"Lined With Despair"

Discreetly continuing never to express opinions in the Soviet Union, U. S. Ambassador Joseph Davies took his accustomed front-row seat as the latest Big Bolshevik trial opened in Moscow last week. He had already learned from the official Soviet newspaper Pravda ("Truth") that Death was going to be meted out to all 21 prisoners (TIME, March 7), no matter what happened in the courtroom. Pravda is seldom wrong in such a case. Thus the U. S. Ambassador could look across at the witness box to the right of the judges' table and figure that certain death hung over the distinguished Russian diplomat who welcomed him on his arrival (TIME, Feb. 1, 1937), and presented him to Soviet President Mihail Kalinin in the Kremlin, Nikolai Krestinsky, who in Washington terms would be the right-hand man of Secretary Hull. Death also hung over former Foreign Trade Commissar Rozengolts who had dined with Ambassador & Mrs. Davies and entertained them at his own country place, a magnificent dacha almost as splendiferous as the former Galitsin Palace which today is Stalin's dacha (TIME, Oct. 4).

The star prisoner last week was, however, no habitue of Moscow embassies. He was Genrikh ("Henry") Grigorevich Yagoda, who, next to Dictator Stalin, was for many years the most dread official in the Soviet Union, the head of Stalin's Secret Political Police. Harold Denny of the New York Times wrote of what the 250 spectators in the courtroom saw as they studied the star prisoner last week:

"This man, once so agile and fox-faced, smartly uniformed and lordly sinister in manner, sat as if in a daze. In appearance he is the most crushed of all the defendants. He has lain for at least ten months in the same prison cells to which he has consigned so many others. He sits lackadaisically in a rear seat of the courtroom. He is dressed in a dark suit. He is only 47, but his hair has whitened in the past year, and his face is lined with despair."

Mighty Fallen. Tass, the official Soviet news agency, supplied U. S. newsorgans with the full 9,000-word indictment against the 21 prisoners. If cabled from Moscow at press rates this would have cost $1,000. It is what the Soviet Government wants to have believed, amounts to this:

Leon Trotsky continues from exile to machinate against Joseph Stalin with such dreadful success that, as his agents and fellow conspirators, the 21 who now face death nearly succeeded in remaking the maps of Asia and of Europe by detaching from the Soviet Union and attaching to adjoining Capitalist countries territories with a total area of 625,000 square miles.

Trotsky and his troop, of whom the 21 are only samples, originally began their machinations against Lenin and are implicated in the infliction of a bullet wound upon the founder of the Soviet Union in 1919 which contributed to his death in 1924. Trotsky was a spy in the pay of Germany from 1921 on, notwithstanding that he had just won the civil war for the Reds and continued until 1925 as Commissar of the Red Army, which he created. In more recent times Yagoda, acting under orders from Trotsky, caused three of Russia's most eminent physicians and scientists to murder outright or hasten the deaths of 1) famed Writer Maxim Gorky; 2) Yagoda's predecessor as secret police chief, Menzhinsky, and 3) Kuibishev, who was chief of the First Five-Year Plan.

Trotsky was also able to have acts of terrorism and wrecking performed in all parts of the Soviet Union, and the general picture presented by the State's indictment is that the friends of Trotsky occupied until a few months ago towering positions from which they could and did cause most of any unfortunate conditions which may exist now in the Soviet Union. Among innumerable specific disasters charged up to Trotsky & Co. is the wreck at Volochaevsk of a military freight train.

Guilty? Judicial Field Marshal Vasily Ulrich, famed "Shooting Judge" of Moscow trials, appeared on the bench last week wearing for the first time the Order of Lenin, "Highest Soviet Decoration," which he received after the last trial. With a bored air he superintended the routine by which prisoner after prisoner, as his name is called, pops up from the prisoner's box, pleads guilty to his section of the indictment (which he has already signed before entering the courtroom), pops down.

After ten of the 21 had thus popped on schedule, Prisoner Krestinsky created last week's first big sensation by making a play, not to the gallery,* but to "The Box."

The Box is located above and behind the judges' bench at Moscow trials in semidarkness. Now & then last week a cigaret could be seen glowing in The Box. It is believed to be at the disposal of the Dictator, but if he comes to watch proceedings darkness hides him.

Krestinsky, speaking and gesturing as though he were appealing to an invisible Stalin behind the glowing cigaret, declared: "I am not guilty. I have been a member of the Bolshevik Party from 1903 until my arrest, and I believe that I am, still a Bolshevik. I did not speak the truth before my examiners./- I lied, of my own free will. I will tell the truth now so that it will reach the ears of the Soviet Government heads. I am not a Trotskyist."

When, after this, the Dictator did not come forward and intervene from The Box, none doubted that overnight the Secret Political Police would get Krestinsky in a frame of mind to confess to everything on the morrow and he did, visibly a broken man. Meanwhile, all the rest of the prisoners popped up & down with their confessions.

Signals. As at the previous Moscow trials, the prisoners, drawn out into elaborations of their confessions by Public Prosecutor Andrei Vishinsky last week, gave the now familiar signals that everyone in court was repeating a rehearsed drama.

