RUSSIA: Tactical Diversion

With every hot-blooded Bolshevik boiling to send Soviet bombing planes to aid the beleaguered Reds of Spain, unavoidable dispute waxed in the Kremlin last week between Joseph Stalin and colleagues of the cold-blooded Dictator. In the end not a single Russian plane left for Spain last week and the whole issue was abruptly crowded out of Soviet news-organs by one more of the sensational “Trotsky conspiracies” which are regularly discovered each time it is tactically necessary to divert Russian minds from something else.

Leon Trotsky lives exiled near Oslo, Norway. Lenin and Trotsky were the chief builders of the Soviet State, control of which after Lenin’s death was seized from Trotsky by Stalin. Their epic quarrel: Trotsky insisted Russia must foment Communist revolutions abroad in order to survive as a Soviet country; Stalin favored husbanding Russian energies at home until the U. S. S. R. had enough surplus strength to promote “The World Revolution of the World Proletariat.”

One morning last week Russians woke up to face screaming headlines in the Stalin-controlled Press that a plot to assassinate Stalin had just been discovered, that the chief plotters were Trotsky and two other renowned Old Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who for the past 20 months have been in jail in Russia. Some of the 14 plot underlings from abroad were said to have been seized in Russia with credentials which Pravda described as passports forged by the Nazi secret police “amid the screams of tortured Communist heroes.” According to Moscow rumors the Dictator was to have been assassinated at the gala anniversary celebration Nov. 6.

Rushing things, Dictator Stalin ordered staged and broadcast this week one of his great propaganda trials to which the entire Russian nation is urged to listen in. Hitherto no Old Bolshevik leader against whom even the gravest charges have been proved has ever been executed, but this time Moscow broadly hinted that Zinoviev and Kamenev will be shot.

In Kristiansand this week exiled Leon Trotsky not only accused Joseph Stalin once more of fraud, fakery and framing innocents but challenged the Soviet Government to invite to Russia an international working class investigating commission, predicted, “All the charges would then break down.”