Old & New Bolsheviks

One more such trial as can be found only in Moscow opened last week, as usual in the palace which belonged in Tsarist days to the Nobles Club, but this time in a less spacious chamber than the great "Hall of Columns"hitherto used (TIME, Aug. 31). In all the experience of Moscowite Walter Duranty he had never before seen the Soviet Supreme Court do business with other than red-cloth-covered tables but last week for the first time they were green-cloth-covered. As usual, the apple-cheeked Red Army soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets mounting guard over the prisoners' box were changed every 30 minutes of the otherwise leisurely proceedings. There were the usual tall glasses of smoking hot tea without which ponderous Judge Vassily Jakovlevich Ulrich and pouncing Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky could never have got through all the years in which they have gradually worked up from Communist obscurity to the reputation of having convicted and sentenced to Death more statesmen than any other team of justice in the world. There was even plenty of tea for the prisoners, and the Soviet Supreme Court has always functioned amid a blue haze of Russian cigaret smoke.

Outside the cozy court, the citizens of Moscow were being warmed up by the Soviet press which invariably, before and during every big Red trial, assumes that all the accused are guilty, blackens their characters with its highest-powered adjectives, and ordinarily writes of the more distinguished prisoners as if their execution by firing squads in the cork-lined cellars of the Commissariat for Internal Affairs ("Ogpu") was a foregone conclusion. Last week the Moscow editors were writing with higher-powered vituperation than ever before. This was because the Star Prisoner was their intimate friend and colleague of many a year, Comrade Karl Radek, until recently the No. i writer on foreign affairs of the Stalin official press. It was as if Walter Lippmann or the late Arthur Brisbane or the New York Times's Arthur Krock should be in the dock of the Supreme Court at Washington, about to be rubbed out by the G-men because the President was no longer quite happy about Mr. Krock. Old Bolsheviks- Dictator Stalin is no longer quite happy about the following most eminent Soviet Comrades, in addition to Comrade Radek, who sat jammed in the Moscow dock before the fascinated eyes of new U. S. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies (see p. 17): 1) Leonid Petrovich Serebriakov, who from 1919 to 1921 held Stalin's present post, Secretary General of the Communist Party, and in 1929 was president in Manhattan of the Soviet trade monopoly Amtorg Trading Corp.; 2) Grigoriy Piatakov, until recently Vice-Commissar for Heavy Industry under one of Stalin's greatest cronies, Commissar for Heavy Industry Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze, whose department has made headlines by lagging behind the current Five-Year Plan; 3) Grigoriy Sokolnikov, once Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs and onetime Soviet Ambassador to the Court of St. James; 4) N. I. Muralov, leader of the proletarians who seized Moscow while Lenin & Trotsky were seizing Petrograd in 1917 and for many years Soviet Commandant of the Moscow Garrison. At the unique sort of trial which is Communism's gift to Jurisprudence, every Russian present, as well as the experienced Moscow diplomatic corps and foreign press, knew last week that the charges which Prosecutor Vishinsky was going to make in an hour-long lecture would immediately afterward be repeated by the prisoners as each confessed to what he had been accused of with only trifling discrepancies. As in previous Moscow trials it was again the case that, since each charge was answered by confession, there was little or no introducing of evidence to prove the charges, except insofar as one prisoner's confession tended to corroborate another's. The chief prisoners, as usual, said they preferred not to be defended by the only lawyers obtainable in Russia, the State's lawyers, and these were busy only with the troubles of small fry. In a general way the object of Prosecutor Vishinsky was to get 17 men condemned to Death by proving that they had conspired against the Soviet Union and to assassinate Dictator Joseph Stalin with Leon Trotsky of Mexico City (TIME, Jan. 25 et ante), who had written great quantities of letters in the hatching of this conspiracy, as would have to be the case, since Comrade Trotsky has not been inside the Soviet Union since 1929.

