original architects of the Communist plan of subversion of the USA. My associate and I pulled him from under an overturned car in Tiflis, and he was amazed. “Why did you save my life?’” he said. “We are enemies. I would not have saved yours. Perhaps when the revolution comes to the U.S.A., and I re- turn there, I will spare your lives." He told me that if his own mother stood in the way of the revolution he would stran- gle her with his bare hands. This is the