Journalist Jailed

Karl Berngardovich Radek, the greatest journalist in Soviet Russia, repeatedly in recent years the spokesman of Joseph Stalin, and in recent months so potent that Moscow correspondents were calling him "the Second Foreign Commissar," was admitted by the Soviet Commissariat of Justice last week to be in jail awaiting trial for his life. Famed Journalist Radek (ne Sobelsohn) suddenly "disappeared'" last month and neither his paper Izvestia ("News"), the official daily of the Soviet Government, nor any other Moscow organ printed a line as to the whereabouts of Communism's most popular commentator. According to such Red newsorgans abroad as the Manhattan Daily Worker Comrade Radek has a "dazzling talent greater probably than that of any other Communist journalist" and has ever been "a passionate partisan of the masses." Therefore last week the World proletariat was startled, to say the least, when Sovie Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky accused Prisoner Radek of "political and legal guilt" in connection with the alleged plot against Dictator Stalin. Because of the same "plot" 16 Bolsheviks were recently shot (TIME, Aug. 31), the most prominent being Lenin's old comrades Zinoviev (ne Apfelbaum) and Karnenev(ne Rosenfeld).

Bolshevik males who happen to dislike Journalist Radek and the small fringe of whiskers around his round face have called him "that ugly little Jewish monkey." Once his name was mentioned by defendants in the recent Plot-Against-Stalin trial, farcical though that was, the Soviet Commissariat for Internal Affairs set secret police to see what they could "get" on Radek. In Russia such agents seldom fail on such assignments. The object in this case was to link Radek with Stalin's enemy, Trotsky.

As usual, Journalist Radek was one smart jump ahead of his enemies. Just before he "disappeared" he managed to get printed in Izvestia, above his signature, a scorching editorial in which he flayed Trotsky and demanded Death for all "decaying-souled traitors." In this editorial Comrade Radek claimed that he personally sabotaged and foiled the Trotsky plots against Stalin, and this bold claim was expected last week to constitute Prisoner Radek's chief defense in court. It was typical of Soviet justice that, even after Radek's arrest had been admitted, Russian newspapers carried no details of the charges against him, and even privileged foreign correspondents in Moscow were not permitted to discover when or where the Kremlin's erstwhile newspundit will be tried.

With the fate of Radek an official mystery, Communists and others recalled events of his recent fame. It was Radek who announced to Russia that "President Roosevelt as a private citizen has been a friend of the Soviet." The first public champagne toast to Mr. Roosevelt drunk by Soviet officials in Moscow was at a party organized by Radek to celebrate the appointment as U. S. Ambassador to Russia of William Christian Bullitt, now U. S. Ambassador to France. It was Journalist Radek who interviewed Mr. Bullitt in Moscow in 1932 and quoted him as saying: "In all the world stalks destruction.

Your country, Russia, is the only country which is marching forward." Communist critics hail as Radek's "masterpiece" his editorial, A Lesson In History For The Archbishop of Canterbury in which he sneered: "Most Reverend Thomas Davidson ... if you tell too many lies, the Communist International will appoint two of its experts to write a history of the archbishopric of Canterbury which will make you feel sorry for yourself. . . . [When Henry VIII] had cast his eye on a simpering miss named Anne Boleyn, the Archbishop of Canterbury decided that all the Church dogmas and all the rulings of its head, the Pope of Rome, might make a comfortable pillow for his lascivious king. Even when Henry VIII got tired of Anne Boleyn and decided to have her put to death in order to take the next into his arms, the Archbishop of Canterbury had no objections. ... A considerable part of the property belonging to the present English aristocracy had its origin in the plundering of Church property by Henry VIII who awarded it to secular and ecclesiastical magnates. And now that the descendants of those pillagers cry out about the 'pillage' of Church property [in Soviet Russia] and protest against such 'sacrilege' in the name of religion, every class-conscious English worker must be laughing in their faces." It was Journalist Radek who, until a few short weeks ago, made for Joseph Stalin trenchant verbal replies to Adolf Hitler, for the Soviet Dictator has had no stomach to speak out himself and risk war with Germany. Of Hitler, scathing Radek has said: "The donkey's ears stick out! His Nazi doctrine is utter humbug. Non sensical!" Last week Communists were saying that should brilliant Karl Radek, the Walter Lippmann of the Kremlin, be shot there is no Red able to succeed him in giving wit and penetration to Stalin's stolid, blunt ideas.

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