There were not placed on the green tables last week any pieces of paper stated to be from the hand of Trotsky. There were just charges and confessions in matching pairs. Confessions. Radek last week confessed that he helped assassinate in Leningrad two years ago Stalin's famed "Dear Friend Sergei" Kirov (TIME, Dec. 10, 1934 et seq.), adding: "We decided to kill enough leaders from Stalin down to bring about a coup."Piatakov and Radek joined in confessing they sabotaged the work of Stalin's "Dear Friend Grigoriy" Ordzhonikidze, so that Heavy Industry has fallen behind the Soviet Plan. Piatakov, extending his confession into what became a lecture, told of alighting at Berlin's Tempelhof Field, being supplied with a forged German passport with a Norwegian visa, flying on to Oslo; conferring with Trotsky, and getting back to Russia without exciting the Ogpu's suspicion. This may seem possible if the thoroughness of Soviet, German and Norwegian secret police methods is not known, but in Moscow it was such an obvious cock-&-bull story that Prosecutor Vishinsky endeavored to draw out Piatakov into further and believable details, asking: "How was all this arranged?" Piatakov, voluble in his confession up to this point, gave the Prosecutor a reproachful glance, and lapsed into silence with a gesture of helplessness. Few minutes later, Prosecutor Vishinsky brought a minor prisoner to the rescue with a confession that a German named Stimmer "knew people able to arrange things like that." Perhaps true, but open for the prize of "Moscow's Most Remarkable Confession,"was the confessing by all hands last week that Adolf Hitler's apple-cheeked Deputy Nazi Party Leader, Rudolf Hess, also went to Oslo, where Trotsky was of course guarded at all times by Norwegian secret servicemen to prevent his fomenting plots, and conferred with the Great Exile in detail. Red Trotsky & Nazi Hess were supposed to have agreed that, after Stalin had been assassinated, Germany was to get the Ukraine and Japan Eastern Siberia, with the headline-making addition last week that Japan be given the island of Sakhalin from which she would get "oil for the Japanese Navy to make war on America."Red Romm, A charge had been made by Prosecutor Vishinsky that many letters between Radek and Trotsky were carried by Vladimir Romm, erstwhile Washington correspondent of Izvestia ("News"), the official government newspaper. Comrade Romm was far enough down the list of witnesses so that before he was called a group of leading news correspondents in Washington had opportunity to rush a cable to U. S. Ambassador Davies in Moscow. They asked him to tell the Soviet Supreme Court, that "In our dealings with Romm we found him a true friend and advocate of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Never once did he even faintly indicate lack of sympathy or disloyalty towards the existing Soviet Government."Prisoner Romm, when invited by Prosecutor Vishinsky to confess, did so in words as satisfactory to the state concerned as were the words of Prince Edward in his abdication broadcast. Confessed Romm: "I had full knowledge of the terrorist plot against the Soviet Government. ... I carried five letters from Radek to Trotsky. ... I agreed to become Trotsky's under- cover correspondent in Washington.""So!"cried the prosecutor. "So you were correspondent for Izvestia and special correspondent for Trotsky?" Red Romm: "Yes." "Communist Al Smith." The Al Smith of the Soviet Union is Leon Trotsky. He might have been and Communists in numbers running very high think he ought to have been and should be Dictator of Russia today instead of Stalin. Keynoted Trotsky, who issued a fresh statement every few hours in Mexico on the Moscow trial: "Stalin's crimes put Caesar Borgia in the shade!" The brains of Trotsky are strictly first-class. Scathingly he asked why the letters he was supposed to have written had not yet been produced in Moscow; he once more offered to produce the whole of his voluminous correspondence to prove that he broke with Radek as far back as 1928; he demanded that prisoners who confess in Moscow that they saw him in Oslo or elsewhere describe the room in which these confessed encounters (which Trotsky denies) took place. He heaped his most biting scorn upon the charges & confessions of Red Romm. Where did Romm say he met Trotsky? In a describable room? No. Romm said they met in a "dark alley." "Romm deposes that 'he agreed to keep Trotsky informed on Washington happenings,' "observed Trotsky. "It would be fine if he would give an example of the type of happening in Washington that I could learn from him and not from the American newspapers, including the Communist press. . . . This 'Romm,' indeed-- a name which I heard for the first time in my life since the trial in Moscow began! . . . The Soviet Government want to make it impossible for me to go to the United States or even to remain in Mexico. My hypothesis is that Romm's story was concocted after my arrival in the New World. . Romm's and Radek's confessions are made particularly to compromise me before public opinion in the United States."Truth in Moscow-An Ambassador watching the Moscow trial arose to say of the confessing prisoners, "If these men are not speaking the truth, then I have never heard it!" Walter Duranty, who obtained the second interview ever given to a correspondent by Joseph Stalin, cabled from Moscow last week that he believed the confessions, notably those of his close personal friends of many years, Radek and Romm, adding that he believed the unfortunate Radek will be shot and that the chances of Romm are not much better. Like all newsfolk actually working in Moscow and getting their dispatches past the Soviet censor, Mr. Duranty is in a delicate position, all the more delicate because every Soviet official knows that he was constantly in and out of the houses of the prisoners who last week confessed a plot to kill Stalin. But Why Do They Confess? The first quoting interview ever given by J. Stalin to a foreign journalist was obtained by Eugene Lyons, manager of the United Press Moscow Bureau for many years (TIME, Dec. 8, 1930). Now resident in the U. S. and writing widely, Mr.

