"Of Age"

The celebration last week of the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Secret Political Police showed further how the State ruled by Stalin has "come of age" (see col. 3). The power of the Political Police is now so ripe that their Commissar Nikolai Yezhov was able to celebrate by announcing on the dread anniversary that eight prominent Old Bolsheviks had been tried in secret, condemned to death for "treason" and secretly executed before the Soviet press was permitted to divulge even that a trial was proceeding.

To Soviet citizens the secret terror has long been far more nerve-racking than Moscow's public trials, and the 20th anniversary fusillade of eight Old Bolsheviks grimly capped the climax. The dead, all of whom according to the Secret Police confessed to "terroristic activities" and "systematic espionage," are in approximate order of importance:

Avel Yenukidze, former secretary of the Central Executive Committee of the Communist Party, intimate collaborator with Nikolai Lenin, generally regarded as having been Stalin's "political mentor" after Lenin's death, long an intimate family friend not only of Stalin but of his second wife, Alliluieva, who as a child had been dandled on Yenukidze's knee.

Mamil Dmitrievich Orakhelashvili, an Old Georgian Bolshevik and Stalin intimate, onetime Vice Commissar for Education.

V. P. Larin, former member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan, famed first Soviet Ambassador to China (TIME, May 4, 1925), Soviet Ambassador to Turkey until several months ago, former Soviet Vice-Commissar of Foreign Affairs.

Boris Steiger, for 14 years the Soviet Foreign Commissariat's chief contact man with Moscow diplomats, a personal friend and frequent guest of the first U. S. Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., William Christian Bullitt, now Ambassador to France.

Boris Petrovick Sheboldaev, former secretary of the Azov-Black Sea region Communist Party.

Vladimir Moiseevich Zukermann, former chief of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Commissariat.

A. D. Metelev, unidentified by correspondents but reputedly an Old Bolshevik.

The Significance-In effect Abel Yenu-kidze was the Louis McHenry Howe of the Kremlin under Stalin. That he and such another old friend as Orakhelashvili, as well as so great a Soviet statesman as Karakhan, should be liquidated left the world but two plausible hypotheses to choose from: either Stalin is madly destroying his best friends, or they, like Trotsky, have come to believe that Stalin has betrayed the Revolution. In any case something is very rotten in Russia.

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