Back to the World

From remote, barbaric Alma Alta, on the distent rim of Russian Turkestan, Great Leo Davidovich Trotsky returned, last week, toward the civilized world. With him traveled his wife and son, glad to end a bitter exile (TIME, Jan. 30, 1928). But in European Communist centres it was feared that Trotsky's release from banishment was a trick and prophets croaked that he would be "accidentally" killed en route.

The trickster, if any, was Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin, who banished Trotsky a year ago for the crime of organizing a political opposition. Stalin brooks no opposition. Last week he muzzled correspondents in Moscow with a censorship so drastic that the only thing really known about Trotsky was that he had left Alma Alta.