WALTER PETTIT SPEAKS ON RUSSIA TOMORROW EVENING

Mr. Walter C. Pettit, one of the leading authorities on the Russian situation, will be the speaker at the fourth of the Liberal Club's series of lectures on Russia and the Revolution, to be held in the Living Room of the Union tomorrow evening at 8 o'clock. Mr. Pettit will speak on "Russia and the Allies" before a meeting open to all members of the Union.

Through his service in 1916-1917 as special assistant attached to the American Embassy in Petrograd to look after the interests of the German and Austrian prisoners in Southeast Russia, his journey out of Russia by way of Siberia, his term as a captain attached to the General Staff in Washington in the Russian Political Division of Military Intelligence, as an expert on the Russian situation with the American legation in Paris after the armistice, and finally as assistant to William C. Bullitt, who was in charge of the "Bullitt Commission to Russia," Mr. Pettit is widely recognized as one of the few authorities who really know the Russian situation today from the inside.

Letter From Norman Hapgood.

In the following article, written for the CRIMSON, Norman Hapgood '90, who also has had first-hand Russian information because of his recently completed term as American Ambassador to Denmark and his trip to Russia, strongly advises the Allies to keep their hands off Russia and let her settle her own reconstruction problems. He writes:

"I do not know what Captain Pettit is going to say in Cambridge on Thursday, but I do know that the Allies have conducted their Russian policy with all the silliness of which human beings are capable. The important question is, are we going to continue our folly? Krassin, the head of the Bolshevik economic activities, is now in Copenhagen, and the Entente is trying to decide whether or not trade will be permitted. Quieting the world by refusing to allow Europe to get food and raw materials from Russia would be a logical continuance of the brains we have shown thus far.

"I do not pretend that recent news from Russia is reassuring. The uncompromising attack of the Communist despotism on the great co-operative associations is disquieting. But it is not our business. We have meddled enough. Every element in Russia except a handful of expatriates wants us to keep our hands off. It is a crime for France to stir up Poland to try to be another eatspaw for French interference. It is not much less of a crime for any other government to refuse export licenses to any business man who wants to begin trade with Russia on any terms that suit him.

"There is no greater question before the world today than how long supposedly free peoples are going to allow their governments to interfere with freedom as if we were still at war. That interference is doing every possible kind of harm. Among other things it continues to prevent the constructive forces in Russia from finding their own way, to solve their own difficulties.