RUSSIA: Perfect Dictator

As thick clouds rolled over Moscow one afternoon last week the ornate chandeliers of the onetime Nobles Club were lighted, Soviet soldiers in blue caps appeared with fixed bayonets, and some 500 people were admitted to the stately Hall of Columns after their credentials had been checked and rechecked by sentries at the doors.

Observer for President Roosevelt was Second Secretary Loy Henderson in charge of the U. S. Embassy in the absence of Ambassador William Bullitt. On a dais four judges in Soviet Army khaki took their places. President of the Court was thickset Judge Vassily Jakovlevich Ulrich, famed ever since he presided at the Soviet trial of British Metropolitan-Vickers engineers (TIME, April 24, 1933). Somewhat less light of step and pantherlike than usual entered Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky, longtime pouncer in broadcast Bolshevik trials. At the left of Judge Ulrich was the box of 16 prisoners around whom stood Red Army guards, changed every half hour.

The Rt. Hon. James Ramsay MacDonald would have recognized the unshaven, round-faced, wild-haired prisoner in the first row of the box as Grigory Zinoviev (ne Apfelbaum). once famed as “Bomb Boy of Bolshevism” and trusted colleague of Nikolai Lenin. The so-called “Zinoviev Letter,” since proved a forgery, was used by British Conservatives to upset the first MacDonald Cabinet with insinuations that British Labor was taking orders from Moscow signed by Zinoviev as head of the Comintern bureau for making “The World Revolution of the

World Proletariat” (TIME, Dec.1, 1924).

The next most eminent prisoner was Lev Kamenev (ne Rosenfeld), onetime President of the Moscow Soviet and Ambassador to Italy, professorial in his fastidious dark suit,’ trim white beard and twinkling pince-nez. The other 14 prisoners, obscure at first, were destined for notoriety last week as the trial proceeded.

It was enough for eager spectators that the whole boxful had been lumped together the day before by Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin as “the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union, leagued in a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet Government—men who have stooped so low that they have lost their human aspect!” A clerk at Judge Ulrich’s elbow read rapidly an indictment of the accused so complex that his swift sentences left spectators blurred as to details. Quite clear, though, were the main charges that the 16 prisoners had contrived among themselves at least four separate plots to kill Joseph Stalin, Secretary General of the Communist Party and as such Dictator of Russia. It was announced that the prisoners had all chosen not to be defended by Soviet lawyers but to defend themselves.

One by one each of the 16 popped up in the box and cried: “I admit the charge against myself.” Asked Prosecutor Vishinsky: “Did you, Zinoviev, organize the Terrorists?” “Yes.” “Did you plot the death of Kirov?”— “Yes.” “Did you organize the plan to kill Stalin?” “Yes. I am guilty of every charge in the indictment.” A few minutes later two other prisoners became tangled in argument with each other as both were rapidly confessing. A third prisoner named Bakayev, a bearded figure in a khaki blouse, arose and loudly interrupted, “I know that Zinoviev ordered his own secretary to kill Stalin!” Said Zinoviev: “I acknowledge that.” “The secretary,” breathlessly continued Bakayev, “instead of killing Stalin killed himself!” Lecture by Kamenev, With the air of a professor addressing pupils of none too great intelligence and striving to make everything crystal clear, Prisoner Kamenev made his confession at such length that his lecture was interrupted four times by the changing of the soldiers guarding the prisoners’ box. Gist of Kam-enev’s confession was that Stalin’s old enemy Leon Trotsky (ne Bronstein), who now lives exiled in Norway, had provided the brains, Kamenev and Zinoviev had supplied the intrigue in Communist Party circles inside Russia, and most of the other prisoners had handled the money, forged papers and weapons which at every attempt had failed to slay Dictator Stalin. In case this academic presentation in a two-hour address should goover the heads of millions of Russians striving to comprehend in their cities, towns and villages, Prosecutor Vishinsky, showing marked deference to a once great Party figure who was Lenin’s friend and is Trotsky’s brother-in-law, interrupted Prisoner Kamenev with the simple question: “Were you a bloodthirsty enemy of the Government?” Replied Kamenev readily: “Yes, I was.” Kamenev and Zinoviev, although confessing by the yard to the greatest crimes possible in Russia, split hairs and quarreled violently before the Court over such fine points as whether Kamenev had “meant” to write an article such as Zinoviev actually wrote for Soviet newsorgans excoriating the assassins of Kirov.

“You did mean to write it!” cried Zinoviev.

Snorted Kamenev: “I did not! I had no intention of writing an article.” “I admit that I was the one with the greatest guilt in Kirov’s death,” went on Zinoviev, gradually getting into better & better voice until at last he thrust the microphone impulsively away from him and burst into the full-throated oratory of his younger days as Bomb Boy. The basso-profundo keynote of Zinoviev’s confession came as he boomed: “I went all the way from party power to counterrevolution and terrorism and actually to Fascism! For Trotskyism plus terrorism is Fascism! I abandoned Karl Marx.” Arabian Nights. In his dispatch the next afternoon United Press Correspondent Norman Deuel cabled a broad, revealing hint as to the nature of the trial which he managed to get past Soviet censors: “Unexpected histrionic ability by minor members of the cast robbed the stars of their spotlight today.”

Prisoner Valentin P. Olberg took first honors with a confession that students at the Gorki Institute had been supplied by him with mimeographed copies of a plan of his own devising. The Olberg plan: one of the Institute’s professors was to make up in the chemical laboratory bombs which students were to explode when reviewed by Stalin in Moscow on May Day 1936, blow up themselves and the entire Soviet Government who would be on the platform.

