Trotsky's Trial

Back from several weeks in Mexico City, kindly, grizzled Professor John Dewey of Columbia University spoke in Manhattan last week to an audience of 3,500. His subject was the elaborate mock trial of Leon Trotsky, held in 13 sessions at Mexico City in March and April, at which Professor Dewey had presided. Object of the trial was to prove or disprove the accusations of treason, sabotage and fomenting world revolution hurled against absent Leon Trotsky during the last mass treason trial in Soviet Russia. Because he felt that the committee of professional liberals from the U. S. heading the trial was unduly influenced in Trotsky's favor, Author Carleton Beals, authority on Central America, resigned in disgust. By last week the committee had proved nothing at all, but to a packed house Professor Dewey was able to say:

"The subcommission unhesitatingly affirms that the results already obtained .justify continuation of the investigation. . . . The commission of inquiry is not trying to discover who is right and who is wrong in their political ideas and policies, the 'Trotskyists' or their opponents. It is engaged in trying to get at the truth as to the specific charges upon which Trotsky was convicted in the Moscow trials. . . . If Trotsky is guilty no condemnation can be too severe, and if he is innocent there is no way in which the existing regime in Soviet Russia can be acquitted of deliberate, systematic persecution and falsification. I might inquire if he [Soviet Ambassador Troyanovsky] thought our hearings were a put-up job, why such pressure was brought to bear upon members of the defense committee and of the commission of inquiry to induce them to resign?"

Whatever the Dewey investigation might prove in the end, there was no doubt that it had shown Leon Trotsky, for eight years an exile in Turkey, France and Norway, a disowned and virtually impotent revolutionist, to be now the most important revolutionary extremist in the world. In 1933 Trotskyist followers in Russia, seeing the gradual abandonment of all plans for the world revolution by orthodox Stalinists, asked secretly for what they called the Fourth International. No one took this seriously until July 1936, when the Fourth International set up a committee in Paris. Most observers, many Communists still belittle the Fourth International, yet last week such a reputable correspondent as "Augur" (Vladimir Poliakoff) of the New York Times was able to write of the ''Free International" as he prefers to call it:

''Of course, Trotsky is only the convenient mouthpiece for the group of cosmopolitan revolutionaries forming the general staff of the class warfare of the world, a staff possessing brain power and resources greater than anything Lenin's followers had before the War. "There is good reason to suspect that the 'Free International' has drawn a large part of its present funds from gold exported by the Government of Spain. The Spanish Republicans removed from Madrid gold of an estimated value of $400,000,000. To insure safety against claims by General Francisco Franco's Insurgents, much of that great sum was hidden in private accounts. Now it appears that partisans of the 'Free International' took advantage of that arrangement cleverly to utilize large amounts to finance activities having nothing in common with Spanish interests and contrary to the interests of Moscow.

"It is possible the disgrace of Marcel Rosenberg, former omnipotent Russian Ambassador to Madrid and Valencia who is now confined in a sanatorium in Moscow, was connected with the fact that he was deceived in this matter by Trotskyists."

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