Lyons turned out in the January American Mercury a dispassionate, detailed six-point analysis of how it happens that in the Soviet Union there is so much abject confessing of whatever it would do the Dictator good to have confessed. Mr. Lyons, veteran of innumerable Moscow trials, says in sum that Soviet prisoners who do not succeed in convincing the henchmen of Justice that they can be depended on to confess fairly convincingly in open court are never brought to trial at all, just taken downstairs and shot. Justice today, in Russian cases of importance, according to Mr. Lyons, does not in the great majority of cases ever reach a courtroom. Scores, even hundreds of Russians are quietly executed after the Soviet police have satisfied themselves that Death is required. In perhaps 1% of cases involving crimes for which Death is the penalty, sound Red propaganda makes a public trial advisable. Writes Eugene Lyons: "The prisoners brought to trial are always a handful carefully selected from a larger number arrested on the same charge . . . hand-picked specimens painstakingly sorted out." After Soviet news-organs have announced the confessions, convictions and executions, "a condemned man whose execution was announced may still be alive, as a result of a bargain or for some other reason. . . . The Soviet State does not deliver up the bodies of the men and women it executes. . . . There is not even habeas cadaver and of course no habeas corpus in the Soviet Union." In a dispatch from Moscow not long ago the rumor that Soviet scientists had invented a gas with the special property of deranging the mentality of a prisoner so as to make him speak and behave for some hours afterward as hypnotically required by Justice, was cautiously mentioned, the writer being still employed in Moscow. Without resorting to the hy- pothesis of such "confession gas,"Mr. Lyons mentions that the use of hostages (wives, children or others dear to the prisoners) is an old Soviet custom, and moreover that in Moscow the authorities have now had 20 full years in which to perfect their "third degree methods, familiar enough in all police systems"to "an extreme of refined cruelty. . .

.""There have been instances when . . . the victim's children were tortured before his eyes--a more terrible ordeal for the father than any that could be inflicted on his own body."Eugene Lyons is a thoroughly professional journalist, but Isaac Don Levine is an avowed, outspoken partisan of Trotsky against Stalin.

His slant on Moscow from Manhattan last week was to charge that the Red Army, which is supposed to have been thoroughly indoctrinated with Communism during all these years, has in fact now become disgusted with the way Communism is working in Russia, and has in recent months obtained under J. Stalin mastery of the frame-up and third-degree apparatus of Justice in Russia. According to Mr. Levine, the New Generation represented by the Red Army now "regards the Old Guard Leninists as the greatest obstacles in its path. .

. . The force which has cast Stalin in the role of Robespierre ... is the force of nationalism as exemplified in the Red Army"--i. e. Stalin, the Georgian strongman and Voroshilov, his Defense Minister who is wildly popular with Soviet Youth. Mr. Levine suggests that these two are now deliberately picking off Old Bolsheviks in a judicial "blood purge" based on the needs of Russian Youth. As pro-Stalin as Levine is pro-Trotsky is Earl Browder, sour U. S. Communist No. 1 (see cut, p. 19). Last week the Moscow Trial was perhaps too risky for Comrade Browder to comment upon and he confined himself to fuming because the U. S. adherents of Leon Trotsky have lined up with Socialist Norman Thomas rather than with Earl Browder, a development highly vexing to Joseph Stalin. At the annual Lenin Memorial Meeting in Manhattan last week, 20,000 Communists heard Browder hopefully bellow: "The American Socialist Party swallowed the poison of Trotskyism more than a year ago, and is already in the paroxysms of vomiting it forth again!" At latest reports Norman Thomas had not shown any sign of giving up Leon Trotsky's "ism" o please Earl Browder. "That Monkey Radek!" The Ogpu, in bringing Radek to trial, stuck into the prisoner's box last week the most impish and irrepressible Communist who has ever risen high in that somewhat solemn Party. If the whole trial was just a show, and if anyone conceivably might give the show away--even though shot for it---the prisoner to watch was Radek, and all Moscow knew it and read every word uttered in confession by "That Monkey Radek."Radek, with his glass of hot tea, his cigaret, and his sardonic way--was he or was he not cracking jokes even before the Soviet Supreme Court, characteristically subtle jokes? Everyone could judge for himself:

P: Prosecutor Vishinsky in the course of lecturing Prisoner Radek remarked upon the fact that for three months after his arrest Radek had not confessed. "Ask me why I did not confess! Ask me!"shot back the Monkey. "Ask me why I did not confess! Be so good, ask me. I call upon you to ask me why."The prosecutor did not ask him. P: Radek confessed readily to everything Vishinsky charged, and then went right on confessing in reductio ad absurdum. Cried the Monkey, nearly if not quite giving the Ogpu show away, "I am guilty of ALL tne charges of ALL the terrorist plots--EV-L-N THOSE I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT!", and the grimacing Monkey took another swig of tea. P: As if inspired by the Monkey, Prisoner Serebriakov soon afterward cut the monkeyshine of confessing that in on the plot to get Stalin were members of the Georgian family of the "Marrying Mdivanis" (TIME, March 23 et ante). Serebriakov said that a "Prince Budu Mdivani" had "connived"with Piatakov and himself to kill "Comrade Laurentius Beria, Secretary of the Communist Party of Transcaucasia, and others."This Moscow monkeyshine quite failed to amuse in Manhattan this week Prince David Mdivani who wanted it clearly understood that the Prince Budu Mdivani of the Moscow Trial is not his brother. "I had only two brothers, Sergei and Alexis,"said Prince David, "and both of them are dead."

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