Other prisoners brought out that Zinoviev had cried, “it is an honor to kill Stalin!” and had claimed this honor for his own wing of the alleged conspiracy.

Trotsky’s son Syedov was called a money-passer. One of the prisoners said the conspirators in Moscow had given him to be carried to Syedov Trotsky in Berlin a copy of The Arabian Nights. “It served in some way which I do not remember as a secret code book,” finished up Prisoner Holzmann, scratching his head with a puzzled air.

Prisoner Fritz David, said to be a German, confessed that at the 1935 Comintern Congress he sat in a box clutching in his pocket a pistol with which to shoot Stalin. “The chance did not come, however,” added David. “Police were in the same box with me.” Over & over Kamenev, Zinoviev and other prisoners got around to confessing in various ways that their purpose as conspirators was simply to kill Russia’s pres-ent rulers and become masters of the State themselves, with no program in mind as to how they would run Russia, and no smallest criticism at the trial last week of anything ever done by Joseph Stalin.

In every confession the Dictator figured as the embodiment of perfection—except that all the prisoners wanted to kill him.

“I am happy that there is a Stalin and that he will continue to lead the country!” cried Prisoner Sergei Mrachkovsky, gilding the lily. Even this was capped by Prisoner Kamenev whose second and final lecture at the trial was a deliberate incitement to Communists abroad to go and assassinate Trotsky. “Zinoviev and I are dead!” cried Kamenev. “Trotsky remains the only person to guide terroristic activities against Stalin. The sooner his hands are checked the better.” Judge Ulrich, who has the reputation of having handed out more Death sentences than any other jurist in the world, left the court to cogitate with his three assistant judges for seven hours, returned to deliver the verdict: all 16 prisoners were to be shot “within 72 hours,” subject to the remote possibility of an overriding decree of clemency by the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union. From Brussels, the Second (Socialist) International dispatched to the Third (Communist) International at Moscow a vigorous message protesting that the prisoners had not in fact been defended in court. This was de’ nounced by the official Moscow party organ Pravda as “impertinent.” With all clemency refused and before a second sun had set, all 16 prisoners were shot dead by a firing squad.

Significance. At the opening of the trial great interest focused on Prosecutor Vishinsky’s blanket charge that the prisoners had operated hand-in-glove with Nazi agents and explicitly with those of Supreme Chief of the German Police Forces Herr Heinrich Himmler. Once this Mrs. de Vries (arrow) .

charge was well out in the world Press, it was entirely dropped by the prosecution, and on the last day, when Prisoners Holzmann and Moses Lurye commenced to bring it into their final confessions, Judge Ulrich cut them short with the sharp order: “Leave events in Germany and the German leader alone!”

Norwegian police, who keep close and constant watch upon Leon Trotsky in his retreat near Oslo where he has been permitted to remain only on condition that he engage in no political activity whatever, inclined this week to the view that if Moscow really had anything on Trotsky as a conspirator against the life of Stalin which would stand up outside Russia, this evidence would long ago have been laid before the Norwegian Government by the Soviet Government with high-power diplomatic demands. The Norwegian Ministry of Justice recently investigated Exile Trotsky’s affairs, ruled that no evidence of misconduct appeared.

Still an active contributor to radical journals in many parts of the earth. Writer Trotsky has a great body of intellectual disciples who refer to themselves as the “Fourth International.” Communists of the Third International hoped this week that the Moscow trial would tend to reduce Trotsky from the status of a great radical ideologist to that of a common instigator of killings and thus weaken his Fourth International in its ideological competition with their Third. Certainly the Moscow trial had the effect of giving Communists all over the world something else to think about instead of why Joseph Stalin had still not sent a single Soviet bomber to aid the Red militia armies in Spain (see col. 3). Active mothering by Moscow of the activities of Communists abroad was always strongly upheld by Trotsky so long as he was in Russia, and he was run out by Stalin after their historic quarrel upon that very point (TIME, June 13, 1927, et seq.). Prominent Soviet figures found it a great nerve strain to have been even remotely mentioned in court last week as having known some-thing was afoot against Stalin, even though charged with nothing themselves. Among half a dozen Bolshevik bigwigs who thus jittered, first to commit suicide was Comrade Mikhail Tomsky, onetime chairman of the Soviet All-Union Council of Trade Unions and Director of the State Publishing House.

Perhaps the most significant Moscow fact was that at the trial last week almost nothing came out which was not directly or indirectly to Stalin’s personal advantage. He emerged from the court records so great that even his worst enemies quarreled over the honor of killing him; so well-guarded that would-be assassins sat in his presence not daring to pull the trigger; so idolized that Zinoviev’s secretary, rather than kill Stalin, killed himself; so lucky that every plot against him failed; and finally so wise that a whole boxful of Bolsheviks intent on killing him did not try to justify themselves by uttering one critical or abusive word against the Perfect Dictator.

—In 1934 a fellow Communist assassinated in Leningrad that city’s Party boss, Dictator Stalin’s ”Dear Friend” Sergei Kirov. Stalin is supposed to have grilled the assassin personally.

One hundred and three Russians were shot in Leningrad and Moscow after secret trials. Thousands more were exiled to Siberia. Simultaneously Zinoviev and Kamenev received jail sentences which they were still serving when arrested in their cells for the present trial, the first public hearing on any aspect of the Kirov case.