Drunken Cobbler

Eleven ragged, unshaven railroad men went on trial for their lives in the theatre of a Moscow club last week. They were three engineers, three firemen, four conductors and a station master, charged with responsibility for the deaths of 68 passengers, injuries to 128 others, in a triple wreck at Kosina, near Moscow (TIME, Jan. 18). That same day four Siberian railmen had been sentenced to death before a firing squad for "gross criminal negligence" in causing a wreck.* Wives, kinsfolk and 1,000 curious Muscovites crowded the smoky room. Fierce, Trotskyish Chief Prosecutor Reuben Katanyan pointed a long, lean finger at the dazed defendants, described the wreck in lurid detail. "The passenger coaches were crushed like matches!'' he cried. "Forty of the dead will never be identified. They were cut into bits!" Nevertheless, Prosecutor Katanyan asked no severer penalties than ten years' imprisonment. In the midst of the trial the wife of one of the engineers arose, addressed the crowd: "There should be only one lone criminal on trial here today. That is the wretched man whose desire for death was the first cause of the accident." The "lone criminal" was a cobbler named Vyesyolov. Drunk, he staggered in front of a train. While the crew of that train was trying to extricate his body a second train ploughed into it. Peasants laid the wounded on a parallel track, a freight train ran over them. Those who were able to appreciate the grim humor of the situation recalled that the cobbler's name was similar to the Russian word meaning gay (Vyesioliy) that when Russians say "drunk as a cobbler" they mean very drunk.

*In Vladivostok last week the senior mechanician of the Soviet freighter Terett and his assistant were sentenced to death for criminal negligence. They had wrecked the Terett, not once, but four times.

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