They chuckled and even laughed aloud between phrases of their most damaging admissions. As Vishinsky would get half through a sentence the prisoner he was supposed to be grilling would snatch the words out of his mouth and finish the sentence before the prosecutor could--and since it was the agreed sentence Vishinsky let it go at that. The usual dramatic effects Vishinsky has standardized were also given. Thus when a prisoner named Prokopy Zubarev testified that in the remote past the Tsarist police gave him 15 rubles ($7.50) on two successive occasions, Vishinsky responded with his menacing stage whisper: "Aha, thirty silver pieces. Twice more than Judas."* One of the neatest signals was given by former Premier Faidsula Khodzhaev of Uzbekistan, a swarthy Asiatic speaking Russian as thick and soft as a Negro drawl. "I ask you to believe me!" he cried at the climax of his confession, "but of course you cannot believe me, because of my position here!" To this wily Asiatic it fell to confess that the British Government had figured in the conspiratorial arrangements of Trotsky & Co.

Yagoda, Nothing could distract the main interest from prisoner No. 1, Henry Yagoda, who not only was chief power of the Stalin Secret Political Police in Russia from 1920 to 1936, but according to the pro-Soviet British Historians, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, was once "Vice-Chairman of the Intelligence Department of the U. S. S. R. for the United States."

Yagoda this week is to appear as one of the accused, last week testified as a witness against the accused Alexei Rykov, who succeeded Lenin as Premier of the Soviet Union (1924-30), and Nikolai Bukharin (probably the closest friend of the founder of the Soviet regime alive today) for years known as "Heir of Lenin."/- Rykov and Bukharin said last week that they had nothing to do with the assassination at Leningrad in 1934 of the Dictator's "Dear Friend" Sergei Kirov. Yagoda, who had been standing with head down, snapped up at this to testify in a dull, flat voice:

"Bukharin and Rykov lie. We did not want to do it, but we yielded to Trotsky's insistence."

Stalin, it came out last week, was escorted by Yagoda from Moscow to Leningrad to investigate Kirov's murder, now confessed to have been the work of Escort Yagoda & accomplices whose confessed main objective was to kill Stalin. Yagoda always personally commanded in the Red Square the Secret Police guards of Stalin and other Soviet leaders when reviewing parades atop the Tomb of Lenin. Thus Yagoda for years was the one man in Russia who could certainly have killed Stalin. Also Yagoda, as head of the secret police, was better able than any other Russian to frame someone else with an assassination. He is scheduled to confess this week that he succeeded in forcing the official Kremlin physicians, who care for Stalin's health, to cause the deaths of other Bolsheviks. One of these might have been Nikolai Yezhov, 42, today the secret police chief under whom the present trial was prepared. Yezhov, it appeared, had suffered from "slow poisoning" and would certainly have died had not the plot against him been discovered.

Back to 1929. Bukharin last week expansively announced that he confessed ''responsibility" for all major crimes mentioned, both those he had known of and those he had not. He compared himself to the chief operator of a telephone switchboard who must accept responsibility for all the operators' "wrong numbers." He then went back to 1929, rehearsed as a confession the gist of his editorials publicly printed then. This seemed greatly to bore the judges. Russian quick-wits at once saw that Bukharin's "confession" of what he called last week the secret program of the conspirators was only a rehash of his public program of 1929, rejected then by Stalin, but amicably. "Our program," confessed the Heir of Lenin, "was greater freedom for the kulaks; greater freedom for the private traders and foreign concessions; and slower industrialization."

It was this advice which the Dictator rejected when he decided to wipe out the kulaks, crack down on private traders, and industrialize at super speed. It was made more like a confession by Bukharin's describing it in court last week as "the platform for the restoration of Capitalism, as we visualized it"--whereas neither Editor Bukharin nor his readers in 1929 visualized it as anything but a slower, perhaps better way to "build Socialism."

It was not Stalin's way. Today that equals Death.

Money for Trotsky. Prisoners examined by Prosecutor Vishinsky last week testified that both before and after Trotsky's expulsion from Russia (TIME, Jan. 1, 1928, et seq.), they have kept him always supplied with enormous sums: one time 20,000 German marks; then 15,000 Sterling pounds; in all a cool $1,000,000. Exile Trotsky, who issued voluminous heated replies to Moscow daily from Mexico City last week, included this: "I state categorically that the only sum I have received from the Soviet Treasury since my banishment from Russia was $2,500. . . . This sum of money was given me with complete legality and the agent secured a receipt from me."

* The gallery consists always of some 200 Russians who appear to be workmen let out for a boisterous holiday, crack jokes and jubilate among themselves during the trials of bigwigs, invariably cheer the death sentences. /-To whom Krestinsky like the others had made his signed confession.

* Godless Vishinsky is misquoting. Judas received 30 pieces of silver. /-Before the Revolution he and Lenin published in Vienna Pravda ("Truth"), today in Moscow the official organ of the Communist Party. In 1917 Bukharin was in the U. S. with Trotsky. In Moscow he was editor of Izvestia ("News"), official organ of the Soviet Government, from 1934 until his arrest last year, and as such was Stalin's official Spokesman.

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