Red Plot: White Cossacks

Propaganda trials in Russia correspond to U. S. Presidential statements, serve to emphasize the Administration's notions. Last big affair of this sort was the Schachkta Trial (TIME, July 2 & 16, 1928), broadcast by radio to prove that lazy, clumsy or willfully inefficient engineers or workmen could expect harsh treatment. Hero of these proceedings was Soviet Prosecutor Nikolai Vassilievitch Krylenko. Last week in a 30-column statement which Moscow papers dutifully printed, Comrade Krylenko announced that he would put eight arrested persons on trial for conspiring with non-Bolshevik citizens to seize the State and to make one of the prisoners, a Professor Leonid Ramzin, president of a bourgeois Russian republic.

Several of the accused, as in the Schachkta case, appeared to have confessed with extreme volubility, will rehearse these confessions at the trial with a view to incriminating as their foreign accomplices: i) Raymond Poincare, Wartime President of France; 2) Colonel Thomas Edward (Revolt in the Desert) Lawrence; 3) Foreign Minister Aristide Briand of France; 4) Winston Churchill, former Chancellor of the British Exchequer; 5) Sir Henri Wilhelm August Deterding, Royal Dutch oilman.

Of these distinguished persons three are famed for anti-Red sympathies, namely M. Poincare, Mr. Churchill and Sir Henri who contributes generously to White Russian (anti-Bolshevik) groups in France and elsewhere. Colonel Lawrence is always mentioned when Great Britain is accused of machinations in any Easterly sphere. M. Briand directs the foreign policy of the European nation most openly hostile to Russia. M. Poincare, touchy about being accused (by Germans) of starting the War, flared up at this new insinuation. "I deny the charges categorically!"

Placidly General Ivan Miller, No. i White Russian in Paris, observed: "When opportunity arrives our army will cross the borders to fight Stalin." Added Cossack General A. P. Bogaievsky fiercely, "We have several cavalry divisions training in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria -merely awaiting the word to cross the Russian frontier!"

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